Senator DeCONCINI: Thank you, Commissioner. Let me introduce quickly Jim Mace, the staff director here who is with us today. Jim, thank you, and Dr. Olga Samilenko who has done an excellent job in translating and helping us here, and we ap¬preciate it Is there another staff member here whose name I don’t know? He’s the reporter. Thank you for your effort

Well now proceed with the witnesses, if you’ll come forward. First, we have Ivan M who will testify here. Is he here? Ivan, would you come forward and please be seated. We welcome you here today.

I do want the record to show that we’re at the Board of Supervisors and our deep appreciation to them for allowing us to use this auditorium today at no cost to the Commission. Please proceed.
Dr. SAMILENKO-TSVETKOV: With the permission of the witness, I will read a translation from Ukrainian into English of the testimony of Ivan M. from Arizona.

TESTIMONY OF MR. IVAN M. OF TUCSON, ARIZONA

I was born in 1913 in the village of K. in the Poltava region. My father had ten hec¬tares of land, one cow, one horse, approximately three pigs, a dozen chickens and three geese. In 1929 my family was dekulakized, but my father managed to flee our vil-lage before the actual dekulakization took place.

A friend who fought with my father in the Russian army in 1914 who, in turn, was on good terms with the secretary of the village soviet, obtained false documents for my father which facilitated his escape. My father left behind his wife, two sons—me and my younger brother—and two daughters. The same friend who helped my father es¬cape advised me to do the same. I was 16 at the time. I was thus not present at the dekulakization of my village.

From 1929 to ’33, I worked at a cement factory in a suburb of the city of Kharkiv, called Nova Bavariya. In 1932,1 had my first glimpse of the famine. In the summer of 1932, either in June or July, workers from Kharkiv and Nova Bavariya, 300,400 or pos¬sibly as many as 500 individuals were mobilized to weed sugar beets in the village of Terny in the Poltava region.

We were told that we would be in Terny for three weeks, but we left the village after only four days of work, because the soil was very dry, and the beets small and poorly developed. The tall weeds almost reached our waists, and when we pulled out the weeds, we also pulled out the beets along with them.

Three days after our arrival, authorities arrived from Kharkiv to take a look at our work. When they saw what was happening with the beets, how we were inadvertently pulling them out along with the weeds, they called us together and ordered us to return home.

So, on the fifth day after our arrival, we returned home. The village of Terny was lo¬cated approximately half a mile from where we were being housed in tents. None of us workers was permitted to visit the village. Two or three individuals, who were specifically chosen for this task, rode out to the village periodically to get water.

When these individuals returned to our camp, they told us that on the outskirts of the village they had seen two extremely emaciated peasants working in the field. The horse which was harnessed to their plow was equally emaciated. It was so exhausted