SYNOPSIS
Kostiantyn Kyryshchuk was born in 1922. He describes the events that occurred during the Holodomor in the village of Skarzhyntsi in Proskuriv raion of Vinnytsia oblast (currently Khmelnytsky raion of Khmelnytsky oblast). He had four sisters. One of his sisters, as well as his father, died of starvation. His mother died three years before the Holodomor.
Kyryshchuk remembers using boiled weeds for food, people being swollen and barely walking, and finding corpses in the weeds’ overgrowth. Once he tried to steal some ears of wheat from the field and got severely beat up. People were also digging up rotten potatoes that were left in the fields over the winter and used them to make pancakes.
Kyryshchuk credits his survival to working as a shepherd to a neighbor’s cow and drinking milk. He assigns blame for the artificially caused famine and deaths of his family members and fellow-villagers to Stalin, Kaganovich and Molotov.