For liberty of prayer and thought.
EMMA LAZARUS, 1882.
‘SOLDIERS OF NICHOLAS’[34]
THERE was one thing the Gentiles might do to me worse than burning or rending. It was what was done to unprotected Jewish children who fell into the hands of priests or nuns. They might baptize me. That would be worse than death by torture. Every Jewish child had that feeling. There were stories by the dozen of Jewish boys who were kidnapped by the Czar’s agents and brought up in Gentile families till they were old enough to enter the army, where they served until forty years of age; and all those years the priests tried, by bribes and daily tortures, to force them to accept baptism, but in vain. This was the time of Nicholas I.
Some of these ‘soldiers of Nicholas’, as they were called, were taken as little boys of seven or eight—snatched from their mothers’ laps. They were carried to distant villages, where their friends could never trace them, and turned over to some dirty, brutal peasant, who used them like slaves, and kept them with the pigs. No two were ever left together; and they were given false names, so that they were entirely cut off from their own world. And then the lonely child was turned over to the priests, and he was flogged and starved and terrified—a little helpless boy who cried for his mother; but still herefused to be baptized. The priests promised him good things to eat, fine clothes, and freedom from labour; but the boy turned away, and said his prayers secretly—the Hebrew prayers.
As he grew older, severer tortures were invented for him; still he refused baptism. By this time he had forgotten his mother’s face, and of his prayers perhaps only the ‘Shema’ remained in his memory; but he was a Jew, and nothing would make him change. After he entered the army, he was bribed with promises of promotions and honours. He remained a private, and endured the cruellest discipline. When he was discharged, at the age of forty, he was a broken man, without a home, without a clue to his origin, and he spent the rest of his life wandering among Jewish settlements, searching for his family, hiding the scars of torture under his rags, begging his way from door to door.
There were men in our town whose faces made you old in a minute. They had served Nicholas I, and come back, unbaptized.
MARY ANTIN, 1911.