Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Another survivor remembered a young boy searching for extra grain in a field. His sister ran to him and told him to go home because their father had died. The boy replied: “To hell with him, I want to eat.”26 A woman told a neighbour that her youngest daughter was dying, and so she had not given the little girl any bread. “I need to try to support myself, the children will die anyway.”27 A five-year-old boy whose father had died stole into an uncle’s house to find something to eat. Furious, the uncle’s family locked him in a cellar where he died as well.28 Faced with terrible choices, many made decisions of a kind they would not previously have been able to imagine. One woman told her village that while she would always be able to give birth to other children, she had only one husband, and she wanted him to survive. She duly confiscated the bread her children received at a local kindergarten, and all her children died.29 A couple put their children in a deep hole and left them there, in order not to have to watch them die. Neighbours heard the children screaming, and they were rescued and survived.30 Another survivor remembered her mother leaving the house in order not to hear a younger sibling cry.31 Uliana Lytvyn, aged eighty at the time she was interviewed, remembered these emotional changes, and especially the disappearance of family feelings—maternal and paternal love—above all else: “Believe me, famine makes animals, entirely stupefied, of nice, honest people. Neithe...