David Doiben lived on Gostinaia Street, a boisterous street lined with three- and four-story buildings, many of them hotels, including the posh Swiss Hotel; it ran directly into the New Market and was the hardest hit on the riot’s first day. Doiben described how he had obeyed the warning to stay inside until midafternoon, when he accompanied his wife and children to his brother’s home a few blocks away. They spotted nothing at the time. Returning an hour and a half later, however, they ran into two non-Jewish acquaintances who warned them to go home immediately. Suddenly a group of rioters ran past them without stopping. Once they disappeared, Doiben and his family saw a Jew, his clothes ripped, who shouted, “They’re beating us and tearing us apart!” Turning the corner to their apartment building, Doiben found it surrounded by a crowd of fifty boys (and a few girls), throwing rocks and smashing against its door. He managed to get into the building, hiding his family inside. After breaking the courtyard door, the rioters entered the building and demanded money, beating those who did not comply and stealing all they could carry.13
Reports on the first day were often contradictory. If, as seems clear, the riot stretched from Chuflinskii Square (where it started) to just beyond the New Market (where Feldman’s home was located), this meant it covered an area of nearly two miles. Nonetheless, the Odessa-based British consul general described it as “a small sized crowd confined to three or four streets.” Although this was technically accurate, it was also true that these streets were within striking distance of the city center. Some would claim that the first killings occurred that day, but this was almost certainly incorrect.14
Transportation across town under any circumstances was cumbersome—trolleys were few and far between, and not many of the streets beyond the city center were lit at night—so rioters covering the area pillaged mostly by foot. Much of Lower Kishinev, at its farthest edge little more than a mile from the center of the first day’s violence, knew nothing of the mayhem until the following morning. And except for the shattering of windows here and there in Lower Kishinev—which commenced around nine that night—not much spilled over into that densely Jewish neighborhood until the next day. Attacks on women continued elsewhere well into the night, stopping only at 11:00 p.m.15
It has been estimated that no more than two hundred rioters participated in the attacks that day. Rarely did they linger in the way in which the mob did at Doiben’s building. Mostly they clustered in groups of twenty, sometimes as many as fifty, spending no more than ten minutes at any address; youngsters arrived first, followed by older and stronger rioters. Children would rarely do more than throw rocks; the adults were more intent on plunder. Already on the first day, those counted as the fiercest were Moldavians—identified by the language they used or their accents—many hailing, it seems, from the agrarian edge of the city or adjacent villages. By the next day, many more would arrive, often with wagons to carry away the contents of Jewish homes.16
Violence continued to escalate that night. Yosef Aaron and his brothers, merchants all, later described how they protected themselves from attack at 10:00 p.m. by shooting bullets into the air when rioters broke into their house. The mob immediately fled. The merchants then gathered their neighbors together and distributed iron bars and wooden clubs, with the decision made that they would fight the next day but only if attacked by adults and not children. Interestingly, even hours after the violence erupted, it remained unclear whether or not this was merely the work of adolescent pranksters. Nevertheless precautions were now taken by many of those with sufficient resources to flee to nearby hotels, or to board trains for Kiev or Odessa. Some even traveled nearly a thousand miles to Vienna.17
Warnings abounded—at least, as recalled once the massacre ended—of greater violence the next day. A gentile gatekeeper for a building near the New Market mockingly asked Jewish residents when he appeared for work, “What’s happening here?” He added as he locked the courtyard for the night that it was well known that permission had been granted for three days of violence. Attacks on women that night were ferocious. In an apartment near the New Market on Nikolaevskii Street, one of the city’s major boulevards, a woman was raped repeatedly for four consecutive hours by members of a mob that included seminarians, according to Davitt. At the same place another woman who beseeched police to stop this attack was told that Jews were getting just what they deserved.18
By now sixty rioters had been arrested; by the end of the next day, the number jailed would exceed nine hundred. Curiously, despite the day’s horrors, many Jews—including communal leaders—remained convinced that the riot was not nearly as bad as had been feared, or that it had now been contained. Early on the morning of the second day, some 150 Jews converged on Governor General Raaben’s offices. Only a small delegation was permitted to meet with him, and they were given the assurance that order would immediately be restored. Perhaps because the many rapes late the night before had not yet been reported or because the riot had been concentrated in only one slice of the city—albeit a highly visible and central part of it, with no one yet killed—this guarantee was believed. Such optimism would quickly vanish.19
It rained that night and was still raining at 5:00 a.m. Monday. The rain was light but persistent, with the likelihood of an overcast and wet day. “Perhaps the rain will be our deliverance,” shopkeeper Yisrael Rossman recalls thinking early that morning. Soon the rain cleared, however, and the weather became balmy. As Bialik captured this moment in his poem “In the City of Killing”: “The sun rose, rye blossomed, and the slaughterer slaughtered.”20
