carry them. And when the conflagration ceased, when we saw our life's work laid in ashes, we went through a snowstorm into the wide world.' "
"Multiply," our author continues "this experience with ten thousand, and scatter these ten thousand instances of Cossak rule over the whole of Galicia and the Bukovina, and you will have a picture—a very imperfect one—of what these two provinces, and particularly its Jewish population—had to suffer under the sway of the Russian invasion.
a At BR 6 1 a N “In Jablowitza, Bukovina, a house was fired by the soldiers who strictly prohibited any salvage. Not to freeze to death during a cold night, the unfortunate owner, a Jew, took two blankets from out of the burning house. He was crucified by the soldiers and a guard posted below the crucifix until he expired. In Fuczka several Jews were hanged, one of them because he wanted to save his wife from violation. In Storozynetz, south of Czernowitz, Isaak Fellermayer, a Jew, was dragged out of bed in the dead of night, by four soldiers, who, without stating any reasons, attempted to hang him. The rope broke and the soldiers cut his throat, gouged his eyes, and threw the naked corpse of their victim into the snow.... .
"But why heap instances? I will mention only one name that thunders more loudly than thousands of separate infamies: NADWORNA!
“In the 16th and 17th centuries the Cossaks in their warfare against the Poles frequently made use of the following inhuman stratagem borrowed from Tartar tactics: when they were about to storm. a fortress surrounded by deep moats, they drove prisoners laden with sandbags before them, lashing them with sabre- strokes and whip-cuts into the moats, men, sandbags and all, where they perished under the fire of their own countrymen, their corpses filling the moats. This horrible stratagem has long since disappeared from warfare between civilized nations. The Japanese have fregeuntly driven herds of cattle in front of them and marched under this cover against the Russians. But the Russians in Galicia re-introduced into modern warfare the Tartar bestiality of using helpless human beings as a cover in marching against the enemy. To be sure, these human beings were Jews. Not prisoners, mind you, but non-combatants, not men only, but old men, young men, women and children of both sexes. It was at Nadworna where the unnameable, the indescribable portent took place. The Russians huddled together one thousand five hundred Jewish families—octogenarians, old women, young matrons with infants at their breasts, school children, pell-mell, some seven thousand souls in all and drove them as a human cover against the Austrian battlefront, marching right in the track of their victims. There are no words in any language emphatic enough to characterize such an exploit.
Try and depict, if you can the situation —strive to bring the unthinkable close to your imagination! Fifteen hundred families, seven thousand heads, none of them able to bear arms seeing that all the capable had
been mobilized long ago, a huge swarm of the old, the sick, of women and children. These Jews incapable of bearing arms had been tortured for months by all the miseries of war, they had suffered hunger and cold, the Russians had looted their dwellings, burned their houses, destroyed their property, they had robbed, scourged and tormented them. And now they were lashed to the shambles like oxen—forward! pashol! They are fired at from the rear with revolvers and machine-guns, their backs are scourged with the Knout, their loins are pierced with Cossak lances and their skulls battered by the butts of Cossak car- bines, and thus they are driven against three hundred volcanoes, roaring and belching fire all along the Austrian front. The Austrians hear the tremendous outcry of the victims, the groaning of the mutilated and the dying, but they cannot help their misery, they must keep on firing ceaselessly, for behind this human holocaust the enemy is crouching for a spring; if they cease firing, the Russians will be upon them and the battle lost. And in this manner seven thousand souls, men, women and children, are slaughtered on the battle-line between two contending armed forces, unarmed themselves and perishing without a fighting chance in a Tartar welter of execution en masse.
“You Jews of America!” thus the author apostro- phizes his trans-atlantic brethren “remember Nadworna and what happened there! Speak of Nadworna to your neighbors, to acquaintances and friends, to Jews, Christians, Mohammedans and heathen, to all races and peoples inhabiting America. And whosoever among you writes a letter, to a near country or afar, to Africa, Australia or Asia, let him make mention of Nadworna and what happened there! Bethink yourselves, if any one of the thousand and one blind chances of the dispersion had brought you to Nadworna, you would have been doomed to die! You, and your parents, and your babes, and the pregnant women of your household and your invalids, on a cold winter afternoon, on a windswept camp, between two roaring hell-fires, doomed to die without the faintest chance of redemption! Seven thousand Jews shot into a shapeless heap, with the roaring of cannon, the whining of bullets, for their only death-bed prayer. And not even an honest grave would have been yours, for the bodies of the seven thousand of Nadworna were left to the crows and to the famished dogs and the wild beasts, thriving upon the ruins of what once were human habitations. Those of Nadworna were guiltless, free of offense to friend and enemv alike. except in that they were Jews.
After this impassioned apostrophe, Mr. Segel, with marvellous Jewish integrity of heart, bids his fellow-Jews of America take heed not to confound the Russian people with the Russian government and its hire- ling mercenaries. In this time of petty national rages, Mr. Segel’s threnody over the slain of Nadworna, as well as the other contents of his book, are sure to impress the reader with an especial sense of Jewish human dienitv in the midst of Jewish mourning.