The ignorant moujiks, encouraged by the officials of the Government, had heaped every indignity possible upon the Jews, and the anti-Semitic feeling reached a climax when it became known that a Jewess had attempted to assassinate the Governor.
Led by a wild-haired local agitator, a mob of a thousand persons proceeded to the Ghetto and carried out a frightful work of destruction. They surged down the narrow street, and after entering the houses and treating the inmates with shocking brutality, looted and set fire to their homes. The enraged rioters wrecked the Synagogue and killed the Rabbi, shouting, “Clear out the rats’ nest! Kill them all!” Screams of pain mingled with wild yells of triumph, and through the long night the Ghetto was a veritable Pandemonium.
The scene was terrible. The street ran with blood. Many Jewish women fell victims to the brutal lust and frantic frenzy of the mob, and were so barbarously maltreated that eleven succumbed, while a dozen men were shot or stabbed.
Before dawn the Ghetto had been totally destroyed and its unfortunate inhabitants, having lost everything they had, were compelled to seek shelter in the forest on the Kritchev road, where many afterwards died of exposure and starvation.
General Martianoff lost no time in wreaking vengeance upon my hapless sister. She had been arrested and taken to prison immediately after firing the shot, and he had condemned her to receive fifty lashes of the knout. Such a sentence was tantamount to death, for punishment by the knout is so barbarous a torture that few strong men could survive so many strokes. Yet whippings were of everyday occurrence in the Tzar’s empire, and even women are not spared by the officials.
It was about ten o’clock on the following morning when Mascha emerged from the grimy portals of the prison, and under a strong escort walked across the market-place to the temporary platform that had been erected. A great crowd had assembled to witness the chastisement of “the pretty Jewess,” and as she mounted the steps, with pale, determined face, they greeted her with fierce yells of triumph.
She looked round upon the sea of upturned countenances contemptuously.
On the platform there had been set up a square wooden frame. Unceremoniously, the brutal moujiks, who assisted the executioner, grasped her with their coarse, dirty hands and tore off her clothing, exposing her bare, white back down to the waist.
The mob roared with approbation when they saw this preparation. A few moments later she was forced upon the black frame, and her wrists and ankles secured so tightly that the tension almost caused dislocation of the joints. Then the executioner, whose duty it was to carry out the sentence, seized the knout—a number of triangular thongs of leather fixed into a short whip handle—and looked round for the signal to commence. As he did so, General Martianoff, with his shoulder bandaged, made his way through the expectant crowd, and shouted—
“Come, get to work. Don’t spare her, but keep the death-blow till last.”