Ms. MAZURKEVICH: Were they adopted later on? Did some families adopt
them?
Ms. HARMASH: Yes, they may have been adopted, or something-even toe parents would come back and find them, but that didn’t happen often.
Some were adopted, but most of them would be educated, brought up, and of course, educated in the spirit of the Communist Party and ideas of Communism, and some of them became very good Communists. But, some never forgot their parents, and came from the orphanage with a very definite idea of what happened to them and their nationality, and their nation.
Ms. MAZURKEVICH: Thank you.
Dr. KUROPAS: It seems from what you say and from some other testimony that we have heard that the people who lived in the towns and cities were a little better off than those in the villages.
Ms. HARMASH: That’s right
Dr. KUROPAS: As the villagers came to the cities to die, literally to fall down in the streets and die, and the people in the cities walked around them, was there any dis¬cussion?
Ms. HARMASH: Any what?
Dr. KUROPAS: Any discussion among the people in the city, was there any ques¬tioning of what was going on? Did people talk among themselves? Did they want to know why it was going on, who was responsible? What was the mood and the attitude of the people in the cities as they saw all these starving people coming to die?
Ms. HARMASH: That’s true. The city people were getting some very small rations. There was very little bread. For instance, the housewife would get 250 grams of bread, and I have to point out that the bread was of extremely low quality. If it was 200 grams of bread, it would be just very solid and full of water, you know. It would consist of very little real grain like wheat.

People in cities got this kind of bread, sometimes very irregular, but still it was bread. It was something to eat, but the ones that came into the city, we had ration books. So if we don’t get our bread today, tomorrow it was lost.

I wouldn’t be able to get bread from today, that I didn’t get yesterday. But, peasants or village people when they came, they didn’t have any hope of getting bread there, because they didn’t have rations, they didn’t have the book.

Sometimes the people who were standing in the queue to get their ration of bread, they would just give a little piece, but it wouldn’t be too often, because they had noth¬ing left for themselves, the city people.

There were discussions, but not at official levels, discussions and a terrible feeling of hopelessness, about what was going on, how it would end up, what could be done with these people. There was no place for these people that came to the city to stay overnight for instance. That’s why they died outside of the buildings.

Sometimes you could see them at the railroad stations, hundreds and hundreds, and they died at the railroad station. There was no official undertaking by government to help these people, even in this condition when they were in a hopeless state.

I have never seen any kitchens where these people could go and get a bowl of soup, I haven’t seen it Maybe they existed in some other places, but not in our area, and that’s how it was going on.