and-so had three poods of grain hidden away in his house. The grain search brigade would then virtually disassemble the entire house, down to the chimney, taking every¬thing apart until the grain was found.

The terrible famine began in the fall of 1932. My family was living in the town of Enakievo in the Donbas area. Frequently, we witnessed how hungry people from col¬lective farms gathered along the railroad lines Zverovo-Kiev and Zverovo-Miullerovo, thinking that travellers on the trains would throw them a piece of bread. All along the railroad you could see the corpses of people who had died begging for food, corpses that lay on the ground like sheaves.

At that time I had an office job at a metallurgical plant in Enakievo and received a monthly salary of 127 rubles. My brother, who worked in the bookkeeping depart¬ment, occupying a somewhat less important position than I, received 108 rubles a month. Our father, who worked as a guard at the same factory, received 70 rubles a month. Between the three of us, we received 300 rubles a month.

People working at the factory in Enakievo were given bread rations. Furnacemen or wheelers, who constantly risked their health through exposure to gas fumes, received one kilogram of bread daily, while their spouses and dependents—400 grams. As a minor boss, I received 800 grams of bread. My father was given 600 grams and the girls received 200 grams each.

In 1933 when the people in the collective farms had already died from hunger, fac¬tory workers like myself were mobilized to work the soil. Four hundred young men and women, myself included, were drafted from Enakievo for this purpose. We were joined by 70 other individuals from the mining towns of Zverovka and Sofiivka. We were taken to the village of Korsunovo, which was twelve miles away from Enakievo. There were three collective farms in Korsunovo. One was called Prometei’. The others were the ‘Shevchenko Collective Farm’. In Korsunovo there were only ten families. In all of the collective farms the people had either died or fled. The 470 per¬sons who had been mobilized to work on the collective farms were divided into three working brigades of 150 each.

Twice daily we were given cabbage with a little oil sprinkled over it, which was brought to where we were working. This food was brought to us in large metal con¬tainers. There was only one horse for all three collective farms. Bags filled with seed were delivered in a truck. After the bags were unloaded onto a cart, the horse was given the job of pulling the cart to the fields. The horse had a stubborn streak in him and sometimes refused to budge. Once, Barabash, a colleague of mine, gave the horse a swat under the animal’s tail, hoping to encourage it to move faster. The animal tore off in a wild gallop, in the course of which he tipped the cart and spilled the seed. An attempt to negotiate a leap over a very high ravine brought on a heart attack and the horse fell dead. Barabash, who was responsible for the horse’s death, was tried the very next day. He was given eight years.

The collective farm to which I was assigned was twelve kilometers from the place where my parents lived. After an entire day of sowing seed, I spent my evenings filling a sack with young tender stalks of plants called loputsky’, a bitter grass called ’shcharyt-M’» pigweed lloboda), and nettle (kropyva) which I then took to my parents at night. All of the grass surrounding the town where my parents were had been picked by starv¬ing villagers who had wondered into the town looking for food. My weekly delivery of