“Cartea foametei” (The Famine Book) by Larisa Turea – a volume of confessions of the survivors of the famine in 1946-1947 in Soviet Moldova – was launched on Tuesday at the International Book Salon in Chisinau, Info-Prim Neo reports. The book presents shivering images from the famine times. A mother making flapjacks from grass and mud and carefully distributes them to her children. A father goes to seek for food in the town, and dies on the threshold on his return, exhausted with starvation. Somebody stole his neighbor's horse to eat it. A woman in the neighborhood kills her baby to feed her other kids. Meanwhile, the Soviet soldiers earnestly continue their mission of forcibly collecting grain from peasants. Larisa Turea says the work is not a scientific research. It contains 50 confessions, accompanied by archive documents, translated from Russian into Romanian. Among narrators: the writer Vasile Vasilache, the singer Nicolae Sulac, the poet Gheorghe Voda, Ion Ungureanu, Ion Dumeniuc, Petru Buburuz. Larisa Turea says investigating the vitims of the Stalinist regime is too late since there will be no more witnesses soon. Even the survivors already hardly remember those events. The witnesses suffered a severe trauma, and don't want to experience that again, as if it were a shameful disease, Larisa Turea says. The writer Spiridon Vangheli says the work is as thrilling as a horror movie, unveiling frightening pains. “It's as a choir from ancient tragedies, it's 50 de monologues in which other 500 souls breathe, talk and shout, sometimes because of fear, sometimes at the tomb's door,” the writer has said. The historian Gheorghe Paladi has underlined the importance of the book in terms of literary, science and teaching. The young generation will get the opportunity to know the famine. According to the historian, the author has given a correct assessment to the phenomenon: the policy of the Soviet authorities to reduce the resilience to the new regime and to push the peasants into collective farms (kolkhozes). Hundreds of documents prove the authorities are responsible for what happened, as they could have diminished the consequences of the drought, they could have rescued those over 200,000 victims of the famine. “Cartea foametei” was published in 1991 by the “Universitas” printing house from Chisinau. Yet many things could not have been said then, Turea admits. Re-published by “Curtea Veche” from Bucharest, the volume has the same foreword signed by the writer Ion Druta. The new print has a compartment of pictures dating to 1945-1950 and taken from the Moldovan National Archives. The Romanian Government payed that several hundreds of books reach the Moldovan libraries. Born in 1952 in Calinesti, Falesti district, Larisa Turea is a journalist and arts critic. The 17th edition of the International Book Salon from Chisinau will end on August 4. It is organized by the Culture ministry and the National Library.