They begged to go home just for a moment. They had left babies in the cradle, they had left sick people. They had fasted since the day before; not a bit of bread had they swallowed, nor water. They begged to take a little food. Then the Cossacks laughed: “Search all you want to! Everything is burned! Everything is destroyed!” With their bayonets they drove them from the Temple. Outside they met other Jews in the same condition. About ten thousand men, women and children were driven from the city on the Day of Atonement.
For miles their cries extended. Groaning, the exiles were driven on through the night. To the Vistula they had been ordered, as they were driven through the gate—to the Vistula, on the left bank, but it would be better still if they jumped into the river.
A Rabbi from another Temple had saved the roll of the Torah; he headed the procession and carried it under his arm.
It was something ghostly to look upon, this white-clad procession of Jews in their death robes; it was like a procession of the century long sorrows of their race. About ten thousand living corpses wandered on through the night.
“Hear Israel! the Eternal, our God, the eternally One! Hear Israel!”
KOLOMAN MIKSZÁTH
Koloman Mikszáth (born in Sklebonya in 1849) is without doubt the best loved writer of Hungary. Why should he not be? He has something of the witty descriptive powers of Heine, the fluent unforced narrative of Dumas, and a peculiar charm which is all his own. He is a painter of inimitable miniatures, glowing with color, truthful in action, a veritable Meissonier of the pen.
In these, spiritedly drawn, richly peopled, diminutive little pictures we see all Hungary pass before us: the burger class, the petty nobility, the church, the state and the peasant. Sometimes these stories are ironic—because Mikszáth is numbered among the humorists—sometimes idyllic, sometimes realistic, and sometimes they are bitter and incisive, and strike home with a certain fatal touch of intimité, telling truths from which we can not get away. He has been a productive writer, and we do not need to go out of his native Hungary for a worthy parallel, when we pause to recall that Maurice Jokai wrote three hundred novels and tales.
Mikszáth is author of a novel, “Mácsik the Mighty,” which reproduces the life of the petty nobility in upper Hungary. His short stories are collected into many volumes, such as “Club and Corridor,” which stories were first published in the daily he himself edited, “Pesti Hirlap” (The Times of Budapest).