cow politics and believed what the government said, that the whole country was in trouble.

Villagers regarded the Communist system with great suspicion. These seizures brought the villages into a bad condition which resulted in the famine which began in 1932.

On the streets of the town there appeared swollen bodies, swollen people. In the marketplaces, there appeared all sorts of foodstuffs containing meat of cats and dogs and human meat as well.

We students who were very hungry threw ourselves at these food stuffs, and one time a student discovered in a small pie the claws of a cat. Although students were in the main taken care of, we also nevertheless felt the hunger, as a result of which we students carried on our backs, bags, and I did also, particularly those students who had no aid coming from their parents at home.

As I was going on winter holiday through the station, we saw thousands of people scattered by the wayside who had belongings, clothing and so forth which they were taking to sell for food.

These people were venturing into the unknown and had no idea that death awaited them. They begged for food, but no one paid attention, because all were hungry and those who were not hungry simply disregarded the pleas of those begging for food.

The police did not allow the people who begged for food to warm themselves in the interiors of the station. They chased the people outside where they froze to death. Special brigades would pick up the dead bodies and remove them, I know not where.

Even those individuals who could still walk and move about were taken away with the dead. In 1933, the directors decided to send the students on a practical expedition to unite theory with practice.

They sent us to the collective farms so that we could gain experience in how farm¬ing was done. They were preparing us as engineers in the machine tractor stations. I and another student was sent to a small town near a village. We were giving lodgings at the home of the brigadiers of the collective farm who had a family, cows and several chickens.

On the following day, we students emerged outside to look around the village, and we were gripped by fear. A majority of the houses had their windows and doors boarded up. There was not a soul about There was not even the barking of the dogs, and only occasionally we saw bodies or half bodies scattered about the street.

We looked at all this, and we could not regain our composure. Returning home, we asked the lady of the house, why is it that practically half of the buildings are boarded up, and not a soul is to be seen?

She answered, they have all died of starvation. Every morning we witnessed brigades who would pick up the bodies lying on the street and would take them to holes in the ground to be dumped. In the collective farm, horses also died and other animals as well.

These dead animals were taken to the field and in the morning, you could not find either the skeleton of the animals or anything remaining, because the bones had been scavenged by the peasants.

Not even the bones were left, because the bones could be used to make some sort of soup. We students had enough opportunity to investigate all aspects of collective