In Trostianetz two young girls (the daughters of Beerman) hung on their father's neck and begged to be killed together with him. Father and daughters were tortured and killed in the most brutal manner. The same fate befell the two daughters of Mogilev,
*See Appendix, pp. 314-315.
who did not want to survive their father (testimony of Sandier).* All descriptions of cruelty in the world's) literature pale into insignificance before the horrors of the Jewish tragedy. This tragedy knows no shades, no high lights. All is equally horrible and frightful., V.. Terrible is the birth of a son from a wounded mother in a room where the father and the grandfather lie lifeless on the floor. Terrible is the plight of the son, who, seeing the torture and death of all his relatives, loses his reason. Horrible is the case of the mother who chokes her own child in order to save the others. Out of the enormous material collected by investigators of the Ukrainian tragedy, in which every line reports Jewish grief, where Jewish blood trickles from every paragraph, we will present only a few sketches and incidents, the testimony of eye witnesses who by a miracle escaped from hell where, however, they had to leave their friends and relatives. Whoever has seen these tragic witnesses, who knew how to tell of the horrors they endured, with epic dignity, without coloring and exaggeration; whoever has seen their sunken, earth-colored faces, their eyes filled with insane sorrow and despair, having no desire for revenge or life — must, like Lazarus in the gospel, lose the power to laugh; he must wander with a poisoned soul through the world, without finding a resting place.
Involuntarily one thinks of the words of the poet:
"Ye Clouds, if behind you in the depths of the blue the ancient God still lives on his throne though invisible to me — I ask you, pray for me and my bloody fate! I have no more prayer in my breast nor strength in
* See Appendix, pp. 396 ff.
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
my hands, nor hope How long, how long, how long!"
(H. BIALIK, on the massacres.)
Following are a few episodes selected almost at random. For in this tragedy everything is typical. There are no exceptions. Every incident is an example of what hundreds of unfortunate towns and villages in the Ukraine had to undergo. They are all illustrations, essentially similar to each other and monotonous like the groaning and the weeping and the corpses and the graves. All is one great cry of the lie of life, and the shameless cruelty of man, who desires to gain power at such a price.
I. BROWNINGS IN THE DNIEPER. a. Steamer "Baron Gunsburg."
Testimony of Shifra Shklovskaya, 40 years old, Widow, Shopkeeper. Only Survivor.