THE CATASTROPHE 83
Hotel Metropole and enjoyed all the advantages and blessings
of this Bolshevik luxury establishment, the chief of them being
the possibility of having a hot bath, and was enabled to appre-
ciate the vast difference between the life of the privileged classes
at Moscow and the conditions in the famine zone of the south.
Almost simultaneously this account was confirmed from
another quarter, by two Polish airmen, the brothers Adamo-
vitch, American citizens, who were the first to fly across the
Atlantic to Poland and were received there with enthusiasm in
the summer of 1934. Later they were the guests of the Soviet
Government at Moscow, and thanks to this were able to get
permission to visit their sister in their native village in the
Ukraine.1
"When we arrived in our car at our native village," they
wrote, "we found it completely changed. The trees had been
uprooted, the cottages and yards were in a state of ruin. We
looked in vain for our parents' cottage, where our sister was
living, and could not find it. At last the peasants had to show
us what had been our parents' farm. In the cottages we saw a
wretched, pitiable figure, whose body was covered with nothing
but a ragged old sack. With the help of our neighbours we
recognized in this figure our sister. She looked many years
older, and the terrible sufferings which she appeared to be
undergoing had so distorted her face that even her own brothers
could not recognize her. When we asked her about our father
and mother, she told us that our mother had died of starvation
because she could not adapt herself to the diet of the other
inhabitants, who lived chiefly on herbs. . . . Our sister's
pitiful appearance, and her strange, macabre story, took our
breath away. Two-thirds of the inhabitants have died of
hunger in the village, and those who are left are more like
corpses than living people. They live without hope, know no
pleasure, and do not know how to smile. A few asked us when
the war would begin; war—salvation! We said we would like
1 Their account was published by America^ the organ of the Catholic
frnigrls from the Ukraine, and was reprinted in Dtlo of October 31* 1934.