FK: They took our father away. I don’t know where. We never saw him again. My mother had some gold bracelets and earrings. So she took them to the TORGSYN¹, a store, where they would give you a couple of kilograms of flour. We tore the bark off linden trees, dried it, pounded it, and mixed it with the flour. That’s what we ate. We kept our cow on the porch. Our neighbor made a chain that we put around the cow’s neck to tie her up. Someone would watch the cow all night, because there was a lot of theft. Hungry people will do anything. In 1932-33 there was a very good harvest. They came and took everything from us. They came with special rods and searched [the ground] to make sure we hadn’t buried anything. I went with my sister to collect grain stalks in the nearby field, and the guard who rode around the field shot at us. We didn’t have the right to collect grain. I don’t know what he shot at us, but he hit me in the leg, and later the wounds started rotting. But to whom could you complain? I was eight or nine years old, and I collected those stalks. He shot at us, I was yelling and he caught us. My mother went and asked about this, but forget it. We didn’t have any rights.

Interviewer – What did your mother ask?

FK: She asked why he was shooting at children. We were children, but he had permission to do this.

I was swollen, like many people.

Interviewer – Were your legs swollen?

FK: I was completely swollen. Then a child or person wants nothing, except to eat.

Interviewer – And your little sister was the same?

FK: Yes. The same.

They collected the dead, and there was someone, half-alive, but they didn’t want to come back the next day, so they took them to the burial pit [still alive]. There were incidents when people crawled out of the pit at night. It was cooler at night, and somehow they would crawl out.

¹An acronym for Torgovlia s  inostrantsiamy – or "Store for Foreigners," where only gold, precious metals or foreign currency could be used. During the Famine, TORGSYNs were a means for the Soviet government to augment their gold reserves – desperate, starving people could trade gold or other family heirlooms for usually very small amounts of grain or other foodstuffs

Fedir Krikun

Date of birth: 7 March 1923

Place of birth: Klyuchnyky village, Kyiv oblast (now Cherkassy oblast)

Witnessed Famine in: Klyuchnyky village, Kyiv oblast (now Cherkassy oblast)

Arrived in Canada: 1951

Current residence: Edmonton

Date and place of interview:  20 March 2009, Edmonton

Excerpt From Full Interview