This is a picture of my mother Basia Pisarenko (née Shulkina). The photo was taken in Chernovtsy in 1948. My mother was born in Gomel, Belarus, in 1900. She came from a family with many children just like my father.

My mother was a housewife. She had a cow and chicken and worked in her small vegetable garden. This vegetable garden and the cow rescued our family from starving to death in 1932–33 during the famine in Ukraine.

After the war we were very poor. My father was severely ill with tuberculosis. We often starved. My father couldn’t go to work due to his illness, and my mother had to stay at home to look after him.