POGROM—THE TRAGEDY OF THE JEWS AND THE ARMENIANS
A Masterful Tale of the Eastern Front
Told by M. C. della Grazie of Vienna
No result of the war has been more pitiable than the suffering inflicted on the subject races caught in its grip. These submerged peoples have had to submit helplessly to the brutalities of both sets of combatants. The Poles, the Ruthenians, the Ukranians, the Slavs of Bohemia and Moravia, have fought with little heart for Russia, Austria or Prussia, as the case might be. But the Jews of the Polish Pale and of Galicia have had an even harder fate; for while the men of military age have followed the flags of their masters, the women, the children and the old men have been obliged to face at home all the evils which travel in the wake of war—disorder, violence, disease, spoliation and semi-starvation. The following story is by M. C. della Grazie, a well known Viennese writer. It makes a masterly use of a single, simple incident to bring home the meaning of one of the war's most hopeless and poignant tragedies. It was written at the time when the Russians still occupied the greater part of the Austrian province of Galicia. This translation, with editorial comment, is by William L. McPherson in the New York Tribune.
I—STORY OF GABRIEL GABRILOVITCH
The colonel sat on the edge of his rumpled-up peasant's bed and with an impatient movement knocked the ashes from his cigar. On the dirty table before him lay the last number of a Russian weekly, which had just arrived by field post in Galicia—a little crumpled, but otherwise fresh looking, and with pictures which made one's mouth water.
The devil! Was it still going so comfortably back in Petersburg (he stopped suddenly and substituted Petrograd) with those rascals of civilians and war cripples? Did such attractive girls still come in and sing and dance as those whose pictures stared at him out of the pages of the last number of the Nida? They must be damnably well off, those dogs, able to frequent the Varieties, where people sit in cozy warmth about the tables and worry about nothing more serious than the genuineness of the labels on the wine bottles.