A brigade came [to our house], and started searching in the backyard, in the garden, and then came into the house. They searched the house and couldn’t find anything. Then Oryna [one of the members of the brigade] took a look under the bed. There was a pood of corn under the bed. We had hidden it because theft was widespread. There was a saying that ‘they’ll pull it from under your head.’ So she pulled it out, and said, “I see where you’re hiding grain.” My mother started to cry and plead that this was all we had to eat. But forget it. “Moscow doesn’t believe tears.” And they took the corn.  I got very angry, picked up a stick and tried to hit [the brigadier]. But my mother stopped me. I remember that well. But it turned out, whether God decides, or whether truth wins out, that those who do harm get punished for it. That [brigadier’s] husband had come home from his job in Kharkiv and they were having a party. In the morning we saw that someone had cut a hole in the roof, broken in and killed them. That was one of those who confiscated bread from the villagers.
We used to make fun of one of the ‘activists,’ calling her “Uncle” Olyana. I don’t remember her last name. She was an example of these Komsomol¹ girls – she smoked, cursed worse than a man, and walked around in a military-type uniform, but without medals.
My father began working in Kharkiv in 1930. Sometimes he brought us a loaf of bread, or something. We kept that loaf of bread for maybe two weeks under the pillow. The bread had already begun to mold, but my mother would tell me, “Son, a long hunger is better than a short one. Take just a bit [of bread] every day.”
When the grain began to yield, I would take my school bag, and scissors to the fields and cut some grain stalks. But I had to watch out for the guard, because if he caught me, he would beat me, and what’s worse, if he took me to the village council, my father would get in trouble.
A man was walking in front of us on our way to school. Suddenly he fell. We took a look at him, and he was all swollen. So, frightened, we stepped around him and went to school. When we were coming home from school, he was gone. Somebody had taken him away.

They had a cellar beside the house, and they put the corpses in there, covered them with some dirt, and to this day that’s how they’re buried.
There’s a monument in our village, on which it states that 548 people died in the famine. I compared statistics of the number of deaths in our village in WWII, and the number of deaths because of the Famine, and more people died during the Famine than in the War. And you know how terrible the War was.