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Only my mother's cooking skills helped us to survive the famine of 1932-33 [famine in Ukraine] [13]. By that time we were living in a one-bedroom apartment in a two-storied building. We had moved there in 1930, after our house was pulled down to create a construction site for the Arsenal Plant [the biggest military plant in Ukraine]. There was a kitchen and one room in our new apartment. The toilet was in the yard. There was a stove in the kitchen for heating the room, which my mother also used for cooking. During the famine my mother made pancakes from potato peels, and we also had sunflower seed wastes. Once my mother bought some cutlets at the Lukianovskiy market near our house. She bought them for our father, who needed some meat to be strong enough to work. My father had them and afterwards heard rumors that those cutlets were made of human flesh. He was sick for a whole week after he heard this. We sometimes got buns and small pies at school. They were brought to school from the Arsenal Plant and the cable plant that were supporting our school. Several times a military unit, located near our school, invited us to their canteen where we had delicious soup. It was so great to have a bowl of soup at that time.
This period was very hard for my father. He was haunted by two feelings for his whole life - the feeling of guilt towards his wife and children and the feeling of fear. My father felt guilty that he couldn't provide better for us, as he was actually deprived of the right to have a good job he deserved and received a miserable salary instead. This feeling of guilt became stronger during the famine. He believed that it was his fault that Inna was born an ill baby. He thought it had happened because his wife didn't get enough food when she was pregnant. As to his feeling of fear - he couldn't sleep because he feared that authorities would recall that he had been declared a nepman and would put him into an even worse situation.
In the late 1930s, during the period of arrests of innocent people [the so- called Great Terror] [14], my father didn't sleep at all. Every night he said 'goodbye' to us in his thoughts fearing that he would be arrested. Fortunately, nobody in our family was arrested - we were too insignificant for the authorities. But the nightmare of people being arrested and the suffering of their relatives was all around us. There was Lukianovskaya prison across the street from our house, and a shipment railway station from where trains full of prisoners were sent to prisons and camps was just nearby. Prisoners' relatives came to our garden and our house begging us to let them stay. They were hoping to see their loved ones for the last time on their way to the station, escorted by security guards and watch-dogs. We often saw prisoners boarding trains. Militia often came to our house to tear people away from our place. I felt sorry for these people, but I believed that they must be true 'enemies of the people' if they were arrested. Some lecturers and students vanished from the university where I studied. Our favorite teacher in physical culture, Benesh, was arrested. He was a Hungarian and a very educated and intelligent man. He vanished just like so many others.
This period was very hard for my father. He was haunted by two feelings for his whole life - the feeling of guilt towards his wife and children and the feeling of fear. My father felt guilty that he couldn't provide better for us, as he was actually deprived of the right to have a good job he deserved and received a miserable salary instead. This feeling of guilt became stronger during the famine. He believed that it was his fault that Inna was born an ill baby. He thought it had happened because his wife didn't get enough food when she was pregnant. As to his feeling of fear - he couldn't sleep because he feared that authorities would recall that he had been declared a nepman and would put him into an even worse situation.
In the late 1930s, during the period of arrests of innocent people [the so- called Great Terror] [14], my father didn't sleep at all. Every night he said 'goodbye' to us in his thoughts fearing that he would be arrested. Fortunately, nobody in our family was arrested - we were too insignificant for the authorities. But the nightmare of people being arrested and the suffering of their relatives was all around us. There was Lukianovskaya prison across the street from our house, and a shipment railway station from where trains full of prisoners were sent to prisons and camps was just nearby. Prisoners' relatives came to our garden and our house begging us to let them stay. They were hoping to see their loved ones for the last time on their way to the station, escorted by security guards and watch-dogs. We often saw prisoners boarding trains. Militia often came to our house to tear people away from our place. I felt sorry for these people, but I believed that they must be true 'enemies of the people' if they were arrested. Some lecturers and students vanished from the university where I studied. Our favorite teacher in physical culture, Benesh, was arrested. He was a Hungarian and a very educated and intelligent man. He vanished just like so many others.
Location
Ukraine
Interview
Zhenia Kriss