Another remembrance of a Ukranian about the famine caused by Stalin's orders to take all food out of the Ukraine.
"Where did all bread disappear, I do not really know, maybe they have taken it all abroad. The authorities have confiscated it, removed from the villages, loaded grain into the railway coaches and took it away someplace. They have searched the houses, taken away everything to the smallest thing. All the vegetable gardens, all the cellars were raked out and everything was taken away. Wealthy peasants were exiled into Siberia even before Holodomor during the “collectivization” (forced unification of individual farms into State driven collective farms - kolhoz). Communists came, collected everything. Children were crying beaten for that with the boots. It is terrifying to recall what happened. It was so dreadful that every day became engraved in the memory, every day and night calls to mind. My son-in-law remembered how he couldn’t bear the sight of dead people he had to throw into the same grave, so he turned away. People were lying everywhere as dead flies. The stench was awful. Many of our neighbors and acquaintances from our street died. I have no idea how I managed to survive and stay alive. And in 1933 we tried to survive the best we could. We collected grass, goose-foot, burdocks, rotten potatoes and made pancakes, soups from putrid beans or nettles. Collected gley from the trees and ate it, ate sparrows, pigeons, cats, dead and live dogs. When there was still cattle, it was eaten first, then - the domestic animals. Some were eating their own children, I would have never been able to eat my child. One of our neighbours came home when her husband, suffering from severe starvation ate their own daughter- a baby-born. This woman went crazy.
People were drinking a lot of water to fill stomachs, that is why the bellies and legs were swollen, the skin became was swelling from water too.
At that time the punishment for a stolen handful of grain was 5 years of prison. One was not allowed to go into the fields, the sparrows were pecking grain, though people were not allowed.
(From the memories of Olexandra Nykyforivna Rafalska, born in 1910, Zhytomir)