There is a hall, which is a combination storeroom and entrance. From there one goes into the kitchen, a white plaster room, with a brick oven and hearth for the cooking. That fireplace and oven is raised about four feet above the floor, and in this the bread is baked, the flat brown cakes of Ukrainian bread, which are very good.

Next to this is the communal room, with its dining table and its decorations on the wall. This is the parlor, and it has the paper flowers, the holy pictures, and the photographs of the dead. And on the walls are the decorations of the soldiers who have come from this family. The walls are white, and there are shutters on the windows to be closed against the winter cold.

Opening off this room are one or two bedrooms, depending on the size of the family. And since these people lost everything, the bedding is whatever they can get now. Pieces of rug, and sheepskin, anything to keep them warm. The Ukrainians are a clean people, and their houses are immaculate.

Part of our misinformation had been that on the collective farms the people lived in barracks. This was not true. Each family had its house and a garden and an orchard where there were flowers, and where there were large vegetable patches and beehives. And most of these gardens were about an acre in extent. Since the Germans had destroyed all the fruit trees, new trees were being planted, apple, and pear, and cherry.

We went first to the new town council house, where we were greeted by the manager, who had lost an arm in the fighting, and his bookkeeper, who had just been demobilized from the Army and was still in his uniform, and three elderly men of the farm council. We told them that we knew how busy they were during the harvest, but that we wanted to see part of the harvest ourselves.

They told us how it had been before, and how it was now. When the Germans came, this farm had had seven hundred horned cattle, and now there were only two hundred animals of all kinds. They had had two large gasoline engines, two trucks, three tractors, and two threshing machines. And now they had one small gasoline engine and one small threshing machine. They had no local tractor. In the plowing they drew one from the tractor station near by. They had had forty horses, and now they had four.

The town had lost fifty men of fighting age and fifty others, of all ages, and there were great numbers of crippled and maimed. Some of the children were legless and some had lost eyes. But the town, which needed labor so dreadfully, tried to give every man work to do that he could do. All the cripples who could work at all were put to work, and it gave them a sense of importance and a place in the life of the farm, so that there were few neurotics among the hurt people.