In 1935, he died. 1935,1 came to mother and local Communists hated my father so, and they arrested me because they heard I so successful in Zaporizhzhia Pedagogical Institute.

I was arrested on August 23, 1936. For months, the great Russian police inves¬tigated me in city Dnipropetrovsk. They tried to connect me with another student. I tried to convince them, “Look, you gave me education. I helped the man.” They said, “Uh-oh, you can get squeezed that way.” I knew it, where I lived in that dormitory with another student, they investigated everyone, but I never saw them. But they stayed proudly. If a man said something wrong against the Soviet Communist system, it will be not to one person, but two who suffer for each person.

There’s a man in Soviet law court at organization. But I’m lucky it was one. I know that my friend was sure with his talk. I even remember Secretary of the Komsomol or¬ganization, all Zaporizhzhia Institute will leave him room, I talked to him about Marx. I talk about him—we never mentioned Stalin, because we thought that he was a dragon, a devil, but about Marx, their philosophy.

I said to him privately, “Look, all day long they give to us Soviet/Communist philosophy. Eclectical material reflect philosophy Communist, but historical materials they took some philosopher from Greece and slowly go up. All criticized the …, they made mistakes. I asked him, did Marx and Engels never make a mistake? He lis¬tened to me and said what you can do. “We have to just be quiet.”

That way, I received just three years in a concentration camp on the eastern side of Lake Baikal, northeast. I remember one of the things when they boarded a Ukrainian echelon of 1,000 person on the railroad train, at about seven. And before reaching the West side of Baikal, they were inspected by doctors. I don’t know why the doctor gave me second grade, but after commission, first and second grade, they sent me by train to the northeast, on the far side of Lake Baikal.

They gave an order, “Out of train,” and ordered us to walk on a frozen river in Siberia. And you know what happened, I know its climate over there and we were hungry. I was a young man at the time, 21 years old, but I was walking slowly. But I heard, and when turned around, I saw they … that man who couldn’t walk with the others. You understand me. I tried not to be the last one. They killed, so many that they had sent of political prison to perform slave labor, but we built the railroad.

Ms. MAZURKEVICH: Mr. Kononenko?
Mr. KONONENKO: Yes.
Ms. MAZURKEVICH: Can we just get back on the track? You were saying when you were a school teacher in the third grade, you were teaching the children. Then during the famine, the children were slowly not coming to school and coming—they were very listless. Do you want to continue in that vein? What happened to the children? What happened to the neighborhood around? Did you see people dying?
Mr. KONONENKO: Yes. And one thing I’d like to express because it so im¬pressed me. In the Soviet political system, a teacher had to be a helper to political sys¬tem.
Once I remember in that place where I taught in school, they send us by force to the field. They had lunch for the villager, they make hot soup. I remember, it was like in bean beef broth for all. And they gave me Soviet newspapers, I remember in