The White Terror and The Red Part 44

"He wants to get us in trouble, the sly fox that he is," somebody remarked.

"Sure, he does. And it was by the Jews he was hired to come here. I know what I am talking about," growled the man who had spoken first. "Down with him, boys!"

"Down with him!" the others echoed, thirstily.

Orlovsky was pulled off and the group of belated rioters, re-enforced by some others, rushed at the cask savagely.

Pavel was in another section of the same street. An old little Jewess whom he saw run out of a gate struck him as the most pathetic figure he had seen that day. Her fright gave her pinched little face something like a pout, an air of childlike resentment, as it were. A Gentile boy s.n.a.t.c.hed off her wig and held it up, jeering to some bystanders, whereupon she covered her gray head with her bony hands, her faith forbidding her to expose her hair, and ran on with the same childlike pout. A sob of pity caught Pavel in the throat. He was about to offer to take her to a place of safety, when an elderly rowdy, apparently provoked by her outlandish anxiety about her bare hair, struck her a vicious blow on the head, accompanying it with profanity.

"Cur!" Pavel shrieked, springing up to him and landing a smart whack in his face.

The rioter looked round with surprise, muttered something and joined the looters.

"Come with me, don't be afraid of the scoundrels," Pavel said, taking her by the hand. His heart was melting with pity for all the Jews at this moment. He felt a rush of yearning tenderness for Clara, and he wished she could see him taking care of this woman of her race.

When he saw two marauders hand out gold and silver watches--the spoils of a raid--to the patrol, his blood was up again.

"Is that what you are here for, thieves, vermin that you are?" he shouted.

"Who is that fellow? Run him in!" somebody said.

He fought desperately, cursing the authorities and calling to the mob to turn upon the soldiers, but he was overpowered and carried away half dead. When his ident.i.ty was discovered at Police Headquarters, it caused a panic among the officials of the place. He was reverently placed in a carriage and taken to the Palace.

The Defence Guard gave the rioters fight in two places, and a desperate encounter it was, but it was not to last long. Troops fell upon them, beat them with the b.u.t.ts of their rifles and hurled execrations at them for violating the police ordinance. Every Jew who was armed and every Jew who looked educated, Elkin among them, was arrested. The others were driven indoors. Vladimir was brought to police headquarters unconscious, with blood gushing from his head.

When the first stack of bedding was pitched out on the sidewalk at Nicholas Street, from a residence over a tobacco shop, a man with watery eyes and a beautiful Great-Russian beard, one of the leaders, selected a big, plump, tempting feather-bed, and opened his pocket-knife with dignified deliberation. A crowd of about one thousand stood about in breathless silence, as though attending a religious ceremony of great solemnity. In order to prolong the spell, the man with the golden beard played with the feather-bed awhile, kneading, patting, punching it, brandishing his knife over it, like a barbaric high priest performing some mystic rite over a captive about to be sacrificed. Then, grasping it with sudden ferocity, his teeth a-glitter amid his enormous whiskers, his watery eyes flashing murder, he cut a quick, long gash, rent the pillow-case apart and hurled its snow-white entrails to the breeze.

"Hurrah! Hurrah!" the mob yelled savagely, as the breeze seized the down and flung it in a thousand directions. "Hurrah! Hurrah!"

The other feather-beds and pillows were ripped up, disemboweled and emptied by some of the other rioters. The summer-baked street seemed to be in the grasp of a snow-storm.

It is one of the characteristics of the housewife of the Ghetto that she will put up with a poor meal rather than with an uncomfortable bed. The destruction of pillows and featherbeds is therefore the most typical scene of anti-Semitic riots in Russia. An Anglo-Saxon crowd viewing a prize-fight is not thrilled more deeply at sight of "first-blood" than were the rioters of Miroslav at sight of the first cloud of Jewish down.

Now the outbreak was in full swing. Some of the men came out in fashionable clothes, their pockets bulging with plunder. The same work of devastation and pillage was going on in many places at once. About ten thousand raiders, most of them covered with down, were skirmishing about in groups of fifty to one hundred, preceded by one or two leaders and accompanied, in some cases, with a band of toy-drums and whistles.

They went from street to street reconnoitering for houses or shops that had not yet been visited. Now it looked like a real anti-Jewish riot.

Hurrah! Hurrah!

After the pillows came the furniture and other household goods, every bit of it either shivered to flinders or carried off. While some were busy smashing things or throwing them out of the windows, others were stripping off their own clothes and arraying themselves in the best coats, trousers, dresses, bonnets, the raided houses contained. A frowzy drunken scrub-woman emerged in a gorgeous ball dress, a costly fur cap on her head, with two gold watches dangling from her neck. One of these gangs was led by a man who wore a woman's jacket of brown plush and a high hat. Another leader was decked out in a fashionable summer suit and a new straw hat, but his feet were bare and encrusted with dirt. A third gang was preceded by a flag consisting of the torn skirt of an outraged Jewish woman, the flag-bearer celebrating the exploit as he marched along.

