For six months during the Soviet famine of 1932-1933, thirty-four-year-old Kateryna Bondarenko ate almost nothing—ate one small piece of bread every three days, ate potato peels when she could find them, ate grass and tree bark—and Kateryna gave every bit of real food she could obtain to her four children ages three to nine, and Kateryna told her children she had already eaten, told them she wasn't hungry, told them she needed them to eat so they would grow strong, and Kateryna watched her child