Later in the evening Yossif took me aside. "Sasha," he spoke solemnly, "you see how radically we differ in our estimate of the Makhno movement It is necessary you should learn the situation for yourself." He looked at me significantly.
"I should like to meet Makhno," I said.
His face lit up with joy. "Just as I have hoped," he replied. "Listen, dear friend, I have talked the matter over with Nestor — and, by the way, he is not far from here just now. He wants to see you; you and Emma, he said. Of course, you can't go to him," Yossif smiled at the question he read in my eyes, "but Nestor will arrange to take any place where your Museum car may happen to be on a date agreed upon. To secure you against Bolshevik persecution, he will capture the whole Expedition — you understand, don't you?"
Affectionately placing his arm about me, he drew me aside to explain the details of the plan.
* CHAPTER XXVI PRISON AND CONCENTRATION CAMP A nauseating stench assails us as we enter the compulsory labor camp at Kharkov. The courtyard is filled with men and boys, incredibly emaciated, mere shadows of humans. Their faces yellow and eyes distended, bodies ragged, and barefoot, they forcibly remind me of starving pariahs in famine-stricken India.
"The sewer is being repaired," the official accompanying us explains. Only a few prisoners are at work; the others stand about apathetically, or sprawl on the ground as if too weak for exertion.
"Our worst scourge is disease," the guide remarks. "The men are undernourished and lack resistance. We have no medicine and we are short of physicians."
Some of the prisoners surround our party, apparently taking us for officials. "Tovarishtchi " a young man appeals to us, "when will the Commission decide upon my case?"
"Visitors," the guide informs him laconically.
"We can't live on the pyock. The bread ration has been cut again. No medicine is given out," several complain.
The guards motion them aside.
The large male dormitory is appallingly crowded. The whole floor space is taken up by cots and benches, set so closely together it is difficult for us to pass. The prisoners cluster in the corners; some, naked to the hips, are engaged in picking lice off their garments; others sit listlessly, gazing vacantly about them. The air is foul, suffocating.
From the adjoining female ward come quarreling voices. As we enter a girl cries hysterically: "Don't dare call me a speculator! It's my last things I was selling." She is young and still beautiful, her torn blouse exposing delicate, well-formed shoulders. Her eyes burn feverishly, and she breaks into a hacking cough.
"God may know who you be," a peasant woman retorts. "But just think of me, with three little ones at home." Catching sight of our group, she rises heavily from the bench, stretching her hand out pleadingly: "Dear ones, let me go home. My poor children will die without me."
The women beset us. The rations are bad and insufficient, they declare. Only a quarter of a pound of bread is given them and a plate of thin soup once a day. The doctor does not attend the sick; their complaints are ignored, and the prison commission does not pay any attention to their protests.
A keeper appears in the door. "To your places 1" he shouts angrily. "Don't you know the regulations? Send your petitions in writing to the Commission."
"We've done it, but we get no reply," several women cry.
"Silence 1" the overseer commands...
At the gate of the Cold Hill Prison (Kholodnaya Gorka) we meet an excited crowd, mostly women and girls, each with a little bundle in hand. They are wildly gesticulating and arguing with the guards. They have brought provisions and clothing for their arrested relatives — the custom, known as peredatcha, prevailing throughout the country owing to the inability of the government to supply its prisoners with sufficient food. But the guard declines to accept the offerings. "New orders," he explains: "no more peredatcha."
"For how long?"
PRISON AND CONCENTRATION CAMP 199 "For several weeks."
Consternation and resentment break from the people. The prisoners cannot exist without peredatcha. Why should it be refused? Many of the women have come long distances, even from neighboring towns, to bring some bread and potatoes to husband or brother. Others have deprived themselves of necessaries to procure a little delicacy for a sick friend. And now this terrible order!
The crowd besieges us with pleas. We are accompanied by the woman secretary of a high commissar, herself an official of the Rabkrin, the powerful Department of Inspection, organized to investigate and correct abuses in the other Soviet institutions. She is past middle age, lean and severe looking, with the reputation of being efficient, strict, and heartless. I have heard that she was formerly in the Tcheka, one of its Commandants, as the executioners are called.
