two bags of weeds sustained my family through the famine. My mother would some¬times make a trip to Druzhkovo, where my sister lived. She would return with a bas¬ketful of potatoes and beets. But even the food obtained this way could not prevent my sisters and brother from swelling up a little. In fact, my brother was so weak from a lack of food that he was unable to walk without falling. Once Ivan and I were com¬ing home through the cemetery when he fell to the ground unconscious. I was forced to take him under the shoulders and pull him home like a piece of wood. My entire family was very, very weak. I was the only one who had any strength left

Once in Enakievo my brother and I were walking along Turtina Street-or it may have been Trutina Street-I have forgotten which. We saw the corpse of a young woman propped up against a plank fence. As we approached we saw there was a child on her breast who sucked the breast without realizing there was no milk left A sanitary truck, whose job it was to collect the dead bodies from the streets, pulled up as we watched. Two men jumped out of the truck, grabbed the body by the leg and dragged it up on top of the pile of bodies in the truck. Then they took the living child and threw it up with the dead bodies. My brother and I wept in pity for the child, but we realized that there was little that we or anyone else could do to help it, for we were all hungry.

There was another incident… At the factory where I worked, there was a shortage of ‘katali’, so-called ‘rollers’, whose job it was to roll up the carts containing the coal, cinders, and metal cutting to the blast furnaces, where these elements were then melted down. Because this involved difficult work, there were very few people willing to do the job. An order was issued requiring rollers to be fed a special diet. The secretary of the party committee at the plant, a man by the name of Dorochenko, took a few men with him and they set off to catch a few hungry boys, who could be trained to do the work of rollers. They searched everywhere—in and out of town—gathering up all the boys they could find. Near the plant was a Polish Catholic Church which had been closed down. Approximately 80 boys were given cooked groats to eat. When the bosses returned the following morning, the boys were all dead. Unable to accommodate so much food, their shrunken stomachs had burst

I saw thousands of homeless children during this time, particularly little waifs, who had been around since the period of dekulakization. Abandoned by their parents, these children had survived, many of them subsisting on weeds. They wandered around in gangs, stealing from people at the market places. There were so many hungry children not only where I lived, but also in the city of Kharkiv, where I travelled once in a while.

There were also instances of cannibalism in Enakievo. Nobody, as a rule, bothered merchants. However, if a person was selling meat, the police would immediately seize the meat to check if it was human or dog meat There were people who had no qualms about cutting off a piece of flesh from a dead body, which they would then sell in order to get money for bread. During the famine, my neighbor, Mrs. Dubova, went to visit her parents in Starobelsk, located in Kharkiv Oblast She returned a few days later and came running to our house, crying that she had almost been eaten by her brothers. She told us in tears that they had attacked her like animals and that she had barely succeeded in making her escape.