The man-made famine has been buried from the beginning — and not just by its perpetrators.
Maria Katchmar was 7 when the troops came to her farm.
The soldiers entered her home in Cherkasy Oblast — a region of Ukraine along the Dnieper River — and immediately began to break everything. Windows and doors. Paintings and linens. Even pots for cooking. Her father was ordered to drown his livestock. When he refused, he was sent to Siberia — and the Soviet troops confiscated the animals anyway.
With the family’s two cows, chickens, and pigs gone, Maria’s mother left to find food, leaving her 10 children to fend for themselves for nearly a month.
