Frída Ficková

"But in the Crimea I used to go to the bread queue at the town shop at six o'clock in the evening and in the morning the shop opened at six o'clock, so I was there standing all night in the bread queue. In the morning the shop opened. I got the bread, I came home, so my grandmother divided it for us fairly. A piece for each of us, because she had to cook lunch... By then, my aunts had given her, my mother, some flour, so it was easier, but I had to go to the queue for the bread."

"It was hard. No food. When they met the norm, they got half a kilo or 700 grams of bread, I don't know. That was it, no flour. That first year people still had something, some supply that they had brought from home, but the second year, 30, 31, 32, 33, they were so hungry that very few people survived, they were all... They were dying like flies. There was no place to live, nothing to eat. It was a very hard life."

"Vologda was the end of the railway line. They were dropped off there and driven on foot. In that year 29, in September, there was an awful lot of snow. In September to October there was an awful lot of snow and there were awful frosts. Someone died on the way, so they buried them in the snow. So somebody made it all the way to Usht-Nem. And from that Ush-Nem, they left the elderly people and the small children in that village again, and the people who could work, they took them forty-five kilometers further. There they set up two tents for them, and in one of them there were young married men and young girls, and in the other there were men."