Natalia Avramenko (nee Ilchenko). Video
Describes collecting potato peels outside a cafeteria. Describes how the dead were collected in her village. Describes the defacement of statues of Soviet leaders.
Maria Boratynska (nee Myshalov). Video
Describes the dispossession of her neighbor. Describes how the authorities searched their home for food.
Evhenia Bozhenko. Video
Describes how her mother walked for miles to bring bread to the children. Describes what happened to people who tried to steal food.
Aleksandra Brazhnyk (nee Skrypnyk). Video
Describes the dispossession of her family. Describes the collection of corpses in her village. Explains what children were taught in school during and after the Famine.
Natalia Demyanenko (nee Malynovska). Video
Describes attempts to cross the Soviet-Polish border in search of food.
Michael Fediw. Video
Reads a poem he wrote about the Holodomor.
Maria Firman (nee Martyniuk). Video
Describes harassment of her father by the authorities. Describes her mother being beaten by a brigadier for taking grain stalks from a field. Describes her mother's and sister's death from starvation.
Halyna Huba (nee Didenko). Video
Describes the death and burial of her cousins. Describes how people were forbidden from collecting grain stalks in collective farm fields. Describes mass graves in villages.
Stefan Horlatsch. Video
Describes how his mother hid food to feed her family, and the harassment she faced at the hands of the authorities.
Oleksandra Jamniuk (nee Leyba). Video
Describes the collection of corpses from the streets of Kharkiv, where she was attending university. Describes how she was unaware that the Famine was man-made until arriving in Galicia in the late 1930s.
Maria Katchmar (nee Zeyko). Video
Describes the dispossession of her family. Explains how her neighbor saved their family from starvation. Describes mass graves in her village.
Luba Kachmarska (nee Maria Bortnyk). Video
Describes how the authorities spread poisoned powder on potatoes so that peasants would have nothing to eat. Describes how her mother hid potatoes in a hole under a fallen tree.
Viktoria Kaluschny (nee Titarenko). Video
Describes how the authorities attempted to persuade children to inform on their parents. Describes how her mother brought home and fed abandoned children. Describes the poisoning of grain stored at a train station.
Valentyna Kaspryk (nee Mukhina). Video
Explains that many villagers tried to escape central Ukraine to the Donbas. Describes how she and a friend collected scraps of food outside a hospital.
Mykhailo Klendukh. Video
Describes his maltreatment at school as the son of a kulak. Describes how grain was being exported in the Crimea during the Famine.
Nina Kohut (nee Petrenchuk). Video
Describes rumors of cannibalism in Odessa, and a search by the NKVD of her parents apartment.
Antonina Kokot (nee Khlemendyk). Video
Explains how her parents managed to feed their children. Describes how they hid food, and what they ate. Describes her father seeing grain being loaded for export at the height of the Famine.
Leonid Korownyk. Video
Describes villagers resistance to collectivization. Reads from a poem he wrote about the Holodomor.
Anastasia Kovalchuk (nee Varchenko). Video
Describes people begging for food door-to-door in the village. Describes the death of her godmother’s children.
Evrosinia Kovalyov (nee Yaroslavska). Video
Describes the death of her brother from starvation.
Hryhoriy Kovalyov. Video
Estimates how many people died in his village during the Famine.
Fedir Krikun. Video
Describes how he and his sister were shot at for collecting grain stalks in collective farm fields. Describes mass graves in his village.
Maria Kurec (nee Honcharuk). Video
Describes the dispossession of her family. Describes the arrest, exile and death of her father.
Mayina Kyrychenko (nee Solomenko). Video
Describes the death of her sister. Describes villagers bringing and leaving their children in the city in the hopes that somebody would feed them. Describes what her family ate during the Famine.
Mykola Latyshko. Video
Describes the process of forced collectivization, and the raising of grain quotas by the authorities. Describes wagons going around his village to collect the dead.
Maria Lysenko. Video
Describes her parents′ attempts to obtain food in Kremenchuk city. Describes grain piles rotting at the train station waiting to be transported. Describes the death of her grandmother from starvation.
Olena Lysyk (nee Stepanchenko). Video
Describes her father′s work at a state farm. Describes seeing her grandfather begging for food in the streets of the city in which they lived.
Raisa Macevko (nee Yaroshenko). Video
Describes the exile of her neighbors for attempting to hide grain. Describes the imprisonment of local women for theft of food.
Pavlo Makohon. Video
Describes the death from starvation of his four siblings and grandmother. Describes the cover-up of cannibalism by the Soviet authorities.
The Holodomor was a very long time ago. Many question why so much time and energy is devoted to this issue. However, when we meet with survivors, when we hear them speak of their experiences, although we can never fully understand, it helps bring us closer to that period in history that had such an impact on what defines Ukrainians as a nation, and who they are today.
The contribution of survivors to understanding the Holodomor is invaluable.
We thank the survivors who have participated in this project. By sharing their stories they have ensured that the truth of the Holodomor will be forever documented in the history books.
