Читать книгу The Jews in the Eastern War Zone онлайн

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It appeared at first as though the long desired union with the Russian people was about to be realized. But it soon developed that the chains which bound the Jews of Russia to their past could not be broken. Forces which they could not possibly control doomed them to the greatest tragedy in their history. The Pale in which they lived was Polish in origin and population. Poles and Jews were fellow victims of the Russian oppressor; but instead of being united by the common bond of suffering, they were separated by religious and racial differences and above all by dissension deliberately fostered among them by the Russian rulers until it developed into uncontrollable hate.

Russian Atrocities

Immediately before the war the struggle had assumed its bitterest form—that of an unrelenting boycott waged against the Jews. When the war broke out the political status of the Poles changed overnight. Both the Russian and the German armies found it politic to cultivate the good will of the Polish population. Many Poles seized the opportunity to gratify personal animosity, religious bigotry or chauvinistic mania by denouncing the Jews, now to the one invader and now to the other, as spies and traitors. In Germany the animus of the attacks was to some extent uncovered and the lies refuted. But in Russia they found fertile soil. The Russian military machine had met with defeat at the hands of the Germans. To exonerate themselves in the eyes of their own people the military camarilla eagerly seized the pretext so readily furnished them by the Poles and unloaded the burden of their ill-fortune upon the helpless shoulders of the Jew. Men, women, even children were executed without the shadow of evidence or the formality of a trial. Circumstantial stories of Jewish treachery, invented by the Poles, were accepted as the truth and circulated freely through the Russian press and on the local government bulletin boards; but when official investigation proved these stories false in every particular, the publication of the refutation was discouraged by the censorship. The authorities gave the troops a free hand to loot and ravage, even encouraging them by the publication of orders which officially denounced all Jews as spies and traitors. The result was a series of outrages unprecedented even in Russia. A million Jews were driven from their homes in a state of absolute destitution.