Some of the women recognize our guide. From all sides come appeals to intercede, in tones of fear mixed with hope.
"I don't know why peredatcha is refused," she informs them, "but I shall inquire at once."
We enter the prison, and our guide sends for the commissar in charge. A youngish man, gaunt and consumptive-looking, appears. "We have suspended the peredatcha," he explains, "because we are short of help. We have more work just now than we can handle."
"It is a great hardship for the prisoners. Perhaps the matter can be managed," the Secretary suggests.
"Unfortunately it can't," the man retorts coldly. "We work beyond our strength. As for the rations," he continues, "the honest workers outside are no better off."
Noticing our look of disapproval, he adds: "As soon 2oo THE BOLSHEVIK MYTH as we have caught up on our work, we'll permit the peredatcha again."
"How soon might that be?" one of our party inquires.
"In two or three weeks, perhaps."
"A long time to starve."
The Commissar does not reply.
"We all work hard without complaining, tovarishtch," the guide reproves him severely. "I regret I shall have to report the matter."
The prison has remained as it was in the days of the Romanovs; even most of the old keepers still hold their positions. But it is much more crowded now; sanitary arrangements are neglected and medical treatment is almost entirely absent. Yet a certain indefinable new spirit is felt in the atmosphere. The commissar and keepers are informally addressed as tovarishtch, and the prisoners, even the non-politicals, have acquired a freer, more independent manner. But the discipline is severe: the old custom of collective protest is sternly suppressed, and repeatedly the politicals have been driven to the extreme method of selfdefense — a hunger strike.
In the corridors the inmates walk about without guards, but our guide frowns down their attempts to approach us by a curt, "Not officials, tovarishtchi." She seems not quite at ease, and discourages conversation. Some prisoners trail behind us; occasionally a more daring one appeals to have his case looked into. "Send in your petition in writing," the woman admonishes him, whereupon there comes the retort, "I did, long ago, but nothing has been done."
The large cells are crowded, but the doors are open, and the men pass freely in and out. A dark-haired youth, with sharp black eyes, unobservedly joins our party. "I'm in for five years," he whispers to me. "I'm a Communist, and it was revenge on the part of PRISON AND CONCENTRATION CAMP 201 a crooked commissar whom I threatened to expose."
Walking through the corridors I recognize Tchernenko, whose description was given me by Kharkov friends. He was arrested by the Tcheka to prevent being seated in the Soviet, to which he was elected by his fellow workers in the factory. By the help of a friendly soldier he succeeded in escaping from the concentration camp, but was rearrested and sent to the Cold Hill Prison. I slow down my pace, and Tchernenko falls into the rear of our party. "More politicals than common criminals here," he says, pre- ^ tending to speak to the prisoner at his side. "Anarchists, Left Social Revolutionists, and Mensheviki. Treated worse than the others. Only a few Whites and one American from the Koltchak front. Speculators and counter-revolutionists can buy their way out. Proletarians and revolutionists remain."
"The revision commission?" I whisper in an aside.
"A fake. They pay no attention to our petitions."
"What charge against you?"
"None. Neither charge nor trial. The usual sentence — till the end of civil war."
The guide turns into a long, dark passage, and the prisoners fall back. We enter the women's department.
Two rows of cells, one above the other, cleaner and lighter than the male part. The doors stand ajar, the inmates free to walk about. One of our party — Emma Goldman — asks permission to see a political whose name she had secured from friends in the city. The guide hesitates, then consents, and presently a young girl appears. She is neat and comely, with an earnest, sad face.
"Our treatment?" she repeats the question addressed to her. "Why, at first they kept us in solitary. They would not let us communicate with our male comrades, and all our protests were ignored. We had to resort to the methods we used under the old regime."
"Be careful what you say," the guide admonishes her.
