AK - We were returning from school, and we found the dead body of a woman who was pulling two children in a sled. She was frozen. We told our father, who went to the village council and told them where the body was laying. They went and picked it up and hid the corpse somewhere until the ground unfroze, so that they could bury it. So there’s a lot to say about the Famine.
Interviewer – But you always had food?
AK – Very little. But my father and stepmother hid food. We had no potatoes left, but we saved the potato peels and planted them in April, so that we would have potatoes. But we ate a lot of pigweed, all kinds of weeds – svyrypa, and kozelyky, which rabbits ate, and things like that. My stepmother made borscht from all this. We had a lot of garlic, which saved us. Before the Famine, we dried a lot of bread, and we had a few bags of dried bread. My stepmother soaked this dried bread, added garlic, and we had some sunflower oil, which she spread on that bread. That’s what we children ate. My stepmother also gave this to people who came to us asking for food.
Interviewer – How did she manage to hide this?
AK – We had an attic where she could hide the bags. My stepmother had a weaver, and she weaved burlap bags. And she put the dried food in those bags.
Interviewer – Did they search your house?
AK – They didn’t search the attic. They only searched the first floor.
There was a [good] harvest. But when you read my memoirs, you’ll understand how much of that grain was exported to Great Britain. At the Azov Sea, there were many boats; my father saw what was happening. He saw starving people in Berdyansk [a port city on the Azov Sea], and the grain that was being loaded onto ships. Stalin said to sell the grain, but Ukraine had nothing to live on. But there was a [good] harvest, but everything was taken from the collective farms, to punish the people. Because people didn’t want to work on the collective farms.