Rossman hurried off soon after the rain ended to the New Market to check on the condition of his store. Footsteps could be heard all around him, he recalled, as he walked the still-wet, dark streets with many other Jews doing the same. On his way he spotted a policeman, whom he asked what to expect that day. The officer admitted he had no idea. Returning to his home a couple of hours later—it was now 8:00 a.m.—he found himself scrutinizing the faces of Christians passing by but saw no sign at all of antagonism. Yet once he reached his home, he found the building surrounded by an increasingly menacing mob. Hiding his family along with dozens of neighbors in a barn on the property—many in the building hid themselves in one or another of the outhouses—Rossman recalled that the mob sounded like “wild animals.” The rioters concentrated now on demolishing the large wooden doors protecting the building’s courtyard. Once these were shattered, marauders entered, calling out repeatedly, “Jews, right now!”21
Why the targeting of some buildings and not others? Probably a crucial factor, quite simply, was the condition of the external doors: Some were too sturdy to dislodge. In Rossman’s building, with its mix of Jewish and non-Jewish tenants, it seems clear that much like elsewhere rioters found themselves able to readily identify Jews—including those without distinctively Jewish garb. There is little evidence of gentiles misconstrued during the massacre as Jews. Once the mob was inside, the loudest screams were nearly always those of women and girls, who were attacked first, with the men protecting them beaten. Rossman’s brother first hid himself in an outhouse, abandoning it because, as he later insisted, he did not want to die in such a filthy place. As soon as he surfaced, he was beaten senseless. Soon afterward Rossman was also discovered, and he too was beaten and left for dead. He nonetheless managed to flee to the building’s roof, where he found dead bodies lying about “much like slaughtered chickens.” A neighbor, a Jewish convert to Russian Orthodoxy—he had saved himself by reciting for the mob passages from the Psalms—now arranged for wagons to transport wounded Jews to the hospital.22
Still, in the first few hours of Monday, the riot continued to be concentrated in the same area where it had broken out, mostly near the New Market. The neighborhood’s stores continued to be ransacked: The newspaper Odesskie Novosti described how well-dressed women were seen eagerly participating, stealing clothes off the racks of Jewish shops and walking through the streets of the city with the goods. Unwanted merchandise w
as so plentiful that it was piled onto roads, often stopping all traffic including trams.23
A wealthy Jew named Sobelman, who prided himself on his close terms with local Russian officials, tried to return home that Monday morning from Raaben’s offices but found his route blocked because the day’s rioting had already begun. Managing finally to reach his building, he found it surrounded by children pelting it with stones. Joined by adults, the mob lingered for more than an hour, working hard at demolishing the front door. As soon as they entered, they started smashing tables on the heads of Jews while demanding that they pay for their lives. As little as a few kopecks—one woman discovered four kopecks in her pockets and gave it to the mob—could make all the difference. Sobelman found his family but was murdered while protecting them. A group of fifteen or so were overheard emerging from his building, calling out, “Sobelman is finished!”24
Some Jews were hit over their heads with tables as many as twenty times until they died. Hannah Bruvarman saved her own life, escaping with little more than a mild beating, when she handed over the three hundred rubles she had earned selling wood before Passover. Fleeing to her daughter’s house nearby, which was also under attack, she had to barter once again for her life, handing over the three rubles that was all the money she had left.25
By late morning nearly the entire city, except for the far-western neighborhoods inhabited mostly by gentile workers and with few Jews, was enveloped. No less than two-thirds of Kishinev was affected by violence. Nonetheless its impact remained haphazard, with—as stated in a British consular report—“many streets within the affected area . . . comparatively (some wholly) untouched.”26
Under the attacks, entire streets were all but leveled; an English reporter in Kishinev during the riot described the scene from his hotel window as one of utter devastation. And increasingly, the attacks were personal. Rossman watched as one assailant called out the name of his victim, asking him in Moldavian, “Are you Ben-Zion?” The Jew turned to him saying, “Why, children?” He was then hit with a pitchfork and killed. A gentile woman who offered to hide Jews in her apartment found pleasure nonetheless in taunting them, entering the hiding place every few minutes with news such as, “You no longer have any stove,” or “You have no beds, no chairs, no table.”27
In his notes Davitt described one Jewish victim caught up in Monday’s violence: “Meyer Weissman. 3 children and a wife. His eye gouged out. He wanted them to kill him. Saw him in his bed. Fine type of poor man. Had a small grocery store.” Wine seller Yisroel Hayyim Steinberg watched helplessly as a mob of fifty confronted his seventy-year-old father, demanding money. The terrified man found himself unable to utter more than a few stray sounds; the crowd responded in quasi-Yiddish, “Gibbe gelt.” When it was found that he had only half a kopeck in his pocket, he was beaten to death. As the son told Bialik, who spent much of his five weeks in Kishinev interviewing victims, “We were hiding the entire time watching all this hiding behind a fence. Four at the same time were hiding in the outhouse.”28
It will never be known how many women and girls were raped over the course of the two days. Davitt counted forty, based on the testimony of a local rabbi, with others likely having failed to report for fear of losing husbands to divorce or, if unmarried, losing the opportunity to wed. (It was reported to Davitt by rabbis that they had indeed received requests for divorce from the husbands of raped women.)29 In her apartment on Nikolaevskii Street, twenty-four-year-old Rivka Schiff, who had been married four years and was an immigrant from Romania, was the victim of serial rape. Her testimony to Bialik is by far the longest, most detailed, and most harrowing of all such accounts:
