I sought for and found the proprietor of this identical carousing machine (a merry-go-round). He was not a Jew, but a Christian, German by nationality, and Reinhold Mergert by name. He told me he saw no Christian or other woman struck by any Jew on the occasion, while no such act was committed by himself or anyone in his employment.
Had any such injury been done to a Christian woman by a Jew, would the carousing machine have been spared by the mobs which wrecked seven hundred Jewish homes, and five or six hundred Jewish shops the same day? Or would the Jew be alive to tell the story?
I saw this very machine in full swing, with its loads of laughing children, on several days during my stay in the city.
“Workers then began breaking windows, pulling down Jewish stores, as sign of protest,” continues M. de Plehve, in his official explanation.
My information, gathered on the spot from eye-witnesses—Russian and Jewish—tells a far different story. It is this:
A few nights before the outbreak, members of the society organised by the Bessarabetz, a large number of Moldavian and Russian artisans, and several Seminarists and students, assembled in the “Moscow” hall. Speeches were made in which it was declared that the Tsar had given permission to kill Jews for a period of three days, beginning on the coming Sunday!
The conveners of this meeting were the leaders of the mobs of Sunday, April 19th, and Monday, the 20th.
That there had been plan, premeditation, and organisation for all this, there is not a shadow of doubt. It was no sudden uprising, as M. de Plehve had been informed, but a carefully prepared and officered arrangement to strike terror into the “Jewish Socialists” of Kishineff, and, through them, into the alleged propagandists of revolutionary doctrines throughout the cities and towns of the Pale, from Odessa to Warsaw.
One more fact establishing the case of preparation:
A fortnight before the riots the band of thirty Albanians referred to in Letter IV arrived in Kishineff. They were strangers and evil-looking. They all took part in the riots, and the mutilations of a child and of two of the four Jews murdered at 13 Asia Street, Bender Rogatka district, were the work of these imported brigands. They were not imprisoned after the riot. They were expelled the city.