Interview

The Torgsin Store

Tulchyn, Ukraine

Donia Presler survived the famine of 1932-33 with the help of relatives abroad, who sent the funds that were needed to make purchases at the special Torgsin stores, which sold hard-to-obtain goods for hard currency:

We wouldn’t have survived except for two sisters, Zisl and Gitl, who left for America just before the [First World] War. They left for America and from America they learned that there was a famine here. During the Soviet regime, there was a store, a canteen, where they had food—flour and corn—and if you had a dollar you could go and exchange it for food. So they sent us—there were four sisters and two brothers—and they would send us twenty-five or twenty dollars or so, and we would go and buy the food. We would mix the cornmeal with some water and a little salt. We would make a punch of water, cornmeal, and salt, and slowly, slowly we would drink it. . . . And this is what saved us. Without it we would not have survived. They were falling like straw in ’33.

The Torgsin stores remained stacked even during the worst times of the famine, a scene that taunted the starving masses. In fact, the Torgsin stores were available to the political elite and those with connections as well as to those with access to hard currency or valuables. Money sent by relatives abroad saved many Jews who would otherwise have surely starved to death.

For more on how funds from abroad saved some Jews from the Holodomor see Money From America

Source: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2013)