"I'm speaking the truth," the prisoner retorts unabashed. "We employed obstruction tactics: we smashed everything in our cells and we defied the keepers. They threatened us with violence, and we all declared a hunger strike. On the seventh day they •consented to leave our doors open. Now we can breathe the corridor air at least."
"That is enough," the guide interrupts.
a hunger strike again," the girl declares as she is led away.
In the death house the cell doors are closed and locked. The occupants are invisible, and an oppressive silence is felt in the living tomb. From somewhere a short, hacking cough strikes upon the ear like ominous croaking. Slow, measured steps resound painfully through the narrow corridor. A foreboding of evri hangs in the air. My mind reverts to a similar experience long buried in the recesses of my memory — the "condemned" gallery of the Pittsburg jail rises before me...The guard accompanying us lifts the lid of the observation "eye" out into the door, and I look into the death-cell. A tall man stands motionless in the corner. His face, framed in a thick black beard, is ashen gray. His eyes are fastened on the circular opening, the expression of terror in them so overwhelming that I involuntarily step back. "Have mercy, tovarishtch," his voice comes as from a grave, "oh, let me live 1" "He appropriated Soviet funds," the woman guide comments unemotionally.
"It was only a small sum," the man pleads. "I'll make it good, I swear it. I am young, let me live 1" The guide shuts the opening.
For days his face haunts me. Never had I seen such start PRISON AND CONCENTRATION CAMP, 203 a look in a human before. Primitive fear stamped upon it in such relief, it communicated itself lingeringly to me. Terror so absolute, it turned the big, powerful man into a single, all-absorbing emotion — the mortal dread of the sudden call to face his executioner.
As I note down these experiences in my Diary, there come to me the words of Zorin. "The death penalty is abolished, our prisons empty," he had said to me soon after my arrival in Russia. It seemed natural, self-evident. Have not revolutionists always opposed such barbarous methods? Was not much of Bolshevik popularity due to their condemnation of Kerensky for restoring capital punishment at the front, in 19 17? My first impressions in Petrograd seemed to bear out Zorin's statement. Once, strolling along the river Moika, there came to my view the big prison demolished at the outbreak of the Revolution, Hardly a stone was left in place — cells, floors, ceilings, all were a mass of debris, the iron doors and steel window bars a heap of twisted junk. There lay what had once been a dreaded dungeon, now eloquent of the people's wrath, blindly destructive, yet wise in its instinctive discrimination. Only part of the outer walls of the building remained; inside everything had been utterly wrecked by the fury of age-long suffering and the leveling hand of dynamite. The sight of the destroyed prison seemed an inspiration, a symbol of the coming day of liberty, prisonless, crimeless. And now, in the Cold Hill death house...CHAPTER XXVII FURTHER SOUTH August y, 1920. — Slowly our train creeps through the country, evidence of devastation on every hand reminding us of the long years of war, revolution, and civil strife. The towns and cities on our route look poverty-stricken, the stores are closed, the streets deserted. By degrees Soviet conditions are being established, the process progressing more* rapidly in some places than in others.
In Poltava we find neither Soviet nor Ispolkom, the usual form of Bolshevik government. Instead, the city is ruled by the more primitive Revkom, the selfappointed revolutionary committee, active underground during White regimes, and taking charge whenever the Red Army occupies a district.
Krementchug and Znamenka present the familiar picture of the small southern town, with the little market place, still suffered by the Bolsheviki, the center of its commercial and social life. In uneven rows the peasant women sprawl on sacks of potatoes, or squat on their haunches, exchanging flour, rice, and beans for tobacco, soap, and salt. Soviet money is scorned, hardly any one accepting it, though tsarskiye are in demand and occasionally kerenki are favored.
The entire older population of the city seems to be in the market, everyone bargaining, selling, or buying. Soviet militsioneri, gun slung across the shoulder, circulate among the people, and here and there a man in leather coat and cap is conspicuous in the crowd — a Communist or a Tchekist. The people seem to shun them, and conversation is subdued in their presence.