Following the looters were dense crowds of spectators, many of them well dressed and with the stamp of education and refinement on their faces.

These included some well known families, members of the aristocracy, who watched the scenes of the day from their fashionable equipages.

Officials, merchants, people of the middle cla.s.s were out in their best clothes. Miroslav made a great gala day of it. The aristocracy was in a complacent, race-track mood. Occupants of carriages were exchanging greetings and pleasantries. Cavaliers were interpreting to their ladies the bedlam of sound, odour and colour. The appearance of a drunken jade in a ball dress, strutting with her arms akimbo, in besotted imitation of a lady, brought forth bursts of facetious applause. The well-dressed spectators tried to steer clear of down and feathers, but that was almost impossible. Many streets were so thickly covered with it that it deadened the sound of traffic. But then to catch some of the Jewish down on one's dress or bonnet or coat was part of the carnival. Where the street was strewn with jewelry, silverware or knicknacks, costly carpets, fabrics, many a n.o.blewoman scanned the ground with the haze of temptation in her eye. "Isn't that cameo perfectly lovely!" And in many, many instances the cameo, or the silver tray, or the piece of tapestry found its way into the lady's carriage. This was during the early stage of the riot. Later on, when all restraint had been cast off, phaetons with crests on their sides were filled with plunder. The lame princess took home one carriage-load and hurried back for more. At every turn one saw a cavalier offering his lady some piece of finery as he might a rose or a carnation, and in most cases it was accepted, on the cogent ground that if left on the pavement it would be destroyed. On the other hand many of the rioters themselves disdained to appropriate anything that was not theirs. Very often when a Jew offered his a.s.sailants all the money he had about him as a ransom the paper money was torn to pieces and silver or coppers was flung out into the street, whereupon the crowd outside would fall over each other in a wild scramble for shreds of the paper or the metal. In one place a man offered the mob all he had in the world as a ransom for his daughter's honour, but his money was destroyed, his daughter a.s.saulted and he himself mortally wounded. When a peasant woman was seen carrying an armful of linen and ribbons out of a small shop, she was stopped by one of the rioters.

"Drop that, you old hag," he shouted. "We are no robbers, are we?" He added a torrent of unprintable Russian and kicked the woman into a swamp of syrup, whisky and flour. A short distance from this spot other peasant women were stuffing their sacks l.u.s.tily, whereupon some of them preferred loud linen to black silk and cheap spoons to silver ones. In several places large sums of money were plundered. As the bank and check system was (and still is) in its very infancy in Miroslav, this meant in most cases that people of means were literally reduced to beggary. One family was saved from personal violence as well as from the loss of its fortune by an iron safe which the looters spent the whole day in vainly trying to open. But then, while they were at work on the safe, the mother of the family went insane with fright.

Marching side by side with the leaders of the various bands were the compet.i.tors of Jewish tradesmen or mechanics who acted as guides, each pointing out the stores or workshops of his rivals. Thus Rasgadayeff, after instructing his wife and servants to see to it that no harm was done to his tenants, the Vigdoroffs, had gone to the scene of the outbreak, where he directed a crowd of rowdies to the store of his most formidable business opponent. The place was raided. A wealth of costly furs was cut to pieces and flung into the street, where cans of kerosene and pails of tar were emptied over the pile, while more than half as much again was carried off intact.

"Boys, no stealing," Rasgadayeff said, in a drunken gibberish, when it was too late. All he could save from the marauders for the slashers was a sable m.u.f.f over which two women rioters were fighting desperately.

In the meantime Rasgadayeff's tenants and the people who sought shelter in their house,--the family of Clara's sister and the two or three strangers--had had a narrow escape from coming face to face with an infuriated band of hoodlums. Their presence had been indicated by a Gentile woman across the street. Mme. Rasgadayeff had tearfully begged the rioters to desist and after some parleying it had been agreed that the Vigdoroffs and their guests should be allowed to escape to their landlord's apartments before the mob invaded their rooms. From an attic window commanding the street Vladimir's parents then saw their household effects and their celebrated library--the acc.u.mulations of thirty years--flung out on the pavement where it was hacked, torn, slashed, trampled upon, flooded with water, mixed with a stream of preserves, brine, kerosene, vinegar, until the contents of eight rooms and cellar, all that for the past thirty years had been their home, were turned into two mounds of pulp. The Vigdoroffs watched it all with a peculiar sense of remoteness, with a sort of lethargic indifference. When old Vigdoroff saw the rioters struggling with the locked drawer of his desk, he remarked to his wife:

"Idiots! Why don't they knock out the bottom?" When one of the mob hurt his fingers trying to rend an old parchment-bound folio, he emitted a mock sigh, quoting the Yiddish proverb: "Too much hurry brings nothing but evil." Only when Clara's little niece began to shake and cry in a paroxysm of childish anguish, upon seeing her doll in the hands of a little girl from across the street, did the whole family burst into tears.