When the vile ones forced their way from the roof into the attic, they first attacked Zychick’s daughter, hit her on the cheek with a tool, and surrounded her. She fell to the floor from the force of the blow. They lifted her dress, pushed her head down, and pulled her bottom up and started to slap her buttocks with their hands. Then they turned her around again, spread her legs, covered her eyes, and shut her mouth so that she couldn’t scream. One took her from behind while the others crouched around her and waited their turn. They all did what they did in full view of the people in the attic. Others jumped on me and my husband. He tried to escape, and I followed him. They jumped on him. “Give us money!” Mitya Kresilchik sought to abuse me and asked for money. I pleaded for mercy. “Don’t touch me, Mitya. You have known me for many years. I have no money.” Others ripped open the back of my dress; one slapped me and said: “If you have no money, we will get pleasure from you in another way.” I fell to the ground with Mitya on top of me, and he started to have his way with me. The other gang members surrounded me and waited. My husband saw this, as did the other Jews in the attic. My husband gave them his silver watch and chain. They thought the chain was gold, and as they were examining it, he jumped [out of the attic and] to the ground. There they beat him. The rest of the Jews jumped, too. Only Sima Zychick and I were left there. They were mocking and abusing me. “It seems like you haven’t slept with a Gentile yet. Now you will know the taste of one.” I don’t know how many had their way with me, but there were at least five, and possibly seven. As they finished, they came down one by one. One Gentile . . . came up there and said: “Hide in the corner; soon a few other thugs will come up here. I will come soon with my wife and take you down.” I sat in the corner (wearing my underwear and my coat); just at that moment, Sima Zychick came and sat down next to me. We sat there silent and still. Immediately, one came up and started to call out his friends’ names. He saw that none were there and left. Then four others came up, one after the other. One of them knelt down and pretended to sympathize with my sorrow. He saw my earrings, ripped them from my ears, and wanted once again to abuse me. But at that moment, the other Gentile, the righteous one mentioned before . . . came up and right in front of him, two had intercourse with me and two with Sima. He tried once again to convince them cunningly by saying: “You are Christians and are forbidden to take the women of Israel.” But then they wanted to attack him as well, and he was afraid and only tried to save our lives: “Do whatever you want with them, but do not kill them.” The four finished and the Gentile helped me to cover my head with my shawl, and Sima held my hand as we left there escorted by the Gentile to my mother’s house. . . . There, too, all had been destroyed. I searched for my husband. I didn’t know where he was. [Was he] dead or alive? I was pulverized, and crushed like a vessel filled with shame and filth. I returned to my residential courtyard.30
Nikolaevskii Street, soon after the pogrom.
That rape occurred was common knowledge in the city in the pogrom’s immediate aftermath. Still, the details of these attacks remained obscure, rarely mentioned in post-pogrom trials. Bialik’s transcript—the source of a wealth of information—was withheld for reasons the poet never explained, left among his unpublished material in the archives of Beit Bialik in Tel Aviv until transcribed and released in print only in the 1990s. Davitt also consigned his notes on rapes to his unpublished diary, leaving them out of his journalism and his subsequent book. (The reason for these omissions on Davitt’s part may have been the strictures of the time—obeyed even by the sensationalist Hearst press, for which he worked—on the reporting of outrages like rapes.) In the diary he kept while in Kishinev, he describes in great detail an atrocity that took place in a semirural part of the city, probably the strip known as Muncheshtskii, or Manchester Way, composed largely of Moldavians “of the poorest & most depraved kind. Their houses are wretched looking. . . . The few Jews who live among them are equally poor.” Davitt continues:
I found on entering a gateway that I was in the yard where five Jews had been killed—one young girl violated & killed & a Jew’s wife held by fiends while others ravished her. . . . She was cornered in there in the shed . . . and repeatedly violated by several men & then killed. About a hundred feet from this house is a long wooden shed used by the male Jews in the yard as a carpenter’s shop . . . the she
d is some 40 feet long by some fifteen wide. . . . The young girl . . . by some accident of chance was left in her home, the house nearest the gateway entrance to the yard & she was caught & treated as above before she could escape. This was during the night of the first day’s rioting. The 23 persons, men, women & children were inhabitants of the house in the yard. The shrieks of the girl were heard by the terrified crowd in the shed for a short time & then all was silent.31
As late as Monday morning little more than stray rumors of violence had reached Lower Kishinev. There had been some rock throwing the night before at the windows of Jewish houses and stores, and some of the neighborhood’s Jews joined the self-defense in the wine courtyard. On the whole, however, the neighborhood had passed through that first night with many expecting that the worst was over.
The area, built on hills just above the Byk, was indented with tiny shops, synagogues, and houses built around courtyards packed with large Jewish families numbering sometimes as many as eight or even ten children. Here violence was concentrated on no more than six or seven intersecting streets, most of them little more than alleyways, packed with ramshackle structures some of which literally collapsed under the weight of attack.
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