FURTHER SOUTH Political questions are avoided, but lamentation over the "terrible situation" is universal, everyone complaining about the insufficiency of the pyock, the irregularity of its issue, and the general condition of starvation and More frequently we meet men and women of Jewish type, the look of the hunted in their eyes, and more dreadful become the stories of pogroms that had taken place in the neighborhood. Few young persons are visible — these are in the Soviet institutions, working as the employees of the government. The young women we meet occasionally have a startled, frightened look, and many men bear ugly scars on their faces, as if from a saber or sword cut.
In Znamenka, Henry Alsberg, the American correspondent accompanying our Expedition, discovers the loss of his purse, containing a considerable amount of foreign money. Inquiries of the peasant women in with the resentful exclamation, "How'd I knowl" Visiting the local police station in the faint hope of advice or aid, we learn that the whole force has just been rushed off to the environs reported to be attacked by a company of Makhnovtsu Despairing of recovering our loss, we return to the railroad station. To our astonishment the Museum car is nowhere to be seen. In consternation we learn that it was coupled to a train that started for Kiev, via Fastov, an hour ago.
We realize the seriousness of our predicament in being stranded in a city without hotels or restaurants, and with no food to be purchased for Soviet money, the only kind in our possession. While discussing the situation we observe a military supply train in slow motion on a distant siding. We dash forward and succeed in boarding it at the cost of a few scratches. The commissar in charge at first strenuously objects misery.
naive smile, to our presence, at no pains to hide the suspicions aroused by our sudden appearance. It requires considerable argument and much demonstration of official documents before the bureaucrat is mollified. Over a cup of tea he begins to thaw out, the primitive hospitions. Before long we are deep in the discussion of the Revolution and current problems. Our host is a Communist "from the masses," as he terms it. He is a great admirer of Trotsky and his "iron broom" methods. Revolution can conquer only by the generous use of the sword, he believes; morality and sentiment are bourgeois superstitions. His conception of Socialism is puerile, his information about the world at large of the scantiest. His arguments echo the familiar editorials of the official press; he is confident the whole of Western Europe is soon to be aflame with revolution. The Red Army is even now before the gates of Warsaw, he asserts, about to enter and to assure the triumph of the Polish proletariat risen against its masters.
Late in the afternoon we reach Fastov, and are warmly welcomed by our colleagues of the Expedition, who had spent anxious hours over our disappearance.
tality of the Russian helpi establish friendly rela- CHAPTER XXVIII August 12, IQ20. — Our little company slowly trudges along the unpaved, dusty road that runs almost in a straight line to the market place in the center of the city. The place seems deserted. The houses stand vacant, most of them windowless, their doors broken in and ajar — an oppressive sight of destruction and desolation. All is silent about us; we feel as in a graveyard. Approaching the market place our group separates, each of us going his own way to learn for himself.
A woman passes by, hesitates, and stops. She pushes the kerchief back from her forehead, and looks at me with wonderment in her sad old eyes.
"Good morning," I address her in Jewish.
"You are a stranger here," she says kindly. "You don't look like our folks."
"Yes," I reply, "I am not long from America."
"Ah, from Amerikeh," she sighs wistfully. "I have a son there. And do you know what is happening to us?"
"Not very much, but I'd like to find out."
"Oh, only the good God knows what we have gone through." Her voice breaks. "Excuse me, I can't help it" — she wipes the tears off her wrinkled face. "They killed my husband before my eyes...I had to look on, helpless...I can't talk about it..." She stands dejectedly before me, bent more by grief than age, like a symbol of abject tragedy.
Recovering a little, she says: "Come with me, if you want to learn. Come to Reb Moishe, he can tell you everything."
ao8 THE BOLSHEVIK MYTH We are in the market. A double row of open stalls, no more than a dozen in all, dilapidated and forlornlooking, almost barren of wares. A handful of largegrained, coarse salt, some loaves of black bread thickly dotted with yellow • specks of straw, a little loose tobacco — that is all the stock on hand. Almost no money is passing in payment. The few customers are trading by exchange: about ten pounds of bread for a pound of salt, a few pipefuls of tobacco for an onion. At the counters stand oldish men and women, a few girls among them. I see no young men. These, like most of the able-bodied men and women, I am informed, had stealthily left the town long ago, for fear of more pogroms. They went on foot, some to Kiev, others to Kharkov, in the hope of finding safety and a livelihood in the larger city. Most of them never reached their destination. Food was scarce — they had gone without provisions, and most of them died on the way from exposure and starvation.
