Since commissar Taranovich had long been weary of his duties and had been asking to retire, which he had not been permitted to do because of the lack of a suitable substitute, the public officials, and particularly the Jews, besought Verkhola to assume the duties of commissar. The latter consented, and he and Taranovich together called up the commissar of the government (gubernia) on direct wire. This official knew Verkhola well from his previous service, and gladly consented to substitute him for Taranovich. Telegraphic orders were immediately issued naming Verkhola commissar, which, incidentally, was extremely displeasing to Semosenko and Kiverchuk. As soon as he took up the reins of office, Verkhola issued two proclamations, in which he indicated that "any appeal to national hatred, and particularly to pogroms, is a disgrace to Ukraine and a hindrance to her regeneration." Such appeals were always weapons for the reactionaries. Every hostile manifestation on the part of a more powerful nation against a weaker shows that that nation cannot assume those forms which are based on equality and fraternity. Such behavior only helped the enemies of Ukraine, and he expressed the hope that the population would not yield to such provocation. He demanded that all agitators inciting to pogroms should be arrested and handed over to a field court-martial, (v. III.) In the other proclamation he demanded that all stolen property be brought to the commissariat to be returned to its owners.
As already stated, it was intended to repeat on Sunday the massacre of Saturday. Three Gaidamaks' who appeared Sunday morning at the city headquarters, among other things, declared, in the presence of Verkhola, that they were granted permission to keep killing the Jews for three days. But after the Sunday session of the city council, Semosenko really did
UKRAINE
see to terminating the slaughter, and it was not repeated again in mass proportions. But the murders of individual Jews, as already stated, were repeated on Sunday and Monday. These murders were numerous.
By Semosenko's directions the victims of Saturday's massacre were to be buried on Monday. Thus the bodies remained in the houses or lay about the streets from Saturday till Monday. Many of the bodies were gnawed by swine.
On Monday, beginning early, numerous peasant's carts, with bodies heaped up on them, started for the Hebrew cemetery. Bodies kept arriving throughout the day and filled the whole cemetery. According to the testimony of the witness, Finkel (pp. 1-4), he himself, while in the cemetery, counted more than a thousand corpses. Hired peasants dug in the cemetery a ditch of enormous proportions, which was to become the common grave of the victims of the massacre. In the cemetery, as reported by the same Finkel, there appeared marauders, who, under various pretexts, approached the bodies, handled them over, and robbed them. There also appeared relatives of the slain, who sought out their corpses and took out of their pockets valuables, in many cases very considerable ones; but very many of the corpses proved to have been previously robbed. Women were found with fingers, on which there had evidently been rings, cut off their hands. The inspector, Dobrovolsky, had charge of the burials. He had orders that not a single body should remain unburied by night. However, they did not succeed in burying all the bodies until four o'clock Tuesday morning. It should be added that besides the common grave four smaller graves were dug and many buried in them. Some Jews succeeded in burying their relatives in separate graves.
As already stated, individual murders of Jews continued also on the following days, both in Proskurov and the vicinity. Many were killed on the road to neighboring places, in the fields, and woods, and nearby villages and hamlets. Besides those Jews who were killed by the Gaidamak horde that was turned loose, the authorities themselves arrested many Jews on the pretext that they were bolshevists, and afterwards shot them. In this regard Kiverchuk's assistant, Kovalevsky, especially distinguished himself — a son of a local householder, a very corrupt and cruel young man. (See testimony of Sarah Hellman, pp. 13-15.)
Extremely interesting in this connection is the testimony of the witness Tzatzkis, who, with ten others, was condemned to be shot, but escaped by a sort of miracle. This Tzatzkis, who
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