Whether the Council of Ministers has interceded and whether its efforts were crowned with success,—I know not. The papers published several orders whereby separate groups of deported Jews were permitted to return to their former places of residence,—for instance, the deported Galician Jews were allowed to return to Galicia,—but there was no general rescript which would put an end to the deportation....
The wholesale deportation of the Jews caused a great perplexity among the population of Crimea. Even people who are not over-sensitive to problems of truth and justice and whose sympathies are far from being broad, show signs of being stirred up. Suppose the Council of Ministers is mistaken, they say, and the presence of the Jews in the governments of Kovno and Kurland is really a danger for the State, but then do not Germans live in those provinces, in even larger numbers than Jews? Time and again we read in the newspapers of the friendly reception of the German armies by the German population of Kurland. There were also registered cases where penalties were imposed on individual persons who either showed too great an enthusiasm for the German troops or rendered them material services. Nevertheless, nothing was heard about the German population of the Government of Kurland being deported in a wholesale manner,—at least, not a single train with Kurland Germans has reached Crimea.
On the other hand,—so thinking people keep on arguing,—if the Jews have proved to be more German than the Germans themselves, and the Teutonic population of Kurland act like loyal Russian subjects, why then liquidate the land owned by the Crimean Germans, who have been living in Crimea for more than a century, who have never shown any disloyalty to Russia, who, furthermore, are separated from the German frontier by thousands of versts and who are, therefore, by no means able to inform the Germans from Germany about the movement of our troops in the provinces of Kurland and Kovno.
And once more rises the question: "In whose interests is all this done?"
The matter has also another aspect. How many Jews were deported—tens or hundreds of thousands—no one knows exactly; but seeing the large masses which are being shifted from place to place, people wonder how many cars were necessary to transport all these throngs. And then it occurs to them that all these trains could bring in enormous cargoes of coal, sugar, kerosene and other wares which are so badly needed here, and carry away grain and fruit, which are needed elsewhere, thus making life more livable in many corners of our vast country.
And people who have the enviable capacity of not losing their equanimity under any circumstances, remark that in this fashion the Jewish problem is being settled and the Pale of Settlement removed.
"Here already the provinces of Voronezh and Penza are opened to Jews.... Little by little all of Russia will be opened up...."