The old traders surround me. "Khaye," they whisper to the old woman, "who is this?"
"From Amerikeh," she replies, a ray of hopefulness in her voice; "to learn about the pogroms. We are going to Reb Moishe."
"From Amerikeh? Amerikeh?" Amazement, bewilderment is in their tones. "Did he come so far to find us? Will they help us? Oh, good God in Heaven, may it be true I" Several voices speak at once, all astir with the suppressed excitement of sudden hope, of renewed faith. More people crowd about us; business has stopped. I notice similar groups surrounding my friends nearby.
"Shah, shah, good people," my guide admonishes them; "not everybody at once. We are going to see Reb Moishe; he'll tell him everything."
"Oh, one minute, just one minute, respected man," a pale young woman desperately clutches me by the arm.
"My husband is there, in Amerikeh. Do you know him? Rabinovitch — Yankel Rabinovitch. He is well known there; surely you must have heard of him. How is he, tell me, please." "In what city is he?"
"In Nai-York, but I haven't had any letter from him since the war."
"My son-in-law Khayim is in Amerikeh," a woman, her hair all white, interrupts; "maybe you saw him, what?" She is very old and bent, and evidently hard of hearing. She places her hand back of her ear to catch my reply, while her wizened, lemon-like face is turned up to me in anxious expectation.
"Where is your son-in-law?"
"What does he say? I don't understand," she wails.
The bystanders shout in her ear: "He asks where Khayim, your son-in-law, is?"
"In Amerikeh, in Amerikeh," she replies.
"In Amerikeh," a man near me repeats.
"America is a big country. In what city is Khayim?" I inquire.
She looks bewildered, then stammers: "I don't know — I don't recollect just now — I " "Bobeh (grandmother), you have his letter at home," a small boy shouts in her ear. "He wrote you before the fighting started, don't you remember?"
"Yes, yes! Will you wait, gutinkcr (good one)?" the old woman begs. "I'm going right away to fetch the letter. Maybe you know my Khayim."
She moves heavily away. The others ply me with questions about their relatives, friends, brothers, husbands. Almost everyone of them has someone in that far-off America, which is like a fabled land to these simple folk — the land of promise, peace, and wealth, the happy place from which but few return.
"Maybe you will take a letter to my husband?" a pale young woman asks. All at once a dozen persons 2IO Begin to clamor for permission to write and send their letters through me to their beloved ones, "there in Amerikeh." I promise to take their mail, and the crowd slowly melts away, with a pleading admonition to wait for them. "Only a few words — we'll be right "Let us go to Reb Moishe," my guide reminds me. "They know," she adds, with a wave at the others, "they'll bring their letters there."
As we start on our way a tall man with jet-black beard and burning eyes detains me. "Be so good, one minute." He speaks quietly, but with a strong effort to restrain his emotion. "I have no one in America," he says; "I have no one anywhere. You see this house?" There is a nervous tremor in his voice, but he steadies himself. "There, across the way, with the broken windows, paper-covered, pasted over. My old young brothers were killed there. Cut to pieces with sabers. The old man had his peiess (pious earlocks) cut off, together with his ears, and his belly ripped open...I ran away with my daughter, to save her. Look, there she is, at the third stall on the right." His eyes stream with tears as he points towards a girl standing a few feet away. She is about fifteen, oval faced, with delicate features, pale and fragile as a lily, and with most peculiar eyes. She is looking straight before her, while her hands are mechanically cutting chunks of bread from the big round loaf. There is the same dreadful expression in her eyes that I have recently seen for the first time in the faces of very young girls in pogromed cities. A look of wild terror frozen into a stare that grips at my heart. Yet, not realizing the truth, I whisper to her father, "Blind?"
