have half a loaf of bread sitting on the stove, you take that too. Clearly, this was not an attempt to merely procure produce for the state, but very quickly assumed a markedly punitive character on the part of those who carried it out

The school teachers were, I think, the most tragic of all figures in the village at the time of the famine. First of all, one obviously does not become a school teacher out of a desire to exert power, or to get rich, or to be socially mobile. It’s a job that one takes because one wants to teach, one has a real desire to serve those who, particularly children, who want to learn. The mobilization of these individuals to take part in these campaigns, to seize food from the households of their peasants, put these people in an extremely tragic situation which Maria N. in Warren talked to us about in some detail.

One of the most moving testimonies we had from any villager, I think, was that of Palashka Olefirenko, who testified before the Commission in Phoenix, and who described how the leader of a harvesting brigade had refused to give her permission to leave the field at harvest time in 1933 to bury her daughter who had perished from starvation.

When the witness was asked if the leader had been a Russian, she replied after some hesitation that he was a Ukrainian, a man who was well known in the village, and I think it is, perhaps, instructive to note that at the conclusion of the hearing, Mrs. Olefirenko, visibly upset, came up to Dr. Samilenko-Tsvetkov and asked her if she’d done the right thing by telling everyone that the leader of this particular brigade, who had been so cruel to her, had, in fact, been a Ukrainian. And, I think that one of the most devastating, traumatizing things about the famine is that it was not simply out¬siders coming in, but it was often times one’s neighbors, people one had grown up with who were recruited by the state and who took part in seizing food and creating a mass starvation.

Several witnesses who were in the village at the time were actually people who had been brought to the countryside as a result of their professions. Mr. Max Harmash, of Phoenix, worked as a technical director at a state farm in Dnipropetrovsk, and was mo¬bilized by the regional government to supervise the seeding campaign on a collective farm in a distant village.

Shortly after his arrival, Mr. Harmash realized that his plans for the seeding cam¬paign could not be carried out, for there were no workers for him to supervise. They’d all either died out or had fled.

Mr. Harmash feared that he would be severely punished for not having done his job, but this didn’t happen, and he realized that his supervisors had paid no attention to the report he had to send in, simply because they had known all along that the col¬lective farm in this particular area had been decimated by the famine.

Witnesses who lived in the cities of Kiev, Kharkiv, and Odessa during the famine talked predominantly of food shortages experienced by urban dwellers and the hoards of villagers descending on the cities at the famine’s height

A number of witnesses belonged to the privileged few whose social status enabled them to obtain more than enough food than they needed, or who worked for the ad¬ministrative organs that determined food allotments to such people.

Dr. WERES: Excuse me. May I interrupt briefly? I’d like to make a suggestion for consideration of the Commission. The public hearing activity is the part of the Com-