Holodomor Survivors tell their Stories
List of Survivors:
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.
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.
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.
Estimates how many people died in his village during the Famine.
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.
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.
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.