"No, not blind;" he cries out. "Wish to God — no, much worse. She has been looking like that ever since the night when I ran away from our house with her.
back.
memory, and my two It was a fearful night. Like wild beasts they cut and slashed and raved. I hid with my Rosele in the cellar, but we were not safe there, so we ran to the woods nearby. They caught us on the way. They took her from me and left me for dead. Look — " He takes off his hat and I see a long sword cut, only partly healed, scarring the side of his head. "They left me for dead," he repeats. "When the murderers had gone, three days later, she was found in the field and she has been like that...with that look in her eyes...she hasn't talked since...Oh, my God, why dost Thou punish me so?"
"Dear Reb Sholem, do not blaspheme," my woman guide admonishes him. "Are you the only one to suffer? You know my great loss. We all share the same fate. It has always been the fate of us Jews. We know not the ways of God, blessed be His holy name. But let us go to Reb Moishe," she says, turning to me.
Behind the counter of what was once a grocery store stands Reb Moishe. He is a middle-aged Hebrew, with an intelligent face that now bears only the memory of a kindly smile. An old resident of the town and elder in the synagogue, he knows every inhabitant and the whole history of the place. He had been one of the well-to-do men of the city, and even now he cannot resist the temptation of hospitality, so traditional with his race. Involuntarily his eyes wander to the shelves entirely bare save for a few empty bottles. The room is dingy and out of repair; the wall paper hangs down in cracked sheets, exposing the plaster, yellow with moisture. On the counter are some loaves of black bread, straw dotted, and a small tray with green onions. Reb Moishe bends over, produces a bottle of soda from under the counter, and offers the treasure to me, with a smile of benign welcome. A look of consternation spreads over the face of his wife, who sits darning silently in the corner, as Reb Moishe shamefacedly declines the proferred payment. "No, no, I cannot do it," he says with simple dignity, but I know it as the height of sacrifice.
Learning the purpose of my visit to Fastov, Reb Moishe invites me to the street. "Come with me," he says; "I'll show you what they did to us. Though there is not much for the eyes" — he looks at me with searching gaze — "only those who lived through it can understand, and maybe" — he pauses a moment — "maybe also those who really feel with us in our great bereavement."
We step out of the store. Across is a large vacant space, its center littered with old boards and broken bricks. "That was our schoolhouse," Reb Moishe comments. "This is all that's left of it. That house on your left, with the shutters closed, it was Zalman's, our school-teacher's. They killed six there — father, mother, and four children. We found them all with their heads broken by the butts of guns. There, around the corner, the whole street — you see, every house pogromed. We have many such streets."
After a while he continues: "In this house, with the green roof, the whole family was wiped out — nine persons. The murderers set fire to it, too — you can see through the broken doors — the inside is all burned and charred. Who did it?" he repeats my question in a tone of hopelessness. "Better ask who did not? Petlura came first, then Denikin, and then the Poles, and just bands of every kind; may the black years know them. There were many of them, and it was always the same curse. We suffered from all of them, every time the town changed hands. But Denikin was the worst of all, worse even than the Poles, who hate us so. The last time the Denikins were here the pogrom lasted four days. Oh, God!"
He suddenly halts, throwing up his hands. "Oh, you Americans, you who live in safety, do you know what it means, four days! Four long, terrible days, and still more terrible nights, four days and four nights and no let-up in the butchery. The cries, the shrieks, those piercing shrieks of women seeing their babies torn limb from limb before their very eyes...I hear them now...It freezes my blood with horror...It drives me mad...Those sights...The bloody mass of flesh that was once my own child, my lovely Mirele...She was only five years old." He breaks down. Leaning against the wall, his body shakes with sobs.
