Ms. BUTKOVSKA: In the schools no one knew. The situation in schools was a very ticklish one because the children who went to the town schools were themselves half hungry and the teachers were obligated to say that everything was just fine. They would be asked by the pupils, “Why, if it is all fine, can’t we have bread to eat?”
Senator DeCONCINI: Thank you.
Ms. MAZURKEVICH: You said that no one spoke about the famine in the cities. They were afraid to speak out for fear of being arrested?
Ms. BUTKOVSKA: It was very difficult for people to take note of the conditions or to discuss them because there was a slogan that was thrown out by the government which read that Life has become better, life has become more fun. They knew that they risked their lives if they spoke out against the slogan. But I noted later that people would tag on ‘only for Stalin’. Everything at that time operated on slogans. There was one slogan that said Anybody who can read should become a writer. They all came and entered the universities and, of course, they had no talent so they were forced to leave.
Senator DeCONCINI: Thank you very much for your testimony.
Our last witness today will be Anna S.
Dr. SAMILENKO-TSVETKOV: With the permission of the witness, I will read the testimony of Anna of San Francisco.

TESTIMONY OF MS. ANNA S. OF SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

Kiev: spring of 1933. In the early spring of 1933, in the city of Kiev, I was a sixth-grade student at Seven-Year School No. 27, on Lukianivsky Street. (At that time, children began their elementary school studies at the age of eight; kindergartens for pre-school age children did not exist.)

My school and other schools in Kiev were closed that spring. The classrooms were stripped of school desks. Hay and straw were strewn on the floors of the rooms, where adults and children lay, swollen and dying. Those who died were hauled away in freight trucks to a place beyond the outskirts of the city where they were buried in common graves and covered with dirt

By some miracle, groups of villagers made their way to the city. The police were sta¬tioned along the roads leading to Kiev, and they sent everyone back to the village who didn’t have official documents permitting them to enter the city. In the same way, they checked all passengers on trains or other conveyances. These unfortunate people, chiefly women and children, would stop first at the bazaars to try to trade in vegetables, seed grain, and old rags, of which there were very little.

I personally saw many swollen, starving people, including children, who sat on the still-frozen ground at the bazaar, on dirty sacks and rags, begging for something to eat.

Sometimes I would see wretched villagers with their children lying dead beside them. Most of the mothers were very swollen and just barely alive. The police tried to drive them away by force, but they weren’t even able to pick themselves up off the ground; and so there they died. Then they loaded them up on freight trucks and hauled them off to common graves outside the city. At the cemetery near our home, it was already forbidden to bury these dead.

By some means (I don’t recall how), my father’s sister and her two children came to stay with us. We didn’t have the right to register them, so they lived with us ‘illegally’,