Feeding the Hungry, P. C. Hiebert, 1929

fe to Constantinople. We made an official call on the Governor of the Gubernia, whose attitude was very friendly. Two of his assistants tried to find fault with our plans but when I pointedly spoke of the approval from Kharkow and Mos- cow, the Governor adroitly closed the conversation. We requested transportation into the Mennonite colonies. But a representative of the Nansen organization had ar- rived just ahead of us and was to be taken in the opposite direction. It was considered to be one of the worst famine centers. They requested us to go there and we went. Strangely enough it was Gulai Poli, the home town of the bandit Machno, whose robber army had committed the unspeakable outrages in the Mennonite and other com- munities. Now these bandits were among the first to die in large numbers from hunger. Their former victims 200 FEEDING THE HUNGRY looked upon it as a retribution visited upon them from Heaven. The second day we were taken to Chortitza volost, the Old Colony, where stands the monument commemo- rating the coming of the Mennonite settlers into Russia in 1789. With the consent of the county officials, a meet- ing of the Mennonite leaders was called to organize an A.M.R. committee for the county and for each village. When our feeding plan was explained, the group generally looked hopelessly disappointed. They could not imagine working effectively in this manner: only one meal a day and that to be eaten at a central kitchen, with no food supplies distributed into the homes. I called attention to the food packages for the use of individual families, but they were despondent. One delegate from Lower Chor- titza expressed himself as ready to give up without fur- ther effort for he was hopeless, but a few weeks later he was one of our enthusiastic workers. The courage and quiet determination of our volost chairman Dyck, who had been recommended by Janz, contributed largely to the marked success of the work in Chortitza volost. As we visited the Mennonite villages we were made vividly aware of the terrible conditions. The quiet of death hung over the clustered houses like a pall. Not a dog barking, for the Mennonites had eaten their dogs; their cats too had all been consumed. Here and there a cow or a horse was left. Few had more than one. If a hog or cow or horse starved to death, the carcass was used for food. One man had a piece of cow hide, about four times as large as a hand, which he had just roasted, singeing off the hair, and was about to eat this. For severai days he had had nothing else to eat and this was the last of it. He would have been very thankful for more cow hide to eat. Another had a piece of harness strap that sometime had been greased, and this he had DRAFT ANIMAL OF EASTERN RUSSIA Comic combinations in teams, such as eamel and horse, horse and ox, or camel and mileh cow were frequently seen. DIRECTORS OF MOLOTSCHNA FEEDING OPERATIONS Left to right: K