HZ: I remember this well. My father brought home a bag of millet, and mother took it and started crying. I wondered what was happening, as children get scared when their mother is crying. My father had taken a [gold] cross and earrings and gave father a bag of millet, which had already been mixed and weighed. There was less millet in that bag than siftings. In Poltava there was a store where you could only exchange gold for food. Father said that there was nothing else he could get for the cross and earrings, that he was happy that he could at least get that [bag of millet]. But mother was sorry to give up her cross and earrings.

A woman gave my brother [Ivan] a bun, and he didn’t eat it right away. He ate it later with his friends, and those boys went home and told their mother, “You know what? Ivan was eating a white bun.” So again they came to our house and started searching for flour, because Ivan had a white bun. But the woman had given it to him. Even children were conditioned against us [kulaks]. I think we were the worst there could be. Children who got good grades in school received a portrait of Stalin. This was such a joy, you wouldn’t believe it! That was the propaganda – the teacher told us that every student should have in their house a “Stalin’s corner” – like the corner where we used to have icons and put kutya. All my friends had a “Stalin’s corner,” and I asked mother, “Where can I put this Stalin’s corner, so that I can do my homework there?” And my mother said, “When I give you Stalin’s corner, you won’t know what to do with yourself!”

Halyna Zelem (nee Sztepa)

Date of birth: 13 April 1926

Place of birth: Polohy village, Poltava oblast

Witnessed Famine in: Polohy village, Poltava oblast

Arrived in Canada: 1951

Current residence: Ottawa, Ontario

Date and place of interview:  21 October 2008

Excerpt From Full Interview