Usually, the trains continued on without stopping, and no one came to the aid of these starving children, who were dying in agony.

I once happened to see the police take away two large baskets containing newborn infants, which they had picked up on the streets. The starving mothers who had given them birth were unable to sustain their lives and had abandoned them, thinking per¬haps that some stroke of luck would save their babies’ lives.

The number of rural refugees in Kharkiv grew with each spring day. Emaciated, with ashen faces, swollen limbs, and blisters all over their bodies, these creatures sat on each side of the bread line, staring expressionlessly at the ground or into space. They had neither the money with which to buy bread nor the strength to stand in line for hours. Once in a while, someone who had been lucky enough to buy bread gave a little to one of these unfortunates. There were cases where they died on the spot, having eaten too large a piece of bread. Some were afraid even to ask the townspeople for bread and begged only for water with outstretched tin cans.

The mothers with babies in their arms made the strongest impression. They seldom mingled with the others. I remember seeing one such mother who looked more like a shadow than a human being. She was standing by the side of the road, and her little skeleton of a child, instead of suckling her mother’s empty breast, sucked it’s own small knuckles thinly covered with translucent skin.

I have no idea how many of the unfortunates I saw managed to survive. Every morning on my way to work I saw bodies on the pavements, in ditches, under a bush or a tree, which were later carried away. They died in the streets which bore the ever-present slogan Life has become better, life has become more fun. Now and then, some¬one risked his life to add ‘for Stalin’.

At work no one spoke of the famine or of the bodies in the streets, as if we were all part of a conspiracy of silence. Only with the closest and most trusted of friends would we talk about the terrible news from the villages: whole villages that had died out to the last inhabitant, or cases of cannibalism where the dying had actually eaten the bodies of those who had already perished. The rumors were confirmed when the townspeople were ordered to the countryside to help with the harvest and saw for themselves whence had come the living skeletons that haunted our city’s streets.

Millions died silently in this fertile country, long known as the breadbasket of Europe. Some of my own close relatives were among them. My uncle, my aunt, my niece and her three small children all perished. My mother, too, became emaciated from hunger, but we were fortunate enough to save her from starving to death.

We who lived in the city managed to catch mere glimpses of the unprecedented hor¬rors which took place in 1932 and 1933. No one can remember without pain and indig¬nation the mass destruction of millions of honest and innocent people who were con¬demned as ‘enemies of the people’ to perish from the unendurable pangs of starvation.

Senator DeCONCINI: Thank you very much. Those statements can’t help but shake us all a great deal. I thank you for your courage to come forward and give them to us.

Do you have any knowledge of what they taught in the schools about what was going on? Was it propaganda from Moscow, or was it just ignored-the subject of the economic conditions in the town?