In Eastern Europe, in the Ukraine, a people numbering millions of souls has been massacred; intervention to put an end to these massacres demands the urgent attention of the human race and of the League of Nations, its spokesman.
The Committee deems that action in this direction is possible; it is a duty incumbent on civilized peoples.
If the League of Nations makes its voice heard, the first step will have been taken towards putting an end to these massacres. Categoric declarations made by the Governments who will co-operate in this matter will exercise a restraining influence on these acts of destruction.
Since December, 1918, there has been aiiuninterrupt«dseries of pogroms in the Ukraine. Since the beginning of September, 1919, a report of the Red Cross Society at Kieff records that more than 30,000 Jews have been murdered. Since that date the number of murders has increased alarmingly. Jewish representatives, recently arrived from the Ukraine, unanimously declare that the number of Jews massacred far exceeds a hundred thousand. The Committee of Jewish Delegations has in its possession reports on these massacres committed in more than 400 places.
Many of tfie pogroms were specially serious on account of their long duration. The pogroms at Ovroutoh lasted from the 31st December, 1918, to the 16th January, 1919. Those at Vassilkof lasted from l!he 7th to the 15th of April; those at Zlatopol from the 2nd to the 8th of May; those at Tcherkassy from the 16th to the 21st of May; those at Derajna from the 7th to the 17th of June; those at Rovno from the 14th to the 29th of May; those at Lytine from the 14th to the 28th of May; and those at Balta lasted 9 days. In other places massacres have been several times repeated; Radomysl, Tchemiakof, Komip, Volodarka, Elisabetgrad and several other towns were the scenes of massacres of 4, 5 and even 10 days' duration.
Hundreds and thousands of Jews have been wounded, iU treated, savagely beaten. Up to the present more than a milUon Jews have been robbed and many of them have had literally their last shirt taken from them. The most refined tortures have been devised. Old men and children have been cut to pieces. Thousands of women and young girls have been outraged, and among these even little girls and old women. The victims have been terribly mutilated; the right arm and left leg have been cut off, or vice versa, the left arm and right leg; one eye has been torn out and the nose cut off. The houses in which the Jews took refuge were burnt, and aU perished in the flames. The number of cases in Which these unhappy victims were doomed to die a slow death of mdeaonbable torture cannot be counted. Burning was the usual practice.
Besides physical torture, they were subjected to mental torture of a kind for which there is no parallel in history. Jews were compelled to dance and to sing in the presence of their torturers, to mock their own people and to praise their executioners; they had to dig their own graves and to commit shameful acts for the amusement of their murderers. These wretched people were forced to look on at the dishonouring of their ■daughters and of their wives, and children were compelled to hang their fathers.
The moral condition of the Jewish population of the Ukraine is near insanity; the terrible sufferings which all the population of this country is enduring through famine And epidemics, cannot be compared to the hell in which the Ukrainian Jews have been plunged for a year and a half. History has nothing to compare with it. The imagination of the greatest poet could not describe these scenes of horror. Dante's Inferno pales besides the realities of every day life in the Ukraine.
Apart from the Jewish circles, the protests which have been made up to the present in many countries against this state of things have been merely the individual protests raised by eminent persons. And, however highly placed those persons were, they found that they were hopeless in the face of these crimes. It is a matter of urgent importance that the civilized peoples should make themselves heard. To keep silence is to become the £iocomplice of these murderers. The vicissitudes of civil war in Russia have not in any way modified the duty of the League of Nations. Should the Ukraine fall temporarily under the sway of the- Soviets, it must be realized that in the case of new upheavals these pogroms will break out with fresh violence. Tlie blood of these victims is not yet dry, and we see at hand the moment when the crimes of the last two years will be surpassed by new acts of violence.
Firm intervention is urgently called for if three millions of human beings are to.avoid complete annihilation. Is an intervention of this kind possible? Will it succeed?