Starvation

A long time ago when I was a student I was returning from a holiday in France with no French money in my pocket so I was unable to buy anything to eat. I hadn't eaten for a whole day and I was now, the next day, on a train travelling across France to Calais where I'd take the boat to England.
I was starving. The hours went by and I was getting desperate. Sitting across from me in the compartment was a group of young people who proceeded to take out food from bags - boiled eggs, bread, this and that. This of course made things worse for me. I felt like grabbing something from them but I didn't; I felt like asking, begging them for a crust of bread but I didn't. I put up with it for the whole seemingly interminable journey. And I thought I felt that I knew what starving was like.
But I didn't know what starving was like. The sort of starvation that occurs in some countries like Ethiopia is 100 - no - 10000 times worse than what I had suffered.
The children's story "Handsel and Gretel" always intrigued me: I found it amusing and a bit, as a kid, frightening; but I never really understood what their problem was at the beginning of the story when the father (or was it the mother? Or stepmother or stepfather?) takes the two children into the woods to..... well, to get rid of them.
How could people do such a thing? Well, I thought, it's only a fairy story.
I went to see Englebert Humperdink's opera "Handsel and Gretel" a few months ago and the same problem of the parents abandonment of their children still troubled me (though in the opera there is not so deliberate an abandonment as in the original story). How could people do such a thing to innocent children?
Then I read a report of what had happened to a village in the Ukraine when Stalin had deprived the villagers of food so that most of them starved to death. And I read about some of the horrific things that happened there. In particular of a woman who had eaten her own child.
It was then I understood what the story of Hansel and Gretel was really about.
I still recall my train journey when I was hungry, but I wasn't starving. Far, far from it.