acquaintances. His name was Ivan Ostapenko. His mother put a noose around his neck and tried to strangle him, but he was stronger than she was and managed to break her hold But he kept the marks the ropes left on his throat for a long time.

I went to another neighbor’s house. They were young people. I looked in the win¬dow and saw the mother and father lying dead on the floor. Their infant son was lying in the middle, still alive, and sucking it’s mother’s dry breast I took him to a retention place for such children, and he was saved As long as I stayed in the village, he was like a brother to me, and I watched over him. When they took us to the orphanage, we went together. Children whose parents had died of starvation were not treated well. They were not allowed to light the stove to keep warm or to wear warm cloth¬ing. We were told that we were parasites, capitalists, vestiges of the kulaks and exploit¬ing classes.

These weren’t orphanages; they were houses of torture. The children had nothing to eat. It was impossible to keep clean. We were literally eaten by lice. But nobody cared. We were the progeny of the defeated class enemy.
The experience of these years is very difficult to describe. The experience of these yean of famine loom before my eyes as if they happened yesterday, yet I am unable to describe them.

I can say one thing. The destruction of human life in my village was very great You could find houses that no one could say who had lived there. My village lost 60% of its inhabitants.

The orphanage had children of various ages. We were all united by a common tragedy and became very close, like brothers and sisters. But we could not reconcile ourselves to being in the orphanage.

Just imagine, it’s evening, and the children are all hungry. Someone starts a sad tune and all the rest begin to weep. The most popular song was a Ukrainian tune called All the Hills are Turning Green. They ordered us to stop singing it. Then they divided us up by age groups. The older we got, the more we hated the government.

We were the children of honest laborers, but they called us White Guards and Pet-liurists. We did not even know who these people had been.

They housed us in two rooms, one for the boys and one for the girls. On the walls were pictures of Lenin and Stalin and of the other prominent Russian and Ukrainian Communists. The children, especially the boys, would take slingshots and knock out the eyes of the portraits. The school director, a Communist and maybe even a secret policeman, came and looked at what we had done. He always had two German shepherd dogs with him, and he would come every night at midnight or one o’clock and bombard everyone with questions. He couldn’t believe the children themselves had done it I wasn’t there at the time. It was around Christmas, and my grandmother had come and taken me to stay with her for the holidays.

Finally the oldest and smartest of us all, Ilko, took matters into his hands. When the director came, he said, “Look, you swine, if you don’t back off, I am going to the secret police tomorrow and tell them that you told us to poke the eyes out. Then we’ll see who believes whom.” The next day all the portraits were changed. Ilko was taken away, and we never saw him again. He was a minor, but minors were not spared.

My uncle used to say to me, “You know, Ivan, with your mouth you will never make it to seventeen with this regime.” I believed that God alone saved me.