I just watched a documentary on Stalin which showed a old Ukrainian woman telling the story of the horrors her family faced when Stalin pushed them onto the collectives, stole their grain and sold it abroad to fund his industrial dreams.
She said that their house had the only nearby well and neighbors came there to fetch water. No one had any food. Everyone was starving.
Her mother had three children. The youngest was a boy around five. He had taken ill so they had put him in the warmest place, a bunk bed over the stove. The mother had nothing to feed her children save a single turnip. She boiled it up and divided it between the two oldest children. The youngest child, smelling the turnip from his bed over the stove ask for some. The woman refused. The child climbed down from his sick bed, crying, grabbing at her skirts and begging for just a bite of turnip. Seeing this, the neighbors told the woman to give the starving child just a bite of turnip.
“No,” she said, “I have to save the food for my healthy children.”
Hearing this, the boy sagged. He gave up begging and weeping bitterly, struggled back into his bed. He cried until he died the next day.
When a child dies slowly, such as from starvation, they often begin to make a particular rhythmic, low, mewing cry in their final hours.
