fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, sisters and children, were making the graves and weeping, they were insulted, scoffed at and mocked in every way by the insurrectionists. Under threat of violence the women were forbidden to weep. A company of insurrectionists passing the cemetery began to sing jovial songs as they saw the Jews burying their dead.*
At every step one met the greatest moral corruption, the most refined torture, the evidence of sadistic inclinations. The murderers were lost to all human feeling. Bloodthirsty animals were at work. This atmosphere of corruption took hold of the young people and children also. The district agent of the relief committee makes the following report:
On the pth of June a peasant brought to the Jewish hospital the two last Jews of Ladyzhenka (before the pogrom there were 1,600 Jews in that town). They were two young girls, frightfully mutilated, one with her nose broken off, the other with broken hands. They are now in Kiev, suffering not only from external injuries but also from venereal diseases contracted from their violaters.
In Rotmistrovka a father and a son were shot in a house. The father was hanged later, and all this took place before the eyes of the mother and wife. The mother begged to be killed also. But the bandits refused, and as she kept on screaming aloud they drove her out of the house. In the same place when the bandits had taken everything out of a certain house, they put the whole family of four persons against the wall (the father, 65 years old, the mother of the same age, the son, 30, and the daughter 28). They began
* See Appendix, pp. 310 ff.
with the daughter so as to take revenge on the parents. All were killed except the son, who as if by a miracle remained alive.
In Slovechno the fiends stuck a four year old child on a bayonet and killed it. In Rotmistrovka a woman (the wife of the local Rabbi) fled with her children from the city. On the way she injured her foot. Her fourteen year old son, seeing his mother bleeding, asked some peasants to help her. One of them consented to take them to the neighboring village. He then took a pick and killed the mother. The two children of fourteen and five years respectively he wounded with the same pick. In the same town there was an old woman, a grandmother, her daughter and five grandchildren (the oldest child was seven years, the youngest six months old), who were looking for a place to hide. On the way they were all put to death. The children of three and one-and-a-half years had their heads split. The youngest of six months was left to itself and died of hunger the next day.*
In Uman five Jews were killed in the fields. One of these, an old man with a white beard, was not killed at once, but met his death in a long agony and great torture. This attracted the attention of Christian children, who gathered around him and threw stones at him, thus hastening his death. Not far from there the bandits murdered a Jew, who fell down dead. He was then lifted up, tied to a tree and made a target at which the fiends kept shooting a long time.
At the same time a mother, crazed with despair, killed her own child. In Rotmistrovka a mother fled with her children to the woods, thinking that there she
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
UKRAINE
had found a hiding place. When she heard shooting she was seized by the fear that the cries of her elevenmonths child might betray her and choked it with her own hands.
There were at the same time also examples of most noble humanity, cases of self-sacrifice, of covering one's neigbhor with one's own breast. Cases are known in which persons were glad to accompany others out of this tearful valley of life and sorrow. It happened several times in Cherkassy that Christian servant girls put themselves in front of their masters to protect them. One of these was actually killed together with her mistress.
In Uman a woman tried to protect her husband and her father with her own body, and received a bullet in the breast. The woman was in an advanced stage of pregnancy and on the following day gave birth to a boy, so that there were three dead bodies lying on the floor of the house, among them that of the husband and the father. In the same place a young pregnant woman tried to protect her husband and was killed by a bullet. The heroic death of the beautiful young woman affected even the murderer. In many houses which he visited later he said regretfully, "Ah, we killed a Jewess in the Kahan house; how she looked at me before she died — I shall never, never forget the eyes of that Jewess." *