"I'm going to kill them. Let them kill me!" the old man said, leaping to his feet. But his wife and daughters hung to him, and held him back.

Later on, when the rioters had gone, the family returned to their nest.

The eight rooms were absolutely empty, as though their occupants had moved out.

Gradually the various bands of rioters got into the swing of their work and did it with the system and method of an established trade. First the pavement was torn up, the cobblestones being piled up and then crashed into the windows; the padlocks were then knocked off by means of crowbars, hammers or axes and the doors battered down or broken in. Next the contents of pillows were cast to the wind, after which, the street having thus received its baptism of Jewish down, the real business of the rioters was begun by the wreckers and the looters. If the shop raided was a clothier's and the freebooters had not yet prinked themselves they would do so to begin with, some of them returning to the streets in two pairs of trousers, two coats and even two hats. After a house or a shop had been gutted and its contents wrecked or plundered it would be left to children who would then proceed to play riot on its ruins. Here and there a committee followed in the wake of some band, ascertaining whether some Jewish dwelling or shop had not been pa.s.sed over, or whether a roll of woollen or a piece of furniture had not been left undestroyed. Not a chair, not a pound of candles was allowed to remain unshattered. Kerosene was poured over sugar, honey was mixed with varnish, ink or milk. It was hard, slow work, this slashing and rending, smashing and grinding. Some raiders toiled over a single article till they panted for breath. A common sight was a man or a woman tearing at a piece of stuff with broken finger-nails and bleeding fingers, accompanying their efforts with volleys of profanity at the expense of the Jews whose wares seemed as hard to destroy as their owners. In one place the mob was blaspheming demoniacally because a heap of ground pepper from a wrecked grocery store had thrown them into a convulsion of sneezing.

The most hideous delirium of brutality was visited upon Paradise,--upon that district of narrow streets and lanes in the vicinity of Cuc.u.mber Market which was the seat of the hardest toil and the blackest need, the home of the poorest mechanics, labourers and tradesmen. As though enraged by the dearth of things worth destroying, the rioters in this section took it out of the Jews in the most b.e.s.t.i.a.l forms of cruelty and fiendishness their besotted minds could invent. The debris here was made up of the cheapest articles of furniture and mechanics' tools. It was here that several Jewish women were dragged out into the street and victimised, while drunken women and children aided their husbands and fathers in their crimes. One woman was caught running through a gale of feathers and down, her child clasped in her arms. Another woman was chuckling aloud in a fit of insanity, as she pa.s.sed through the district in a cab, when she was pulled off the vehicle. A good-looking girl tried to elude the rioters by disguising herself as a man, but she was recognised and the only thing that saved her was a savage fight among her a.s.sailants. A middle-aged woman came out of a house with shrieks of horror, imploring an intoxicated army officer to go to the rescue of her daughter. The officer followed her indoors, but instead of rescuing the younger woman the only thing that saved her own honour was his drunken condition. One woman who broke away from two invaders and was about to jump out of her window, was driven back at the point of the bayonet by one of the soldiers in front of the house.

"We are under orders not to allow any Jews to get out," he explained to her, good-naturedly.

"Take pity, oh, do take pity," she was pleading, when her voice was choked off by somebody within.

Every synagogue in town was sacked, the holy ark in many cases being desecrated in the most revolting manner; while the Scrolls of the Law were everywhere cut to ribbons, some of which were wound around cats and dogs. One woman met her awful fate upon scrolls from the Old Synagogue at the hands of a ruffian who had once heard it said that that was the way t.i.tus, the Roman emperor, desecrated the Temple upon taking Jerusalem. Two strong Jews who risked their lives in an attempt to rescue some of the scrolls were seen running through the streets, their precious and rather heavy burden hugged to their hearts. The mob gave chase.

"'Hear, O Israel!'" one of the two men shrieked, "'G.o.d is G.o.d. G.o.d is one.'"

But the verse, which will keep evil spirits at a respectful distance from every Jew who utters it, failed to exercise its powers on the rioters. The two men were overtaken and beaten black and blue and the scrolls were cut to pieces.

A white-haired musician, venturing out of his hiding place, begged the mob to spare his violin which he said was older than he; whereupon the instrument was shattered against the old man's head. On another street in the same section of the city another Jewish fiddler was made to play while his tormentors danced, and when they had finished he had to break the violin with his own hands. Pillows were wrenched from under invalids to be ripped up and thrown into the street. In one tailoring shop a consumptive old man, too feeble to be moved, was found with a bottle of milk in his trembling hands, his only food until his children should find it safe to crawl back to the house.

