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Ukraine remembers famine horror
By Laura Sheeter
BBC News, Kiev
Ekaterina Marchenko is insistent.
"I can't have you leaving here hungry," she says. "Here, just have this bowl of soup, and maybe later you'll feel like having a sandwich, or a cup of tea and a piece of cake."
The hospitable 87-year-old cannot bear the thought of her guest being less than full, but then she has a horror of going hungry.
Seventy-five years ago, Ekaterina saw seven members of her family and almost all of her neighbours starve to death, in a man-made famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine.
Tree bark and roots
The "Holodomor" or "famine plague" as it is known in Ukraine, was part of Joseph Stalin's programme to crush the resistance of the peasantry to the collectivisation of farming.
“ Don't go near the priest's house either - because the neighbours there have killed and eaten their children ”
Ekaterina Marchenko recalls a warning from her mother
When in 1932 the grain harvest did not meet the Kremlin's targets, activists were sent to the villages where they confiscated not just grain and bread, but all the food they could find.
The confiscations continued into 1933, and the results were devastating. No-one is sure how many people died, but historians say that in under a year at least three million and possibly up to 10 million starved to death.
The horrors Ekaterina saw live with her still.
"We didn't have any funerals - whole families died," she tells me.
"Of our neighbours I remember all the Solveiki family died, all of the Kapshuks, all the Rahachenkos too - and the Yeremo family - three of them, still alive, were thrown into the mass grave."
Ekaterina, her mother and brother, survived by eating tree bark, roots and whatever they could find - but she says starvation drove others to terrible deeds.
"One day mother said to us, 'children, you can't take your usual shortcut through the village anymore because the grandpa in the house nearby killed his grandson and ate him - and now he's been killed by his son...
And don't go near the priest's house either - because the neighbours there have killed and eaten their children.'"
Though some, like Ekaterina, can never forget what happened, many Ukrainians had never heard of the famine until the country's independence - such was the secrecy about it during Soviet times.
But every year since independence, events to commemorate the famine get larger, and momentum is growing behind a campaign to raise international awareness of what happened
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