Only a few Russian Governors, such as Korff, in Warsaw; Kelepowski, in Lublin, and the Governors of Wilna, Petrikow, and Grodno have spoken, although too late, against the pogroms, but neither the Government nor the Poles take these warnings seriously.
Eyewitnesses have told me about Jewish soldiers in the different lazarets who have turned mad, not through the unavoidable horrors of the war, but because of the pogroms they have witnessed in the towns they have passed. They mistake those they have seen murdered for their own relations; they imagine they see their own mothers, sisters, or beloved ones in that plight. They are always raving about the same thing.
The pursuit of the Jews by the Russian-Polish anti-Semites is the more invidious under these circumstances, as 300,000 Jewish soldiers, among them many volunteers, are serving in the Russian Army, and as the self-sacrifice of the army and the Red Cross hitherto has been immeasurable. In the great congregations are special hospitals for Russian soldiers—regardless of their creed—founded by Jews and with Jewish money. Not a few Jewish soldiers have already won the highest military distinctions, nay, a few of them have even received them from Mr. Rennenkampf, the Commander in Chief himself, who used to be a zealous anti-Semite, as the Russian Court on the whole is passionately anti-Semitic. The manifesto from the Czar To my dear Jewish subjects, which has been printed in the French newspapers, has never been anything but a fabrication.
While the usual accusation against the Jews in Russian Poland was that of sympathizing with the Russians—for which they have no special reason—Mr. A. Warinski, who in Russia is classed among the black ones, also called the true Russians—in "Politiken" has made the charge against them that the German attempts of gaining the Poles "have only had the effect desired on the Russian and Polish Jews, as these elements, because of psychological relation with the Prussians, feel disposed to place themselves at the side of Germany." This accusation and the arguments for it might express the culmination. The Jew shall and must be Judas. If it cannot be accomplished in one way the opposite way is tried. Mr. Warinski does not say one word about how many Jews have gone into the war as volunteers out of pure enthusiasm for Poland. They have not been able to believe, as I for my part cannot believe, that the last outcrop of nationalism in Russian Poland is more than a temporary epidemic.
How could Russian Poles in the long run be unfaithful to the only powers they have been able to appeal to, the only powers which took an interest in them? How can they who are fighting for their liberty after so many years' ill-treatment be willing to seize an opportunity to ill-treat the only people who (to its misfortune) is in their power, the only people who have suffered far more and twenty times as long as they themselves; and the only ones who are too strong to be destroyed through any ill-treatment? How can the Poles, who were at times ruined as a State through the treachery of their own men, want to fling out the accusation of treason against a tribe which has never betrayed itself and which even in the deepest abasement never betrayed the only Slavic tribe who in the Middle Ages gave a refuge to its children?
I suppose that the Poles will maintain against this appeal to them that I, whom the Ruthenians could never bring to make any attack on them, am now, because of my descent, speaking in favor of a matter, which is very unpleasant to them. My personal descent has so little influenced my proceedings and way of thinking that during the whole of my public life I have been subject to continual attacks in national Jewish periodicals and newspapers as the man who denied community of descent and supposed community of faith.
This Spring during my stay in America I was continually attacked in the American Jewish papers as the callous denier of the Jews. It was nonsense, as is most of that which appears in print, but it proves at least that it is not on behalf of my blood but on behalf of my mind that I speak on this occasion. My sympathy is not with the Jews as Jews, but as the suppressed and ill-treated.
I am the man who a generation ago wrote: "We love Poland, not in the same way that we love Germany or France or England, but as we love liberty. For what is to love Poland but to love liberty, to feel a deep sympathy with misfortune and to admire courage and combative enthusiasm? Poland is the symbol of all that which the supreme among mankind have loved and for which they have fought."
These were my words and hitherto I have adhered to them.
Shall I have to feel ashamed of having written them, now that Poland's future is being decided?