The saddest sight in the Muscovite city is the place I named the Lane of Tears. It is an alleyway between two rows of permanent stalls on the Sukarefka, where women and men, old and young, almost entirely of the educated classes, with the exception of a few professionals who occasionally compete with them, foregather and sell their personal effects in order to keep body and soul together.
For three months I went to the market daily and never failed to visit the Lane of Tears. I have seen gently nurtured women selling their silken underclothing to the vulgar wives and mistresses of Commissars, who, all unmindful of the feelings of the seller, held up the garments for all to behold amid the ribald laughter and lewd jokes of the soldiers standing near. I have seen a young widow selling an officer’s tunic and strive to gulp down the tears as, with the proceeds, she hurried off to the bread pitch. If I read the story right, that tunic had been dear to her as the last remaining remembrance of the young husband the firing squad had taken from her.
Begs Money for Bread.
One day as I was having my shoes cleaned, a luxury which later I was unable to afford, an elderly lady addressed me in rapid Russian. I did not understand her as she spoke so swiftly and I told her so. She immediately asked me in French, German and English, with hardly a trace of an accent, what language I spoke. She told me in torrential French that she was starving (she looked it), and begged me to give her a little money with which to buy bread. She said all this as if she had learned it by heart and had then had to summon up her courage to say it, as after asking for the money she told me in a faltering voice that she would not have done so but that she had not tasted bread in four days.
I took her to a food stall and insisted on her joining me at an early dinner. The food was rough but good. As we ate I got her to tell me her story. Her eldest son, an officer, had been killed in the war against Germany; her second son and her husband had been shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918, and the crowning blow had fallen only a few months previously, when her only daughter and her husband were executed.
Having sold all her possessions, she was now starving, and, as she told me, had only one wish in the world, to fall asleep one night and never wake up. I gave her what I could. I never saw her in the market again. I have often wondered whether her wish was fulfilled. I trust it was; for that poor lady and thousands like her, death can hold no terrors, only relief from untold suffering.
A lady getting on in years, whom I often met on the Sukarefka, selling her clothing and other little trifles, has, I am glad to learn, arrived back safely in England. She is an English governess who had been in the service of a rich family living in the provinces. She made repeated applications to Rosenberg of the Soviet Foreign Office to be allowed to return to England, which were brutally refused. While the French Red Cross was in Moscow she was fed, but when it was evacuated she found it hard to keep alive. I was unable to help her, as I was desperately close to starvation myself. This lady was living at the English home, where I visited her several times. It was eventually taken over by the Soviet, and the remaining English women were herded four and five in a room, while the Bolshevik inmates lived in comfort in a room apiece.
Brutality of Bolsheviks.
The seizing of St. Andrew’s Home was only an instance of the brutal manner in which the Bolsheviks treated the British and the Americans in Moscow. The action was all the more despicable and cowardly inasmuch as the people living there were for the most part poor governesses, quite destitute of funds.
When Krassin left Moscow I applied to Rosenberg for permission to leave, which was refused on the ground that the frontier was closed. When the frontiers were opened I again asked to be allowed to leave and was put off with the excuse that the frontiers were still closed, although I knew them to be open, as several foreigners had left. It was only when Nuorteva, who came from Marten’s bureau in New York, took over Rosenberg’s job that the Foreign Office put its cards on the table and stated that they refused to honor my safe conduct and that they intended to hold me as a hostage. It took me a month to persuade Nuorteva to allow me to go. Nuorteva, leaving aside natural differences of opinion, behaved like a white man and showed himself both kind and considerate toward all the foreigners and genuinely desirous of helping them so far as the Vetchika would allow him to.