Daria Schulha Kira recalls huddling, 75 years ago in a small village in eastern Ukraine, with her three siblings as Communist Party officials ransacked their home looking for grain.

"Your government needs your food," she remembers the armed men shouting. "Then they took iron bars and poked in the walls and the floors, looking for anything they could find."

But they didn't have any food. Kira, now 85 and living in an apartment in Manhattan, was living through one of the worst periods of Stalin's brutal reign in the Soviet Union.