Part 17

The moment of my arrival in Korosten happened to coincide with a new wave., with a new stage in the civil war here in this region. Under the influence of reverses on the front, and on account of the drafting, outbreaks against the "commune" and the "Jews" began in many villages and hamlets. Unexpectedly for the small groups of Jewish families living in the surrounding villages and hamlets (three, four, or five families in a place), armed peasants began to appear, assemblies were called, uprisings were organized against the Soviet regime; and, as a necessary ritual of such uprisings, plundering and murder of individual Jews. The inhabitants of these scattered localities,, which none of us knew anything about, fled 'to their capital of Korosten, leaving their property exposed to plunder at the hands of the local peasants; or they even abandoned their families and fled pellmell wherever they happened to be able to go. All these tiny places, such as Shershni, Tulchinki, Dobrini, etc., with their two or three [Jewish] families (see pages 1-6 the report), experienced the same things as were experienced in Zhitomir, Ovruch, and Proskurov, where we know and all the world knows what happened. The whole horror of their position consisted in the doomed situation in which they found themselves. Bandits hunted them down, "for their lives," as Matiashko, the head of the bands operating hereabouts, said. The victims of these outbreaks were people who were not in the least to blame for anything— old-time and aged inhabitants of the villages, who hated the "commune" as much as those who killed them in the name of the struggle against this "commune." Into these localities an investigating agent will never penetrate; they will never be recorded in the pages of a report. All these uprisings against the regime and the Jews occurred under the banner of Sokolovsky, whose detachments operated in the region near Zhitomir. In many places there was no direct connection with Sokolovsky*s detachments, but the peasants, thinking that at present they had to give themselves some name or other, decided to call themselves his followers. There were places where the peasants, although they rose against the Soviet regime, nevertheless distinguished themselves from Sokolovsky; in such places there were neither murders of Jews, nor even robberies. In certain places a new trait may be noted in the relations of the insurgent peasants to the Jews. Thus, in the town of Ushomir (about which see below), near Korosten, the rebel peasants did not touch any of the Jews. Fifteen of the rebels appeared in the town early one morning, summoned all the Jews into the synagogue, and there announced to them, that they had come not to destroy the