Creeping along and pulling my friend with me, I got into the corner of a room and hid myself behind a barrel. In the short distance which I covered as I crept, I came upon severed hands and other parts of the human body, which I thrust away from me in horror. After an hour, which seemed to me a whole eternity, I heard calling, "Whoever is alive come out!" But I was afraid to utter a sound. After listening, however, more carefully I heard the lamentations of our women and mothers in the Jewish language and understood that the bandits must have gone away. It was in fact the peasants of our place who had come out of sympathy to carry us out. With great difficulty I took my friend on my back, came out to the exit and gave a sign of life. They pulled us out and took us into the fresh air. I was saved, I know not how. I was saved by a miracle. My friend died. My nephew who was seized along with me was, as was proved later, tortured and slaughtered in the most brutal fashion. I remember as I was being taken to the Staff, the executioners said to me that I would be at once cut down with the saber. I began to beg them and said it would be better if they would shoot me. Thereupon they answered, "It can't be done, we have been ordered to cut down with the saber." With these words they picked up a hand lying near, showed it to me and said, "You see, it is a pity to use a bullet." After these words, I received the blows on the head and the hand.
BEN YANKELEVICH TSUKERNIK. July 9, 1919.
V. T ( F PODOLIA)
Report of B. Sandier, President of the Temporary Soviet of Trostianetz
In my home town, Trostianetz, unhappy and ruined forevermore, there was a belief among the people that on account of a blessing it once received from a saint there would never be pogroms or bloodshed there. The people were convinced of the truth of the legend, especially during the last months when the bands of Petlura in their retreat swept away and destroyed everything, and yet comparatively spared our town and confined themselves to a partial pogrom and the destruction of
UKRAINE
property. Some time passed. The population began to recover from the injuries and losses caused by the bandits. Again they thought of the good saint who with invisible eyes was protecting the welfare of the town. Life in the town flowed along normally and peacefully, when the Soviet power established its rule and the political department appointed a military-revolutionary committee, to which our town sent one of its representatives. Then came the ninth of May, and one of the greatest tragedies in the world was enacted in our town, which led to an unsparing extermination of almost the entire male population at the hands of the insurrectionary bands.
When I begin to describe the bloody events of which I was an eye-witness from beginning to end, a shudder takes hold of me. It is too much for me to bear, for wherever I look I see the same thing — blood, blood. From whatever side you approach the tragedy, from whatever angle you consider it, it appears frightful and gruesome both in regard to the acts of the fiendish intellectuals of the place, the insults and tortures which they inflicted upon their victims, and in regard to the organization and extension of the districts in which the persecutions took place, the diabolical thirst for blood exhibited by the mob and the secrecy of the plan which was hatched long before this unhappy day and was carried out obstinately to the minutest detail. Yes, it is too terrible to describe all this. I feel as if I were beginning to kill people myself. But it can not be helped. I shall have to carry my memories with me to the end. We, eye-witnesses, who saw those streams of blood; who heard the groans of the martyrs; the weeping and wailing of hundreds of widows and orphans, of brothers and sisters and children;
who for eight days heard the terrible tolling of bells in all church towers; who saw the pogromists, executioners with pitchforks, spades, axes, pickaxes — we who saw and heard all this, are marked men, men departed from life.