68 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
from a third quarter, the German colonists in the south of the
Soviet Union. The famine gripped their villages and settle-
ments like the rest. Hundreds of letters from these German
settlements have been collected by the "Brethren in Distress"
Committee; heart-rending documents, some of which have
been published in the pamphlet Hungerpredigt (Eckardt,
Berlin). Some of these German settlements affected by the
famine are on the Black Sea, close to the frontier of Bessarabia
(now part of Roumania). The frontier is formed by the Dniester
—a river reddened with blood. During the past few years it
has been the scene of tragedy after tragedy—the killing of
refugees from the Soviet Union, shot down before they could
reach the farther bank. But many succeeded in reaching the
Roumanian bank. The state of things across the Dniester is,
therefore, thoroughly appreciated in Bessarabia. A letter from
a German colonist on the Russian side to his relatives living in
Bessarabia was published at the end of I933.1 He wrote: "All
those dreadful swollen figures. . . . They die at the street
corners and often lie there a long time. At night cartloads of
naked bodies are taken from the hospitals and thrown into
common graves; a few days later the same grave is filled up.
Our friends went into the hospital the other day. Their friend,
a schoolmaster, had received a letter from the hospital on the
24th to say that his mother had died on the 2ist. He had not
been allowed to visit her while alive, but now he was sent to
the mortuary with his friends and told to pick out his mother.
They entered two rooms with locked doors; on the stone floor
there were many dirty and naked corpses. Like skeletons,
nothing but skin and bones, flung down in different positions,
just as they had died. Our woman friend had a hysterical
attack. The schoolmaster's mother was not to be found, so
she was in the common grave already. Another schoolmaster
succeeded in getting his dead sister out of the common grave.
1 In the Deutsche Zeitung fUr Bessarabien, the organ of the local German
minority at Tarutino.