David Katharas: What a Jewish Pogrom Means

From the historical archives, a reminder of the thin line between barbarity and civilisation, and that civilisation cannot be taken for granted. (The image at left is of still-breathing victims of the Kiev pogrom of 1919; the pogrom described below seemingly occurred in 1885, and the author briefly mentions one that took place in 1905.)

This article was printed in The Australian Worker, 16 August 1933; it was entitled 'What a Jewish Pogrom Means'.

For centuries the Jews have been persecuted. But have you ever realised the terror of a pogrom? This description of anti-Jewish riots by David Katharas refers to pre-war Russia, but it might easily be Germany to-day.

This story may help Christians to realise the. horror with which world Jewry has heard of the outbreak of anti-Semitism in Germany, and the depth of feeling behind the protests of our people against the Nazi attacks on the Jews.

I am a trader in the City of London, but Russia is the country of my birth.

I am one of many thousands of Jews in this country and America who have lived through the terror of persecution in Eastern Europe, and who know what anti-Semitism can mean at the hands of the more brutal of the European peoples.

My mind goes back to a spring evening in the town of Kiev in South Russia [Ukraine].

There are five of us huddled in a corner of a back room — my parents, my two young sisters and myself. We children are clutching my father's arms, too terrified to speak or even to weep. 

There is a rumble in the distance which grows louder every minute until, we hearthe howls and curses of a mob of people. They are in our own street It is filled with yelling fiends.

My father creeps oyer to the window, lean see his face now against the light, his eyes wide open and his features petrified. I crept over beside him.

'It is Mordecai Wienarski's baby . . . Mordecai Wienarski's baby,' he kept repeating. 

The mob is dancing in frenzy and shrieking maledictions on the Jews. They are surging against Mordecai Wienarski's house, and some men are leaning out of the upper windows. They are shouting, 'He has hidden his gold! He has hidden his gold!'

Among the crowd there is a squad of Cossacks. One of them points to the ground, and laughs. The Cossacks make no move to disperse the crowd. My father suddenly realises that I am beside him and pushes me back to the corner. There we remain, the five of us clinging to each other, weeping with terror.

The din outside gradually dies. As darkness comes down the sky is lit with flames. We can hear the crackling of fires nearby. We remain closer together in our corner. We dare not flee. They are burning houses nearby.

For weeks after that night in May we children never left the house. There was a reign of terror for the Jews of Kiev. For a few days there would be peace, and then a drunken mob would storm the house of a Jew. That would be the signal for a renewed outbreak of murder and pillage.

We had come from Odessa only a month before. I remember what high hopes I had. Some Russian boys had spat on me in Odessa, and Kiev was a sort of Mecca, for I had been told that nearly all the people in the town were Jews. Actually there were about 20,000 out of a population of 140,000.

It was years later, after we had gone to live in Moscow, that my father told me the full story of those riots in Kiev.

He was an eye-witness of many of the terrible events. The. ostensible cause of the pogroms was the assassination of the Czar Alexander. The Russian Government was having trouble with its own people, and it wanted a scapegoat. As with Hitler now, it blamed the Jews.

The attacks on the Jews were organised. Stories were spread about that the Government had ordered the property of the Jews to be handed over to the Russians, and ignorant people believed that they had a right to take all we had.

The day of which I have spoken was the Christian Sabbath. A mob of the lowest elements in the town had broken into the dram shops and looted the vodka.

Frenzied with drink, they set out to seize their 'rightful property' from the Jews.

At the house of Mordecai Wienarski they found nothing to plunder. He was a poor man. Enraged, they seized his child of three and threw it out of the window.

The Cossacks, who were supposed to preserve law, and order, did nothing to restrain the mob. Elsewhere they joined in the orgy.

Many Jewesses were attacked on the same day, some of them mere children.

There was Rosje Feldman, whom we knew. She was thirteen. Several brutes attacked her, while others held her hands and feet. She died a month later.

Another girl of fourteen met the same fate. One married woman was stripped and maltreated. She was kicked while unconscious.

