Dalkey, June 9th, 1903.
The hideous realities of the actual outrages committed during the two days’ inferno of murder and outrage surpass in the naked horror of their details almost anything which the imagination could invent. I hate to return to further reference to these deeds. It has become a horrible and repugnant subject, but I convince myself that some good will come of it in tending to keep alive the sympathy of the American people in the future of the victims who escaped with life, but also with broken hearts and the outlook of a dismal future.
Meyer Weissman had a very small store in one of the poorest Jewish quarters of the city. He had lost an eye, by an accident, when young. The mob attacked and demolished his little grocery on Easter Sunday. He offered them all the money in his possession to spare his life. It was a sum of sixty roubles. The leader took the money, and then said: “Now, we want your eye; you will never again look upon a Christian child.” He implored them to kill him instead of making him blind for life. They gouged out his eye with a sharpened stick, and left him. Amidst sobs and suffering he told me his story in the Jewish Hospital.
Near the bed of poor blind Meyer Weissman was that of Joseph Shainovitch, whose head had been battered with bludgeons, and the victim left for dead. He told me that it was this same gang who killed his mother-in-law, by driving nails through her eyes into the brain. This story I refused to believe, thinking it might be born of some horrible nightmare following the poor fellow’s terrible experience. But from no less than six different sources, one of them being a Christian doctor, I learned that the facts were as stated by Joseph. Among the other witnesses were the men who dug the unfortunate woman’s grave.
In the female ward of the same hospital there were still upwards of a dozen girls and married women, when I visited the place, whose injuries were too serious to allow of their discharge. I heard their stories: at least those which could in part be related to a man.
One of the girls, aged about seventeen, was a perfect type of Jewish beauty, with a face which a painter would envy as a model for a Rachel. Her head was covered with bandages. She had been alone for three hours in the hands of a dozen men, who had killed her father and mother, and they left her for dead. A young Jew, evidently her lover, sat at her bedside while the tale of her sufferings and losses was being told.
In the next bed was a married woman, a mother of four children. She had not fully recovered consciousness, and all the events of the night of her agony were as yet not completely known to her. She, too, had been beaten and left for dead, after having been assaulted by many men.
At the Rabbi’s house, as already related, I met several more victims of the mob’s nameless infamies. One was a girl of sixteen, named Simme Zeytchik, very pretty, and childish-looking for her years. She said that all her assailants were Russians, mainly Seminarists, and told the Rabbi that fifteen of these young ruffians had outraged her.
She was one of twenty women who had sought refuge in the loft of the house No. 11 Nicolaievskai Street, and who were discovered by the mob, as were several other groups of women and girls in similar hiding-places.
I have before me a record of thirteen girls and women of ages ranging from seventeen to forty-eight, who were assaulted by from two to twenty men, and in many cases left for dead.