RM: People hid [food]. They buried it, but if it was found, they ended up in Siberia. The entire neighboring family died in Siberia. They were our distant relatives. How did it happen? Our neighbor was building a house, and he built one wall thicker than the others. They came to take a look at what he was doing. He made a double wall, with an empty crawlspace between. He filled that space with corn, wheat, whatever he had. They came and looked around, measured the house, and asked why one wall was thicker. He said he didn’t know, that’s how he had built it. So they started to drill through the wall, the grain began flow out, and his entire family was sent to Siberia. He, his wife, and two children died in Siberia, and the two older children, Nunia, and Wasyl survived.

Interviewer – Do you remember their surname?

RM: Vovk. They brought them [Nunia and Wasyl] back to the village, and they still had close and distant family in the village, but their family were scared to take them in, scared to even talk to them. Their family [were afraid] that they would be exiled to Siberia.

[Three] women went to work, and didn’t have anything to eat, so they put a few cobs of corn in their pockets. Three women from our village – I remember their names – were sentenced to three years each, and they sat in prison for three years. But one of them cooked in the kitchen there and was released earlier. People in the village became so upset that she was released early that they had to take her back to prison.

During the Famine nobody traveled anywhere because people were too weak to go far from home. People were weak. People died. I went to their funerals. People died of starvation.

Raisa Macevko (nee Yaroshenko)

Date of birth: 25 February 1924

Place of birth: Mala Yaremivka village, Kharkiv oblast

Witnessed Famine in: Mala Yaremivka village, Kharkiv oblast

Arrived in Canada: 1951

Current residence: Edmonton

Date and place of interview:  20 March 2009, Edmonton

Excerpt From Full Interview