Irina Tarnavska recalls the hunger

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 were waiting for Mother to come home from work to eat together [tears]. I went and sat down over the pot and tried to breathe in the smell of the potatoes [tears]. That is how I fed myself! And when Mother came home from work, we ate the potatoes and it was all gone.”