THE CATASTROPHE 63
capital of the Ukraine lay the corpses of peasants who had died
of hunger. They had arrived by still earlier trains to beg for
food in the town, but were so weak that they fell down dead.
In the industrial towns of the Donetz basin also the houses of
better situated technicians and engineers were besieged by
starving peasants from morning till night. A similar description
is given by a German agricultural expert, who travelled all over
the Soviet Union in 1933. He writes: "Conditions in the pro-
vincial centres of the south are infinitely worse than in the
capitals. When the train arrives one enters the station building.
It is clean, and no one is to be seen but the railway officials and
Ogpu agents. But then one goes into the open air, on to the
station square. The whole square is covered with dead bodies.
Dreadful skeletons lie in the dust on the stones. Some are still
moving, the rest are motionless. If one approaches the latter,
one sees that they are corpses. All victims of the famine. They
fled from their villages to escape the famine, but fell victims to
it in the town."
The same eyewitness then describes in particular the terrible
fate of the children in the famine areas. In one of these accounts
he says: "It was beyond my comprehension. I would not at first
believe my own eyes. Some of the children dragged themselves
to their feet for the last time and gathered their remaining
forces to look for something eatable in the street. But they were
so weak that they fell down and remained lying where they
fell. The poor children were the strongest impression of any
journey. At Kharkov I saw a boy wasted to a skeleton lying in
the middle of the street. A second boy was sitting near a heap
of garbage picking egg-shells out of it. They were looking for
eatable remnants of food or fruit. They perished like wild
beasts. . . . When the famine began to haunt the villages
parents used to take their children into the towns, where they
left them in the hope that someone would have pity on them.
. . . Their lot was better in the towns than in the country
villages, because child murder in the towns is obviously more
difficult than in the country."