MK: Collective farms had already been established. In the other part [of our village] the collective farm was called the “Paris Commune.” In our part of the village the collective farm was called the “Red Shock Worker.” They wouldn’t allow us to join the collective farm, even though we wanted to. We were considered “deprived of the right to vote.” We didn’t have the right to vote in elections for local or state government. We were considered enemies of the people, kulaks. In the second grade in school, a kitchen was organized, but I belonged to the class of children who were “socially unreliable.” I didn’t have the right to go to that kitchen where they gave children food.

INTERVIEWER – Were there other children there who weren’t allowed to go into the kitchen?

MK: There were very few kulak children. I remember about myself, when you got to the door, they said – no, no. You – out. The teacher was usually a nice woman, and with tears in her eyes, would say, “No, no. You’re not allowed to come in here. We would usually collect sorrow. It was very sour. We ate its leaves when the plant was still young, but later it would give seeds, which we dried, ground up and made [pancakes].

INTERVIEWER – Your mother made pancakes?

MK: Yes. She would take her last bit of clothing and take it to the activists and trade it, usually for makukha. Do you know what makukha is? When sunflower oil is made the seeds are pressed, and makukha is left over. It was used to feed cattle and pigs. When you ate it, you would get very bad constipation, but you had to eat, because a hungry death is worse than anything. Wild birds, crows, sparrows, people ate it all. Wild apples, people would eat them in the orchard, and come out and die on the street. Nobody buried them; they would lie there for weeks, in the nettle.

[My father] built ports in the Crimea. He was in Kerch, and would send us help. He said that British ships came to load grain there. The grain was under the open sky, huge mounds of wheat. It was all exported. And people were dying of hunger.

INTERVIEWER – And he saw this?

MK: Yes. He saw this. The NKVD guarded the grain, and nobody had the right to take the grain, even when it started rotting.

When they had already established the collective farms, after the harvest my sister went to collect grain stalks, and a guard, from our village, who would ride around the fields on a horse, beat her with a stick. Whoever could collect some stalks and bring them home, dry them out, then crush it between two rocks, and make some kind of pancakes out of it. It wasn’t similar to bread, but people ate it.

Mykhailo Klendukh

Date of birth: 15 June 1925

Place of birth: Mutyn village, Sumy oblast

Witnessed Famine in: Mutyn village, Sumy oblast

Arrived in Canada: 1954

Current residence: Oshawa, Ontario

Date and place of interview: 11 February 2009, Oshawa, Ontario

Excerpt From Full Interview