Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Those deprived of food were also liable to die suddenly in the act of eating, if they managed to get hold of something to eat. In the spring of 1933, Hryhorii Simia remembered that a terrible stench arose from wheatfields close to the road: hungry people had crawled into the grain stalks to cut off ears of wheat, eaten them and then died: their empty stomachs could no longer digest anything.19 The same thing happened in the bread lines in the cities. “There were cases when a person bought bread, ate it and died on the spot, being too exhausted with hunger.”20 One survivor was tormented by the memory of finding some beets, which he brought to his grandmother. She ate two of them raw and cooked the rest. Within hours she was dead, as her body could not cope with digestion.