On the Monday all was quiet, but on the Tuesday morning the news spread round the terrified Jewish community that the houses of Christians in Kiev were being marked with crosses. We waited for the worst, and it happened.

The mob was more murderous than ever.

A Jewish wine shop was broken into, and after drinking themselves mad, the fiends cut the throats of the proprietor's wife and six children. My father saw the bodies next day in the cellar.

In another part of the town, a widow of fifty who was trying to save her daughter from dishonor was herself attacked. 

Mrs. Leah Chajet was one woman whose house was entered by a dozen raving madmen. They struck her on the head with a hammer. A fortnight later she gave birth to a child.

The child lived. She died.

Even worse things were happening in some of the smaller towns.

At one place while the Jews were at the synagogue, all the Jewesses were attacked. The younger were ill-treated, three dying as a result. The older were driven into the river, many of them dying later of exposure.

When the Jews heard that their women were in danger, they rushed out of the synagogue to attempt a rescue.

Several were stoned to death.

In other villages Jewish houses were burned down. One mother was forced to look on while her two children were roasted alive. In the same village a mother was ill-treated and then burnedto death in the house. Her little girl lay crouching in a ditch watching the home go up in flames.

Meanwhile the village innkeeper, a Jew, had been cooped in one of his own barrels and thrown into tlie river.

These things did not happen in the Middle Ages! I am only sixty now, and they are within by own memory. Many of my relatives were victims.

As I said, we went to Moscow soon afterwards. Tlie terror broke out there again as late as 1905. I was married by this time and had two young children.

The authorities were faced with a revolution, and again they blamed the Jews.

My part of the town was in danger, and I fled with my family in the dead of night in a closed coach. We took refuge in the house of a friend, a professor, who lived near the university. After an hour or two, news came that the mob was making for the university.

We moved off again for the house of another friend. Our coach came right into the mob, on the embankment of the Moskva River. We had to move slowly, and I was able to see them throw a man into the river, which had then a thin coating of ice.

Every time his head appeared, the soldiers fired at him and the mob threw stones. I learned afterwards that he was not a Jew; but a Gentile student.

That happened' in 1905, and the South Russian terror only twenty years earlier.

Human nature does not change in a generation. And we Jews do not forget that the pogroms started in East Prussia be fore they spread to Russia. That is why the name of Hitler is a nightmare to all Jewry.

Crippled Zelda, "The Pogrom Girl"

I was busy in the newspaper archives yesterday, and noticed by chance the following article, headed "The Pogrom Girl," in three New South Wales rural newspapers starting with the Quirindi Herald and District News, 18 October 1907. It was reproduced from a column written by Gertrude Landa (Aunt Naomi) in the London Daily News. 

Concerning a Russian Jewish refugee in Edwardian London, it reads like a short story but is a factual article.  I think it's worth posting, for the record. (Of course, "the Lane" mentioned in the article is the famous Petticoat Lane, in Whitechapel. pictured left.)

Little Zelda rides daily in her carriage now, and is extremely happy. Some people feel very sorry for her when they see her drive past daily, and say, "Poor little thing." 

Zelda's large shining eyes do look sorrowful and there is even a touch of sorrow in the sweet smile with which she answers all the glances directed at her.

Zelda is a cripple, and the carriage in which she rides is the omnibus which calls for her and for others afflicted as she is, and takes them all to school. 

A bright, clean, and cheerful lady, in a nurse's costume, sits with them, and altogether they feel very happy; and in their prayers they do not forget the kind and generous people who have devised these and other things for their comforrt.

When I first saw Zelda lifted out of the omnibus one day, I cried. One foot is strangely twisted. She cannot put it to the ground, and, even with a crutch she walks with very great difficulty.

I asked her how she came to be so afflicted, and the poor little girl's face went white and she trembled. She looked so frightened that I was sorry I had asked the question. She cried also
when 1 kissed her.

"Everybody in this wonderful land is so kind," she said. " I think this must be Heaven mentioned in our prayers."

