Tag #155213 - Interview #103686 (Ilia Rozenfeld Biography)

However, during my first yeas at school there was faming in Ukraine. Our family was in a very hard situation, but my mother always thought of something to help the family. I remember that my grandmother sent us one dollar amounts – they were also poor. My mother went to buy buckwheat, herring and something else for this dollar at the Torgsin 13 store. Somebody gave my father pork fat and my mother cooked on it. I smelt his fat approaching our house coming back from school and felt sick: I couldn’t eat it. My father told me off for that and said it was sinful to refuse from food when other children were starving. Once a young woman from a village came into our yard, when I was playing with a ball with other boys. She was barefooted and her legs, white and swollen, struck me. She was holding a boy by his hand and carrying another boy, thin and starved. She asked for food and we ran to our homes to get what we could. 
 
We had nothing, but beetroots at home. My mother gave me a beetroots which I took to this woman. She wiped it with her hand and gave her boy to bite on it. Once there was a man lying on the stairs. There were lice on him and he was dying painfully and there was nothing that could be done to rescue him. We were scared Once we were trying to get our ball from the bushes and there was a half-decayed corpse there. –Every night a thin horse-ridden cart rode along our street loaded with corpses with their legs sticking out. Those corpses were taken to a pit in a dump site.