Soon he recovers himself. "Here we are in the center of the worst pogromed part," he continues. "Forgive my weakness; I can't speak of it with dry eyes...There is the synagogue. We Jews sought safety in it. The Commander told us to. His name? May evil be as strange to me as his dark name. One of Denikin's generals; the Commander, that's what he was called. His men were mad with blood lust when there was nothing more to rob. You know, the soldiers and peasants think there is gold to be found in every Jewish home. This was once a prosperous city, but the rich men that did business with us lived in Kiev and Kharkov. The Jews here were just making a living, with a few of them comfortably off. Well, the many pogroms long ago robbed them of all they had, ruined their business, and despoiled their homes. Still, they lived somehow. You know how it is with the Jew — he is used to mistreatment, he tries to make the best of it. But Denikin's soldiers — oh, it was Gehenna let loose. They went wild when they found nothing to take, and they destroyed what they didn't want. That was the first two days. But with the third began the killing, mostly with swords and bayonets. On the third day the Commander ordered us to take refuge in the synagogue. He promised us safety, and we brought our wives and children there. They put a guard at the door, to protect us, the Commander said. It was a trap. At night the soldiers came; all the hooligans of the town were with them, too. They came and demanded our gold. They would not believe we had none. They searched the Holy Scrolls, they tore them and trampled upon them. Some of us could not look quietly on that awful desecration. We protested. And then began the butchery. The horror, oh, the horror of it...The women beaten, assaulted, the men cut down with sabers...Some of us broke through the guard at the door, and we ran into the streets. Like hounds of hell, they followed us, slashing, killing, and hunting us from house to house. For days afterwards the streets were littered with the killed and maimed. They would not let us approach our dead. They would not permit us to bury them or to help the wounded who were groaning in their misery, begging for death...Not a glass of water could we give them...They shot anyone coming near...The famished dogs of the whole neighborhood came; they smelt prey. I saw them tear off limbs from the dead, from the helpless wounded...They fed on the living...on our brothers..."
He broke down again. "The dogs fed on them...fed on them..." he repeats amid sobs.
Someone approaches us. It is the doctor who had ministered to the sick and wounded after the last pogrom was over. He looks the typical Russian of the intelligentsia, the stamp of the idealist and student engraved upon him. He walks with a heavy limp, and. his quick eye catches my unvoiced question. "A memento of those days," he says, attempting a smile. "It troubles me a good deal and handicaps my work considerably," he adds. "There are many sick people and I am on my feet all day. There are no conveyances — they took away all the horses and cattle. I am just on my way now to poor Fanya, one of my hopeless patients. No, no, good man, it's no use your visiting her," he waives aside my request to accompany him. "It is like many others here; a terrible but common case. She was a nurse, taking care of a paralytic young girl. They occupied a room on the second floor of.a house nearby. On the first floor soldiers were quartered. When the pogrom began the soldiers kept the paralytic and her nurse prisoners. What happened there no one will ever know...When the soldiers had at last gone we had to use a ladder to get to the girls' room. The brutes had covered the stairs with human excrement — it was impossible to approach. When we got to the two girls, the paralytic was dead in the arms of the nurse, and the latter a raving maniac. No, no; it's no use your seeing her."
"Doctor," says Reb Moishe, "why don't you tell our American friend how you got crippled? He should hear everything."
"Oh, that is not important, Reb Moishe. We have so many worse things." Upon my insisting, he continues: "Well, it is not a long story. I was shot as I approached a wounded man lying in the street. It was dark, and as I was passing by I heard someone moan. I had just stepped off the sidewalk when I was shot. It was the night of the synagogue pogrom. But my mishap, man — it's nothing when you think of the nightmare in the warehouse."
"The warehouse?" I asked. "What happened there?"
"The worst you can imagine," the doctor replies. '"Those scenes no human power can describe. It wasn't murder there — only a few were killed in the warehouse. It was the women, the girls, even children...When the soldiers pogromed the synagogue, many of the women succeeded in gaining the street. As if by some instinct they collected afterwards 2l6 in the warehouse — a big outhouse that had not been used for many years. Where else were the women to go? It was too dangerous at home; the mob was searching for the men who had escaped from the