It was so strange a remark for a girl only ten years old to make that I was really anxious to hear her story. And when I got to know Zelda better she told me it of her own accord, in quaint, broken English.

Zelda is a pogrom girl. She was one of the victims of a pogrom in a fearful Russian town, where Jews have been set upon and massacred.

"Oh! it was a horrible time," she told me."My father – peace be on him – he was a teacher of Hebrew – he came running into the house one day and cried, 'In God's name, hide ! Hide in the cellar!"

"That was not easy. Mother was in bed. We had a new baby – peace be on him – and mother could not move. We would not go  nto the cellar without her.  There was my eldest brother, Yankel,
nearly a man, a brave boy. He got the big wood-chopper and stood near the door.

'This for the first pogromchik who comes in here,' he said fiercely; but my father said, 'No, no." My mother cried bitterly. Only my older sister, Sorra, she whose betrothed went away to fight for the Czar in Manchuria [during the Russo-Japanese Wat, 1904-5 – D.A.], she was calm.

She took me into the cellar. Then we heard a great noise and screaming and scuffling. 

What happened I cannot tell you. Ask me not. The pogromchik found us; they dragged us up the steps into the room whore mother lay. Father was not there. Yankel was not there. Only mother, was there!

She was moanlng, oh, so pitifully. The baby,the little blue-eyed Moses, only two weeks old, he was not crying. He was covered with a white tablecloth, which was red – yes. with blood."

I wanted Zelda to cease telling me her story.

But she said, "No; let me finish. There was somebody else dead in the room, a great big, ugly man, one of the pogromchlks. It was horrible to look at him. Near him was the big wooden chopper, and 1 know it was my brother, Yankel, who had killed the man. I began to cry. I was only a little girl. I had never seen such things before.

Sorra had no tears. She never cried after she heard that her betrothed was wounded in the war. We sat down on the floor and mother looked at us as if strange. She kept asking for the baby.

Then there was a great noise in the street. Sorra got up to bar the door,but it was broken. 

The pogromchiks came back. We stood by the bed to guard mother.  Sorra picked up the big
wood-chopper, but it fell from her hand,and she gave a terrible scream. I screamed as well. The men had some thing on a board. They threw it on the floor .

'This is yours,' they said, and they laughed in a way that made me feel cold. Then they went away. 

The thing on the board was once our father."

Again Zelda interrupted her story with an outburst of tears, and I said I did not wish to hear the rest;

"I had two straight legs then," she.went on as if she did not hear me. "When I saw my dear father dead, my father who loved me so, my father who taught me the beautiful prayers and told me the wonderful stories from the Bible and from the Talmud, I felt like Yankel must have felt when he picked up the big wood-chopper. It was there on the floor, with blood on it. 

I looked at it, and I could see nothing but the blood. I picked it up. I ran to the door. I threw it with all my might at the men. It hit the man who had said, 'This Is yours.' It hit him on the head.It did not kill him. 

Blood came from his face, but he picked up the chopper, and  – and, you can see I the mark on mv leg yet.  It is all twisted. Oh, It did hurt! It burnt like fire, and I fell across my father's body.  I thought I was going to die too."

****

The rest of the story I heard from others.

Zelda, with her foot in bandages, and her mother and sister, left home one night – the same night that their father and the baby were buried. Her mother and sister are working here, and they
live on a nice, clean little tenement not far from "the Lane." 

They are going to America soon. Sorra's young man escaped from Manchuria to British Columbia, and he is now in Cincinnati, working hard and making money for his future wife. They have heard from the brave Yankel, too. He was sent to Siberia, but he is hopeful of escaping and reaching America.

"Yankel always keeps his word, mother says," Zelda told me. "If he says he will escape from Siberia, we know he will. He sent us word with a man who escaped. They could not escape, together, or they would have been found out."

Zelda told me one thing more.

"I am collecting pennies and halfpennies for the Cripples' Fund. I have put all my halfpennies in a box. I do so want to leave something for the fund before I go to America. I shall so sorry to miss my beautiful carriage."

(I wonder whether she and Yankel did in fact settle there.)