Shorva Goryayevich Vasilyev (Basneyev)

“When we arrived in Siberia, it was very cold. I noticed that there were crosses standing nearby, meaning a cemetery! There was no firewood, so I secretly stole over to that neighboring cemetery to get the crosses for kindling. To this day, I am ashamed of my actions, but we would not have survived otherwise. People were starving. Many died of typhus. A frozen sugar beet was a luxury. In the spring we trapped squirrels. It was meat, which meant life. The meat and fat was turned into food, and the skins were sold for a few kopeks at the trading office. Many were saved from frostbite by squirrel fat. The frosts in Siberia are ferocious. Down to -40 or -45. Not far from the home where mother and I lived there was a ditch into which they tossed the corpses of sick animals, their bellies sliced open and covered with some sort of white powder and reeking awfully. We were constantly hungry, and I would sneak in there at night, trying to cut off at least some sort of animal leg to bring it to mother. She boiled up this meat, changing out the water and crying. It made no difference, what you died of: hunger, plague, or Siberian pests. But we survived. Later I went to veterinary school. I already knew the anatomy of animals. I had seen it with my own eyes and cut them up with my own hands. It was an easy course. And when, at the lectures on infectious diseases, the teacher said that the meat of sick animals should never in any situation be processed or used for food, that it meant certain death, I looked him in the eye and gently smiled. We understood one another without speaking a word.”