I see you shake your head. Fiction! Fiction! Then read the letter sent by a young man and a young woman who worked at a "Home" in New York. The letter was printed in "Our Health" of January, 1913. The Institution did not even offer an excuse. Deny, it could not.
"The patients are mistreated, beaten, kicked, insulted," runs the letter. It has two signatures, the man's and the woman's. If this be not true, why did not the Montefiore Home sue the calumniators? But it is true. They keep quiet. They are afraid of revelations. Some old man or old woman might take his last days into his own hands and come out with the truth.
Another old man was punished by the attendant with two days' fast. He sat at the table but was forbidden to eat. The cause of the punishment was that the old man had soiled the tablecloth.
When visitors come the lawn is shown, the clean kitchen, the beautiful dining room, the spacious rooms. Nothing of the inhuman treatment to which the inmates are subject comes to light. The gross insults: "Beggar, schnorrer, pauper, liar," are not heard then.
One "Home" is under the same roof with an orphan house. Upstairs the children, downstairs the old people, as though it were a prophecy: "Here you start, there you finish."
The callousness of this shows the sentiment of the people supporting the institutions. An old woman, while peeling potatoes, remarked: "All they miss is a dressmaking shop between the floors and a cemetery in the yard and their whole life would stretch before them."
"BISMARCK"
Amongst the people in the Home were two chums of olden days. Moise Hertz and "Bismarck." They knew one another from childhood, were born in the same village in Russia, had gone to the same school (cheder) and were both, later on, with their wives and children, driven from home. Once across the border they drifted apart. Moise Hertz with his family went to Germany and "Bismarck" with his wife and children went to England. Both men were tailors. Moise Hertz's two sons returned to Russia during the revolution. One was hanged; the other is in Sachalin (Siberia). His wife died in New York.