from hunger that it would pull the plow a short distance and then stop, too weary to go further.

Our workers asked the peasants why the beets had not been weeded earlier. The peasants replied that there was no one in the village of Terny to weed the beets, be¬cause everyone had died of hunger. Our people were genuinely astounded. When they readied the camp, they told the rest of us about the incident.

While still at the camp in Terny I happened to read in a magazine that the Institute of Orchard Management in Poltava was accepting student applications for the third and fourth levels of study. When I returned to Nova Bavariya I applied to the In¬stitute and was accepted.

At the end of August of 1933, as I was travelling from Kharkiv to Poltava I saw with my own eyes several corpses lying along the road. I was not long at the Institute, for soon after my enrollment I was expelled as an ‘enemy of the Soviet people’. Thus, on the fourth of January, I was on my way back to Kharkiv.

Not far from the monument to Kotliarevsky in Kharkiv, I saw a woman and child lying on the ground, dead. Excuse me, in Poltava, I saw a woman and child lying on the ground dead.

Walking along Lasal Street, I saw another body, that of a man. In the middle of Blahovishchensky Bazaar I saw a third corpse. People at the Bazaar, and indeed in the entire city of Kharkiv, were no longer surprised at seeing corpses in the street. They would take one look at the body and then continue along the way.

There was very little food to be found at Blahovishchensky Bazaar. Some meat was sold, but I don’t know what kind it was. At the train station in Nova Bavariya, I saw a mother and her two children. All three were extremely swollen from hunger.

During my student days at the Poltava Institute of Orchard Management, I was given 300 grams of bread a day. The bread was made out of the grain brought by peasants from the collective farm to be ground in Poltava. We students got the rem¬nants of this grain called milchug. But we were not always fortunate enough to receive even this small portion of bread.

Sometimes we would get no food at all for two or three days. During this time, we would simply go hungry. And, what was worse, the 300 grams of bread that were missed one day could never be recovered. As a student at the Institute I worked at a plant where sunflower oil was processed.

Workers at the plant supplemented their meager diet by eating hulls from the sunflower seeds, called makukha. In addition to the 300 grams of bread, they gave us cabbage soup once a day at the Institute. That was all the food we got.

My mother died of hunger in the village K. in the Poltava region. Her sister and her two children also perished from hunger. About the rest of my relatives I know nothing. The little I do know, I discovered when I returned to the village in 1941 during the German occupation. That was the first time I had set foot in the village of my birth since my escape in 1929.

During all the intervening years, I never corresponded with my mother. In 1941, when I returned to K. and discovered that my mother had died of starvation, as had several families in the village, I was also told that my father had been shot in 1937. Surviving neighbors also told me that my younger brother had been taken from the In¬stitute where he was studying and also shot as ‘an enemy of the Soviet people’.