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and the administration of the province, as well as by a deputation of the Jewish community. The representatives of the latter were Krasny, now minister for Jewish affairs in the Petlura government, and the wellknown Fania Nurenberg, active in public affairs. The purpose of my journey, as well as Krasny's and Fania Nurenberg's, was to receive the money appropriated by the Ukrainian Government, at the request of Revutzky, the minister for Jewish affairs, for the relief of the population of Zhitomir and Berdichev who had suffered from the pogroms.
On the second and third days after our arrival in Vinnitza, we, i.e., the representatives of Zhitomir and Berdichev, were asked by Revutzky to call on him at his hotel apartment with Kovenko, the commandant of the city of Vinnitza and the leader of the Clans of Death (who had instituted the pogroms in Zhitomir and Berdichev), in order to establish the responsibility for the pogroms.
The thought of a meeting with Kovenko, the former president of the Investigation Commission and the murderer of Gogol, the president of the Jewish Kriegerbund (union of soldiers) — a fact which Chekhovski, the Minister of the Interior, had also alluded to in a conversation with the delegation of the Socialistic parties received by him — the thought of meeting with this Kovenko appeared to us, to say the least, frightful. On the following day, as we were having dinner at the restaurant of the Hotel Savoy, Revutzky summoned us to come at once to his room, where they were expecting us. In spite of everything we all, for one reason or another, went, Madame Nurenberg, Krasny and myself. We found there Kovenko, three leaders of the Clans of Death and a Hetman, who, as we learned later, was the Ataman Pashchenko himself. Paschenko was the Ataman of the Clans of Death who himself instituted the pogroms in Berdichev and Zhitomir, had exacted large sums of money from rich Jews in Zhitomir, and whose staff, living at the railway station, had murdered seventeen Jews and among them old men. His guilt was so firmly established that the Ukrainian government had to arrest him, and Sumkevich, the Commissar of the Government of Volhynia, had to declare that Pashchenko, who was without question responsible for everything, would be severely punished.
The fact that Pashchenko was free in the Savoy Hotel, where the ministers of the Ukrainian Government were staying; that after the meeting he went for dinner to the restaurant where the members of the Directory were taking their meals, made the entire meeting useless. Among other things Novikov, a member of the Zhitomir city administration, recognized in the officer on duty at the building in which the Directory was located, the leader who was responsible for the most horrible episode during the whole Zhitomir. pogrom, which took place on Theatre Street, when all the men of the Weinstein house were brought out, and some shot, while the rest were undressed, and while being led to the railway station were beaten to death on the way with sabres and the butt ends of guns.
The meeting was opened by Revutzky with a speech in which he said that the charge that the government had instituted the pogroms reflected on him also as a member of the Government, and that he therefore desired that the question should be settled at this meeting, which was participated in by representatives of the
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Clans of Death as well as of Zhitomir and Berdichev.
One of the leaders from Galich, who was not in Zhitomir at the time of the pogrom, but had been sent there by Kovenko to establish the circumstances of the pogrom and the responsibility therefor, declared that the pogrom was instituted mainly by Jews, that it had begun before the Clans of Death had arrived, and that Pashchenko had not enough forces at his disposal to check the pogrom. We all protested against this shameless declaration. I called attention to the fact that in Kiev there was a letter of a certain Hodman who had been beaten by soldiers of the Clans of Death in Fastov. He wrote in the letter that he had heard from soldiers that Clans of Death had gone to Zhitomir to institute Jewish pogroms. The letter arrived in Kiev on the day before the pogrom broke out in Zhitomir. I also called their attention to the fact that the Investigating Commission in Zhitomir had in their possession a note signed by Pashchenko and addressed to the well-known bandits Bek and Dimitrienko, in which they were ordered to appropriate the money in the Azov bank which belonged to the rich Jew, Rabin. I also asked Pashchenko how, if it was true that the only reason the pogroms continued was that he had not enough forces at his disposal to stop them, he could explain the fact that at the station, where he himself had been with his staff, seventeen Jews had been killed, among them some very old men.