Hunger

War World II started in the USSR at 4 am on June 22, 1941. Our town, Kiev, was bombed at the same time and was occupied by Germans on September 19. In the meantime, everybody who wanted to run away to the east was looking for transportation. The trains were busy with military transits and were mostly not available for civilians. My father David, a 39 year old high school teacher, was mobilized to evacuate children from his school to Siberia. I don't know what happened to the kids’ families. Probably he was to take east only those whose parents weren't able to take care of them.

We - the kids, my parents, my 12 year old sister Rachel and me, a 5 year old boy- left by foot with only the luggage we could carry ourselves. Rachel was lightly wounded in her heel by a little bomb splinter. She was afraid to tell anybody about that, so she suffered silently while it healed by itself. We walked 120 kilometers. After that we got horse wagons, then a train car designed for cattle and finally a passenger carriage. Our trains (we had to change them many times) were stopped often giving priority to military ones. Many nights we spent in places not suited to human beings. Finally we came to a small town ,Asino, in Siberia. The authorities took care of the school children and sent our family to a village ,Novonikolaevka, of about 3000 inhabitants in the middle of the taiga, 50 kilometers north. My father had to be a principal of a local school. A few weeks later he was sent to the front and we never saw him again. His friend in the platoon sent us a letter that in April, 1944 he died. Being ambushed by Ukrainian bandits he lit his truck on fire and burned himself so as not to be tortured by them. They wanted independence for Ukraine and for the sake of it fought the Red Army on the Nazis side, at the same time killing thousands of civilians who didn't support them. Today they would be called terrorists.

It is interesting that now Stephan Bandera, the leader of those thugs, was proclaimed a hero of Ukrainian people. The statues of him were erected, streets named after him. Recently Polish authorities have expressed deep displeasure of those actions, noticing that banderovtsy (members of S. Bandera's gangs) killed many Polish people as well. As Karl Marx said: “History repeats itself twice, first as tragedy, second as farce“. Indeed.

We lived in a small house allotted to a school principal. It was a simple loghouse with moss between the logs for insulation. An inner porch separated the entrance from the dwelling part, which included the kitchen and “gornica”, - a living room and a bedroom combined. A stove in the kitchen made of bricks and clay, took up most of the space. It was designed for cooking and heating. The flat top of it provided sleeping space for a few people. It was very useful in Siberian winters, where frost of -50C can stay for a long period. Under the floor was a cellar for storing potatoes and other provisions. Next to the house was a vegetable garden and an outhouse at the far end of it.

Electricity was not available in remote places like our village. For light we used a kerosine lamp. Kerosine was in short supply (what wasn't?). Instead of it we used splinters. To prepare them for the evening was my job. When you are 5 or 6 years old it could be a challenge. Once I chopped off a little piece of my thumb using an axe.

There was no radio in our village as well. Newspapers reached us, but only once in a while. The most reliable source of information were the letters, those which finally found recipients. All letters were censored and usually big parts of them were stroked out with black ink.

However, the biggest problem of all was hunger. Constant, cruel, humiliating human dignity hunger. You become humiliated because pangs of it don't let you concentrate on what you have to do, you feel unjustly deprived. It hurts even more than physical pain.

Food was available only on the black market, but we had no money for it. The state distributed ration cards for bread, oil, and sugar for a nominal price. For working people the norm was 800 grams a day, for the rest – half or even less than that.

It sounds like a lot of bread. For example, now I eat between 50 and 100 grams a day. But I eat a lot of other products as well. In war time other products were occasional luxuries. People who had just enough bread and potatoes were lucky. The bread itself was very bad quality, hardly edible.

The bread was brought to the village once a week, but at an unknown time or day. People were guided by rumors and on the eve of the expected day, rushed to form a line before the store's door, as the bread usually was not enough for everyone. It often happened that rumors were false and people wasted their time in vain and the next day the procedure was repeated.