"You have drunk enough of our milk, you scabby Christ-killer!" yelled a rioter as he knocked the bottle out of the tailor's hand and hit his head with a flat-iron.

Little Market in front of Boyko's Court, the home of Clara's father and mother, glistened with puddles of vodka, in which cats and dogs, overcome by the alcoholic evaporations, lay dead or half-dead. Now and then a drunken rioter would crouch before one of these puddles, dip up a handful of the muddy stuff with his hands and gulp it thirstily, with an inebriate smile of apology to the bystanders. The corner of a lane nearby was piled with bra.s.s dust and with broken candle-stick moulds. A horse trough in the rear of the police booth was full of yolks and egg-sh.e.l.ls. When the goose market next door to Boyko's Court was raided some of the fowls were stabbed or had their necks wrung on the spot, while others were driven into the vodka ponds on the square. A hundred geese and ducks went splashing through the intoxicating liquid, fluttering and cackling. A number of rioters formed a cordon preventing them from waddling out and then fell to stabbing them with knives and pitchforks, till every pool of vodka was red.

"Jewish geese, curse them! Jewish geese, curse them!" they snarled.

Not very far off, hard by a wall, a Jewish woman was giving birth to a child. Presently a Gentile woman with a basket half filled with loot took pity on the child and took it home, giving the policeman her address, while the mother was left bleeding to death.

It was also in this district of toil and squalor where the most desperate fighting was done by the Jews. One lane was held by five of them against a mob of fifty for more than half an hour until the five men were lugged off to jail, and then the remaining inhabitants of the lane became the victims of the most atrocious vengeance in the history of the day. A mother defended a garret against a crowd of rioters by brandishing a heavy crowbar in front of them. The maddened Gentiles then scaled the wall and charged the roof with axes and sledge-hammers. Part of the roof gave way. The woman continued to swing the crowbar until she fell in a swoon.

The houses of the richest Jews were closely guarded by the soldiery and, barring one exception, rioters were kept at a safe distance from them.

Even the house of Ginsburg, the most repugnant usurer in town, was taken care of. Some army officers, indeed, directed various bands of roughs to the place on the chance of having their promissory notes destroyed, but the roughs failed to get near it. There was an instinct in official circles that the wrecking of wealthy Jewish homes was apt to develop in the ma.s.ses a taste for playing havoc with "seats of the mighty." For after all a man like Ginsburg and a t.i.tled plunderer of peasant lands are not without their bonds of affinity. The great point was that in dealing with Jewish magnates Popular Fury was liable to confuse the Jew with the magnate, the question of race with the question of cla.s.s.

As to the Gentile magnates their att.i.tude toward the rioters was one which seemed to say: "You fellows and we are brothers, are we not?" And their mansions were safe. Members of the gentry openly joined the rioters, some out of sheer hatred of the race, others for the sport of the thing, still others honestly succ.u.mbing to the contagion of beastliness. In the horrid saturnalia of pillage, destruction and rapine many a peaceful citizen was drawn into the vortex. A man stands looking on curiously, perhaps even with some horror, and gradually he becomes restless as do the legs of a dancer when the floor creaks under a medley of sliding feet. But then there was a large number of Gentiles who acted like human beings. Among these were members of the priesthood, although there were holy "little fathers" who pointed out the houses of their Jewish neighbours to the mob.

The best friend of the Jews during that day of horrors was Vodka. The sons of Israel were made a safety valve of by the government and Vodka rendered a similar service to the sons of Israel. It saved scores of lives and the honour of scores of women. Hundreds of the fiercest rioters were so many tottering wrecks before the atrocities were three hours old, while by sundown the number of dead and wounded looters was as large as the number of murdered and maimed Jews. Two men were found drowned in casks of spirits into which they had apparently let their heads sink in a daze of intoxication. A handsome young rioter in a crimson blouse staggered over the bal.u.s.trade of a balcony, hugging a Jewish vase, and was killed on the spot. One man was killed in a struggle over a Jewish woman and several others had simply drunk themselves to death, while a countless number were bruised and disabled in the general melee, falling, fighting, injuring themselves with their own weapons of destruction.

Toward evening some of the streets had the appearance of a battlefield after action. Hundreds of men and women, swollen, bleeding, were wallowing in the gutters, in puddles, on the sidewalks, between piles of debris, in a revolting stupor of inebriety. Some of them slept several hours in this condition and then struggled to their feet to resume drinking. The trained rioters had thoughtfully seen to it that some casks of vodka, as also some accordions, should be reserved for the closing scenes of the baccha.n.a.lia.