Zinadia Marusenko (nee Demchenko). Video
Describes how her mother′s sisters died of starvation in the village. Describes her great grandmother′s death from starvation.
Evdokhia Marych (nee Zalevska). Video
Describes the death of both her parents from starvation. Describes life in an orphanage during the Famine.
Pavlo Morenec. Video
Describes Dzhankoi, the first train stop in the Crimea, and how the authorities would turn away people trying to escape famine in Ukraine. Describes an encounter with a small boy in Dzhankoi.
Oleksiy Ohienko. Video
Describes how his father traveled illegally to villages in the Belarusian SSR to trade tobacco for grain and dried bread.
Halyna Onyskiw (nee Bielchyk).Video
Describes how the authorities searched their home for food. Describes how the family saved her grandfather from starvation. Describes mass graves in the village.
Valentyna Podash (nee Shevchenko). Video
Describes black flags hung in villages where everyone had died. Describes the bread with which her father fed her.
Valentyna Revutska (nee Vilchynska). Video
Describes children begging for food in the market. Tells how her mother worked in the village in place of dying peasants. Describes seeing corpses outside her school.
Valerian Revutsky. Video
Describes his experiences as a student from Kyiv mobilized to assist with the harvest campaigns in the villages.
Viktor Royenko . Video
Describes how his village looked during the Famine, what people ate, and how Soviet brigades searched villagers' homesteads for food and confiscated any that was found.
Luba Semaniuk (nee Novikova). Video
Explains how her mother traveled 150 km to try to exchange heirlooms for food. Describes the death of her neighbors from starvation.
Kateryna Shcherban (nee Levkovets). Video
Describes how the authorities dispossessed villagers. Describes her brother′s arrest for stealing potatoes, and how she collected grain stalks in the collective farm fields.
Ivan Shevchenko. Video
Describes how he tried to convince his grandmother to give him some more bread, and how his parents tried to help hungry people begging for food.
Olena Shevchuk (nee Yaroshenko) Video
Describes Donetsk city during the Famine.
Vera Stefaniuk (nee Dubeyko). Video
Describes the guarded grain silos in her village. Describes her mother trading things for food. Describes how her mother found a porcupine, which saved both of them from starvation.
Fedir Strohiy. Video
Describes what happened to his father because of his refusal to pay taxes. Describes the dispossession of his family by their neighbors.
Nadia Shulha (nee Symonets) Video
Explains how the authorities prevented villagers from collecting grain in collective farm fields. Describes how the police confiscated food from villagers returning from Russia.
Vera Shumylo (nee Fominichenko) Video
Describes seeing corpses in the market in Kharkiv. Describes how her mother traveled to Russia to get food, and how the authorities confiscated this food upon her mother′s return to Kharkiv.
Evdokhia Shurovska (nee Lyhuta). Video
Describes the difficulties her father had in finding work because of his classification as a kulak. Describes the death, in a single day, of her two sisters.
Kateryna Symahovska (nee Zyma). Video
Describes how she ate the seeds her mother had saved for planting and scenes of corpses in the streets of her village. Describes how after the Famine a woman came to their village searching for her children.
Natalia Talanchuk (nee Hrebinska). Video
Describes scenes of the Famine in Dnipropetrovsk city. Tells how her mother traded family heirlooms for food. Describes guard towers set up in collective farm fields.
Nadia Tkachenko . Video
Describes a case of cannibalism in her village.
Fedir Tkachenko. Video
Describes his family fleeing from arrest. Describes the death of his neighbor from starvation.
Volodymyr Tokar. Video
Describes the murder of a Communist activist in his village. Describes how his mother collected corpses in the village.
Aleksandra Tyshchenko (nee Senyk). Video
Describes the dispossession of her parents by fellow villagers. Describes how she went to the city to ask for food door-to-door.
Wasyl Wasko. Video
Compares his experience as an inmate in Dachau, where he spent three years, with life during the Holodomor.
Antonia Witrowych (nee Prychodko). Video
Describes how her family was able to hide some food from the committee that searched villagers′ homes and confiscated food.
Yulia Woychyshyn (nee Stepanenko). Video
Describes how her father, who worked for the village council, was forced to falsify death statistics. Reads from her father′s memoirs about a case of cannibalism in their village.
Mykola Zabolotnyi. Video
Describes pressure put on farmers who refused to join collective farms. Describes villagers′ resistance to collectivization. Describes trials in his village.
Dmytro Zapishnyi. Video
Describes having food stolen by a street child. Describes how his mother saved him from starvation. Explains the role of dispossessed labor in the industrialization of the Soviet Union.
Olha Zazula (nee Tsila). Video
Describes what her family ate during the Famine. Describes the death of her aunt and cousins from starvation.
Halyna Zelem (nee Sztepa). Video
Describes her father trading family heirlooms for food, and the propaganda that children were subject to in schools.
LIST OF SURVIVORS