My parents, apparently realizing that their ‘God will provide’ threatened to diminish their authority in my eyes, one day let in a boy who was both cold and hungry. They fed him and warmed him up. The next day, the boy left our dwelling to continue his quest for bread. Some time after that, I contracted spotted typhus. My mother cried over me and also over the boy who had visited us because in his clothing there had been lice that undoubtedly infected him as well with the disease. I survived, but the boy surely died, for how could a homeless person survive such a serious illness?

After my long illness, I noticed that my mother had placed a luxurious bouquet made up of shafts of local wheat in the room which she kept until the beginning of the war in 1941. I later was told that this was how the wheat had looked the year that the deadly hunger had returned to Ukraine.

Thirteen years later, in 1946, when I was a student in my final year at the Odessa Medical Institute, we students were sent to villages in the province of Odessa and to the Izmail, Mykolaiv and Kherson provinces. Our task was to introduce measures against ‘dystrophy’, which was a medical term for people suffering from acute malnutri¬tion.

In 1946, the first year after the war, there was a drought in Southern Ukraine and neighboring Moldavia. The resumption of collectivization in the postwar period was carried out with the same result as the first attempt at collectivization. Once again, hungry peasants were knocking at our door. Once again, there were outbreaks of spotted typhus.

I had the occasion to travel to villages, organizing measures for the liquidation of the epidemic of spotted typhus which had broken out among the hungry villagers. The government sent not only inexperienced young doctors, but also special party commis¬sions and public prosecutors to villages which were again dying because of hunger. Every able-bodied person was called before the commission to see if he had fulfilled his yearly quota of workdays (trudodni). No regard was given to a person’s health, only his age. Those who had not fulfilled their norm were immediately sentenced to exile in Siberia without the benefit of a trial.

It turned out that very few people had actually fulfilled their quotas. Reasons for this were as follows: the post-war devastation of agriculture, a drop in the number of farm laborers, an unscientific method to determine a day’s norm, and most important¬ly, the hunger of the collective farm workers. Only the working classes and civil ser¬vants received food according to a system of special coupons. Thus, a bookkeeper at a collective farm or a cleaning lady who cleaned the offices of collective farm bosses, received bread and other foodstuffs through coupons, while the collective farm worker who actually produced the bread received no coupons because he belonged neither to the working class nor to the class of civil servants.

These absurdities in the Socialist system of agriculture obscure the true reasons for the third famine which befell the Ukrainian nation. This was that Ukrainians, worn down by the excesses of collectivization, famine and injustice, attempted to utilize the events of the Second World War in order to liberate themselves from the regimes forced upon them by two occupations.

I should point out that I am talking here about events that transpired in areas around the Black Sea littoral and the Danube Delta.