NT: It was against the law to leave the village and go to the city. They didn’t let people out of the village. The Famine was deliberately planned; this was planned death. First, they broke the spirit of the peasant. They knew that if you took away from the peasant everything that grows in the ground – beets, potatoes, cucumbers – that it would be impossible to survive. You had to feed yourself, and feed your family. Such was the famine. There was famine, and there was cannibalism. I am telling you the honest truth.

In our village, our neighbor, Wasyl, swelled from hunger, couldn’t walk anymore, and he lay on a cot waiting for death. His sister, Yevdoshka, couldn’t get him any food because she herself was starving. But women somehow coped better than men. Men were more vulnerable to starvation. For some reason, women coped better. After Wasyl died, his sister Yevdoshks cut the flesh off his thigh, cooked it, and soon after, she died too. Yevdoshka didn’t leave the house, and her cousin, who lived next door, went over and found two corpses. They found cooked meat in a pot and decided that the sister had died because she ate her brother’s flesh. There was cannibalism, and mother used to order us not to stray far from the house because there were instances where children were stolen and their flesh cooked. The Famine was something terrible.

Nadia Tkachenko

Date of birth: 14 November 1923

Place of birth: Brydok village, Cherkassy oblast

Witnessed Famine in: Brydok village, Cherkassy oblast

Arrived in Canada: 1995

Current residence: Toronto, Ontario

Date and place of interview:  17 July 2008, Toronto

Excerpt From Full Interview