Hunger (Original in Russian)

At a number of points in her interview, Irina Tarnavska mentions the hunger she suffered with her family and the difficulty in obtaining the slightest commodity. In this extract, she tells how, when potatoes were cooking in a saucepan, she would sniff the smell to have the illusion of tasting them.

“We would wait for Mother, when she came back from work to eat together… [tears]. I went to site over the cooking pot and tried to breathe in the smell of the potatoes [tears]. That’s how I filled myself! And when Mother came back from work, we ate the potatoes and that was that.”