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 letup 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.
