NK One day, my mother said, I have to take your ring and earrings and take it to the TORGSYN¹ to trade. I started to cry, saying that these were from my godmother, why are you taking them away? Mother said, because we don’t have any money and there’s a famine. You can’t buy anything for money, only for gold and silver. So mother took the ring and earrings and they weighed them at [the TORGSYN]¹ and in exchange gave her rice or butter, or whatever she needed. I once went out into the street, and [my parents] got angry at me, and told me not to go into the street, because children are being stolen. Later we found out that children were being stolen, and ground into schnitzel and pies.
INTERVIEWER – Your parents told you this?
NK – Yes. My mother told me. They had heard from other people that at the bazaar, when a policeman was eating a pie, he found a piece of nail and finger in it. One day, mother told me that I could go to my aunt Tania’s, but to be careful not to talk to anyone. Our address was #2, and my aunt lived at #10, so I had to go quickly, and at #7, a man started to talk to me and grabbed me by the arm. Somehow I got away from him, and when I looked at his face, his eyes looked as if they were made of glass. I heard that people who eat human flesh turn into animals. They get a different look [in their eyes]. And that man said that if I told anyone he would kill me and my entire family. I was very scared.
The Orthodox hang their icons in the corners. And the young NKVD officer grabbed this icon and threw it on the ground and broke it. A piece fell off. I grabbed the icon and held on to it. My grandmother grabbed him by the collar and told him, “You young scoundrel! You haven’t even thanked your mother for the milk she fed you with, and you’ve come here and wrecked an icon that’s been in my family for so many years!” We were lucky that the two officers were young, maybe eighteen, and they weren’t investigators. If they had been older, the whole family could’ve been arrested or exiled.
¹An acronym for Torgovlia s inostrantsiamy – or "Store for Foreigners," where only gold, precious metals or foreign currency could be used. During the Famine, TORGSYNs were a means for the Soviet government to augment their gold reserves – desperate starving people could trade gold or other family heirlooms for usually very small amounts of grain or other foodstuffs