I heard about horrors from childhood. You probably know about the big famine in the Ukraine, a famine that Stalin started because the Ukrainian nation didn’t obey him. And I remember there was a certain house on the field, and every time we passed that house, my grandma would tell me, “Shh. Quiet, quiet.” And I was wondering why she is telling us to be quiet.
Later, when I grew up, she told me the story. During the famine, people were eating everything. They were eating dung and waste from people and from animals. And this one woman who lived in the house, she ate her two children, and she was separated by the village — she lived alone. And I remember how scared I was to walk past that house. And this story of our nation, it has had a great influence on me, and I wanted to tell those stories.