Many years later my mother told me a story about those days. After spending a few nights waiting for bread, she was lucky to get her ration. Exhausted morally and physically, lost in a fog and dragging her feet, she was carrying bread home for her children. Being unable to resist the temptation, she nipped off a crumb of the crust. Then one more. Then another one. Then she thought it was her own share and ate a bit more. Close to home she noticed that the whole piece was almost gone. It was impossible to show up with such a small bit and she finished it before opening the door. Shaking of horror and humiliation, she told us that bread hadn't arrived again. She kept this story to herself for twenty years having no courage to tell it to us.

The hardest time for us was spring and beginning of summer, when last year 's supply was gone, but a new one had not grown up yet. The main source of food, except bread, was our garden. I still remember how good the vegetables were from it, their look, smell and taste still unsurpassed.

Potatoes were so large – I used to carry them in both arms, as firewood. Tomatoes, when you broke them in half, showed sparkling crystals, similar to sugar lumps. And they were sweet, not quite as sugar, but still very tasty. Cucumbers were covered by sharp pimples and a white-bluish powder which disappeared after you touched them. We used to strike them along their body to break these pimples, so they would not prick our mouths. Vegetables couldn't be stored for a long time, so we made pickles of them, of tomatoes, cucumbers and of cabbage. Cabbage also was great, sweet and juicy. But the best part of it for me (still is) the core. Carrots, well, they were just delicious. Onions and garlic added a great deal to the table. Only problem was – we weren't able to produce vegetables enough, as it was too hard a job. Water for it we had to bring from the river in buckets. It was a couple hundred meters away with a steep bank. My mother worked to exhaustion and I was too small. Although I worked with all my energy, it was almost negligible.

I have noticed that after our return till now I've never tried such great vegetables. I guess the reason for that was the exceptional soil and climate of that region. Then, we let all crops ripen to their best condition and didn't use chemicals (simply we just hadn't any).

The first things in summer came to our table not from the garden, but from the wild. It began in May with nettles and sorrel. Both of them made delicious soups, appreciated even now. From the forest in fall we got mushrooms, berries, and pinenuts. To pick mushrooms and berries, the process was mostly individual, known to many Canadians very well. It is worth it to tell a bit more about harvesting pinenuts. They grew on Siberian (stone) pine. The adult tree was usually huge. By local people it was considered to be a noble one. It gave unrotting wood. At the time, a water pipe had recently been discovered. Laid underground about 200 years before, it was in pretty good condition. No less than for timber, it was valued for nuts, a nutritious and delicious food. From olden times, there was established amongst neighboring villages, a possession of particular trees in the taiga. Every village decided when the nuts were ripe enough for harvesting and made an expedition for them. The cones grew high on the trees and were unreachable from the ground. But when they were ripe, they fell by themselves if just shaken off. So, the men cut another appropriately long and wide tree, made of it a battering ram and hit the pine many times, until the cones stopped falling. The cones were big and heavy. People brought them home just for fun. But most of the cones were heated by fire on the spot to roast the nuts. Seed scales opened by heating and the ready nuts were put in sacks. The distribution of nuts went by the rules of the village. Collecting nuts or cutting pine trees by individuals was considered as theft of public assets and punishment was severe.

As now I can see, we had unused resources of food, but we were too ignorant to recognize them.

Not long ago I was talking to one Chinese person. He told me that once they watched a documentary movie about a Gulag labor camp. In spite of the narrator's story that people were dying of hunger in these camps, my interlocutor and his friends couldn't believe that.

''Why didn't you believe?'',I asked him, ''It is true, really.'' "In the footage we watched, we noticed a lot of flies hovering around and just sitting on the faces of prisoners. It is some protein, you know. But the guys just ignored them. So, they weren't hungry enough." For me this conversation became a lesson. Our squeamishness is not a thing to be proud of.

In 1945 the war was finished, but hunger was still there. In 1946 we returned from Siberia to Kiev and lines for bread in my town were even longer, for the whole night. We took turns with my mother. Once in a dismal shifting my mother, in an attempt to heighten my mood , said that the time would come when bread would be in abundance, and not just one kind of rye bread but even white. I revolted, ''Don't tell me tales! I'm not a little one anymore.''

Gradually, in ten-fifteen years, hunger subsided. The first time I ate enough was in 1955 in a summer camp of my college. I even remember the menu: borsch, kasha (a boiled buckwheat) with some meat and compote.