behind a wife and three children. They took absolutely everything: cows, pigs, every¬thing. There was nothing left for the wife to do. She sent her children away to fend for themselves, set fire to the house, and hanged herself.

Things were a little different in ray family. My father was always on the run during the day and would only come at night We had nothing; they had taken everything from us. They came with their pikes, poked around, asked questions, and grabbed my mother by the hair. They tore off my mother’s earrings and her cross. We children cried, but nothing helped. No one paid any attention to our tears.

They locked our mother in the basement So there we were, five of us children with me the oldest, and our father nowhere to be found. They came back to see if they had missed anything and found one egg that had not been taken. They took it away.

Father would sometimes be able to bring us a little flour, sometimes a little grain, anything that had not been seized. But protecting the food was impossible because our house was under constant surveillance, and he could not get to us every night They took everything, even our clothes. We did not even have a blanket We were poor as church mice. We huddled together at night to keep warm.

After two weeks they let mother out of the basement But what could she do when there was nothing to eat? In March or April, 1933, they took our cow. The first to die was my youngest sister, then another sister. Then my brother and a third sister died at the same time. Father died and was buried on Holy Thursday. Mother died two days later, and they threw her in a hole on Easter Sunday. I remember how a neighbor came and comforted me, saying that although my parents had gone, they had died on holy days, Holy Thursday and Easter. It was a terrible time for me. I was starving myself to such an extent that I could not walk. Before he died, my father had asked one of the teachers to take me under his wing. I was only in the first grade at the time, and it was only thanks to this teacher that I survived. He took me to a hospital. I don’t remember who the doctor was or anything about the place. I only remember that my skin was shiny and transparent like glass. The doctor cut me open in several places and let the liquid under my skin run out. It smelled like dead flesh. When I left the hospital, I had no strength to walk and sat in the sun. The teacher picked me up and saved my life. But many who had owned everything they needed now died like flies.

It was hard. While still swollen, I would go to the point to catch fish and frogs. I tore them up and ate them raw.

After my family died, I lived alone in the empty house until the same teacher came and took me to live with him. Usually, people took no interest in small children. Typhus was very widespread then. But whether they were sick or starving, they would be put on open trucks like sheaves of wheat and taken away. The people who took the children said that they were being driven to a hospital, but none of these children were ever seen or heard from again.

A horrifying silence settled over the village. I can still remember going to my neigh¬bors’ houses to see if anyone was alive. I remember going into one house and seeing the blind son sitting in one corner. His skin was grey. He had been dead perhaps a week or two. And he wasn’t the only one. Starving people on the verge of death, sometimes even mothers, sometimes lost their sanity and turned into animals who smothered their own children and ate them. It happened, for example, to one of my