Tag #155928 - Interview #78231 (yakov voloshyn)

We were very hard up. My father earned little and my mother didn't work. We decided that I had to study and go to work at the same time. My uncle, Israil Menachimovich, worked in the commercial department of a newspaper in Kiev. He helped me to become an apprentice in the illustration department of the popular daily newspaper 'Proletarskaya Pravda' [Workers' Truth], present-day 'Kievskaya Pravda' [Kiev's Truth]. My tutors were Kazimir Reshko, a photographer, and Kazimir Swidzevski, an artist, who signed his drawings with the pseudonym 'Ognit'. Ognit taught me to retouch photographs. This kind of work was done manually at the time. It took a lot of effort to improve photographs or correct deficiencies for newspaper photographs. I was an industrious apprentice and a short time later I became one of the five best retouching experts in Kiev. I studied in the art school simultaneously and finished it in 1934. I continued working in the editorial office.

I remember the famine in Ukraine 11 in 1932-1933. Of course, it wasn't as horrific in Kiev and other bigger towns as it was in villages. I never saw corpses in Kiev while there were dead bodies in villages, as documents and photographs confirmed. Of course, we will never know the whole truth about those years, in the same way we shall never know the truth about the Great Patriotic War. I remember sausage was made from horse meat at that time: it was red and wet and if kept for a short while it lost so much water that there was hardly any sausage left. However, we managed somehow. There were coupons for meals in a canteen issued at enterprises, and food packages were handed out. There were long lines in food stores. It was hard, but it wasn't mortal.