“Why did you give me such a small piece of bread? Are we having a famine here?” my grandmother used to say when my mom cooked for her.

Dariia Zharko was an 8-year-old girl when the Soviets came to her village in central Ukraine’s Cherkasy Oblast and took everything edible. Her village, Shenderivka, shrank by 25 percent because of the Holodomor, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s deliberate starvation of 3.9 million people in Ukraine from 1932-33.

Zharko, my grandmother, came from a poor family. She was the seventh and the youngest child. They didn’t have shoes and walked barefoot. She didn’t remember her mom, who died three years after giving birth to Dariia.

The family, all peasants, lived in a picturesque area close to the Ros River. Her father, Ivan, made a living as a watermelon farmer. In 1932, the combination of poor harvest, forced collectivization and Soviet soldiers, who took away all food, starved many families to death.

It was a miracle and wise management that saved my family. They were able to hide a cow in the bushes. Zharko’s grandfather was getting one glass of milk from the cow every day and share it among seven children and his son. He didn’t leave anything for himself, so he died, likely from starvation while working on a field.

Zharko’s brothers were also fishing in the nearby ponds, catching crucian carp. My grandmother loved this fish through all her life. She also made pancakes from greenery collected from the garden.

Zharko’s family suffered but was able to save almost all of its members, unlike many others. Dariia was the only one out of seven who got an education in a university and a teaching career, but the famine memories walked alongside in her life.

I remember her hiding candies and apples in her closet. When I was small I was asking mom why she is doing that, as you can always go to the nearest store and buy everything you need. Perhaps grandmother’s memories from the Soviet past motivated her to keep a lot of food in the house.

Not everyone was lucky enough to live through the winter of 1933. My grandmother remembers incidents of cannibalism in Shenderivka. She said one mother had to kill one of her daughters in order to feed her other children. She was then put in jail, where she went mad.

My paternal grandfather was studying in Lviv, then part of Poland. While they didn’t suffer in the famine, they remember it.

Once, the principal of his school gathered students and asked for humanitarian help.

“Our dearest brothers and sisters are starving in central Ukraine, so please tell your mom and dad to bring to school anything they can donate – a glass of sugar, some grain or clothes,” he said.

My grandfather, Stepan Romanyshyn, saw senior students taking off their coats, scarves and hats, and piling them in the middle of the room. Romanyshyn had his new jacket on him – deliberately too big for him, so he could wear it for the next five years. He took it off and put it with the rest of the clothing. His mom scolded him for that outburst of generosity.

The trains with the aid didn’t reach central Ukraine – they were stopped on the Zbruch River, the current border between Ternopil and Khmelnytsk oblasts.

The Holodomor is a part of my childhood memories thanks to stories from my relatives. However, the rest of the world doesn’t know much about it.

In 2017, I spent six months on a journalism fellowship in the United States. Whoever I talked to there, they had never heard of the Holodomor – neither fellows from Asia or Africa, nor Americans. The only exceptions were some representative of Ukraine’s diaspora community with strong connections to their motherland.

Near the end of the program, I stayed for a week in a hotel in Washington, D.C. When one of the receptionists saw my nationality in my passport, he started asking me about Ukraine. It turned out that he wanted to go to Ukraine and work at the ski resort Bukovel in the Carpathian mountains. His grandfather was from Ukraine.

He also suggested that I visit a Washington memorial dedicated to Ukraine.

“The Holodomor Memorial?” I asked, remembering that such a monument was unveiled in 2015.

“Holocaust, you mean?” he corrected me. “No. The Taras Shevchenko Memorial.”

He knew about iconic Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, but he didn’t know about the Holodomor.

So far, only 14 countries have recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide — Georgia, Ecuador, Estonia, Colombia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Poland and Hungary, Australia, Canada and Portugal, and it was partly recognized in Argentina, Brazil, Britain, Spain, Italy and the United States, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

I hope awareness of this Soviet crime against humanity, and many others, will spread among the general public, especially during this time of Russian propaganda and war against Ukraine that has been on since 2014.

The latest book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum, “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine,” published in October, is a step in the right direction to making the facts of this genocide known to a wider audience.