_July 30, 1915._
_Darlingest Mother and Dad:--_
To-day I went to the Jewish detention camp with the wife of the French
Consul here. She called for me in her limousine. As I think of it now,
it was all so strange--the smooth-running car with two men on the box,
and ourselves in immaculate white summer dresses. The heat was intense,
but we were well protected. Through the windows we saw others sweating
and choking in the dust of the hot streets.
"I'm afraid I've brought you here on a very hot morning," said Mme.
C---- apologetically.
In spite of my curiosity I believe I felt a distaste of the detention
camp on such a day. A crowd is always depressing, and doubly so in the
heat. But we stopped at a door cut in a high board fence, and passed by
the sentinel into the enclosure where the Jews were penned in awaiting
the next stage of their journey.
Hundreds of faces turned toward us; hundreds of eyes watched our
approach. There were old men with long, white, patriarchal beards
flowing over their dirty black gowns; there were younger men with peaked
black caps and long black beards; and there were women who had pushed
back their black shawls for air, and who held sore-eyed, whining babies
listlessly on their knees. Bits of old cloth stretched over poles
afforded shade to some. Others tried to get out of the burning sun by
huddling against the walls of the tenements that enclosed the yard on
three sides. The ground was baked hard as iron and rubbed smooth by the
shuffle of numberless feet.
As we approached, the Jews rose and bowed low. Then they settled back
into their former immobility. Some stared at us vacantly; others lowered
their eyelids and rubbed their hands together softly, with a terrible
subservience. If we brushed close to one, he cringed like a dog who
fears a kick. Yellow, parchment-like faces, all with the high-bridged,
curving noses, and the black, animal-like eyes. I was as definitely
separated from them as though tangible iron bars were between us. We
seemed to be looking at each other across a great gulf. "They are human
beings," I said to myself. "I am one with them." But their isolation was
complete. I could not even begin to conceive the persecution and
suffering of ages that separated us. "All people are born free and
equal," indeed! I turned away.
"This camp is run on communistic principles," Mme. C---- was explaining.
"The Jewish Ladies' Benevolent Society provides a certain amount of meat
and vegetables and bread, which is cooked and served by the Jews
themselves. Here is the kitchen." We spoke French among ourselves, which
seemed to put us farther away from the dumb, watchful Jews behind us.
"If it wasn't for us, they would starve. The Government allows them
eight kopecks a day. But who could live on that? Besides, most of the
Jews here pay the eight kopecks to the overseer to avoid his
displeasure. He makes a good revenue out of the blood money."
Two rooms in one of the houses had been converted into a kitchen. A
dozen or so Jewish women were paring and cutting up potatoes and
cabbages and meat into huge soup-boilers. They were stripped to their
shirts, and their bodies were drenched with sweat. They curtsied to us
and went on preparing dinner.
A blast of scorching heat puffed out from an open oven. Two women, with
long wooden handles pulled out big round loaves of black bread and laid
them on a shelf to cool.
The warm fragrance of cooking attracted some white-faced Jewish
children. They edged into the kitchen and looked up at the food, their
eyes impenetrable and glittering like mica. A woman cut up some bread
and gave them each a piece, and they slunk outdoors again, sucking their
bread.
"The food is scientifically proportioned to give the greatest possible
nutriment," Mme. C---- said.
We went out. After the kitchen heat the air of the courtyard was cool.
"This is the laundry. A certain number of the Jews here wash and iron
the others' clothes. They are kept as clean as possible."
The laundry was gray with steam. A dozen or so women were bending over
wash tubs. Like the women in the kitchen, they were stripped to their
shirts. The wet cloth stuck to their sweating bodies and outlined their
ribs and the stretch of muscles as they scrubbed and wrung out the
clothes. When the water became too black, some young boys threw it out
of doors, and the women waited for the tubs to be filled again, their
red parboiled hands resting on their hips, in the way of washerwomen the
world over.
We crossed the mud before the wash-house, on planks, and went into a
house across the courtyard.
"This is the tailoring establishment," Mme. C---- continued. "The
tailors among them mend and cut over old clothes which we collect for
them, so that every Jew may start on the next stage of his journey in
perfectly clean and whole clothes. My husband and son complain that they
will have to stay in bed, soon, I have taken so many of their suits of
clothes.--And here are the shoemakers."
We looked into the adjoining room, where the cobblers sat cross-legged,
sewing and patching and pegging shoes.
"It's very hard to find the leather. But it is so important. If you
could see how they come here--their feet bleeding and swollen and their
shoes in tatters. And many of them were rich bankers and professors in
Galicia and Poland, used to their own automobiles like the rest of us. I
think I would steal leather for them."
The workers were different from the waiting Jews in the courtyard.
Perhaps it was work that gave them importance in their own eyes, and
took away that dreadful degrading subserviency--degrading to us as much
as to themselves. The whirring noise of the sewing-machines, the click
of shears, the bent backs of the workers, and the big capable hands,
formed by the accustomed work! The trade of every man could have been
known by his hands! My heart was warm toward them.
"It's splendid, I think," I said to Mme. C----.
As though she guessed my thoughts, she replied, "They are grateful for
being allowed to work."
"For being allowed to work." Those words damn much in the world. What
hindrances we erect in the way of life!
And I looked out into the courtyard again, at the apathetic faces of
the waiting Jews. Waiting for what? The white, dead faces, with the
curved noses and hard, bright eyes, all turned toward us. Were they
submissive or expectant, or simply hating us? They say the Galician Jews
turn traitors and act as spies for the Austrians. But surely not these.
What could these broken creatures do? How near death they seemed!
The courtyard burned like a furnace. The shade was shrinking from moment
to moment. The heat rose in blinding waves. I was sickened. The
courtyard smelled of dirt and waste and sickness. It was unreal--the
whole thing unreal: those working at usual, necessary tasks as well as
those furtive, watchful ones in the burning sunlight. Death was in them
all.
I went out into the courtyard, walking slowly in the scorching heat.
There was no shade or coolness anywhere. My attention was drawn to a
pregnant woman who had evidently been sitting in a thin strip of shade
by the fence; but now the sun was beating down on her bare head. She sat
with her arms hanging along her sides, the palms of her hands turned
upwards. A baby hardly a year old twisted fretfully on her lap,
fumbling at her breast with a little red hand. But she looked steadily
over the baby's round head, a curiously intent expression in her dark
eyes, as though she were looking at something so far away that she must
concentrate all herself on it so as not to lose it from view.
Near her a man leaned against the fence. He was red-headed, and his
unkempt hair and ragged beard flamed in the sun. A rope tied round his
waist kept up his loose trousers, and his shirt was open, disclosing a
hairy chest. Where his skin showed, it was unexpectedly white. He kept
plucking at his chest, smiling idiotically.
"Is he insane?" I asked Mme. C----.
"Yes. He's that woman's husband. He went out of his head on the road.
They say he was raging that his wife was obliged to walk in her
condition. Well, he's happier than she is, now."
Under a canopy made from an old blue skirt lay a sick boy. His face was
like a death-mask already, the yellow skin stretched tightly over the
bones of his face, and his mouth unnaturally wide, with parched, swollen
lips. From his hollow eye-sockets his eyes looked out unwinking, as
though his lids had been cut off. He held himself halfway between a
reclining and an upright position. No normal person could hold himself
that way for long, but the sick boy kept himself motionless with
maniacal strength. The flies hung over him like a cloud of black
cinders. One of his friends attempted to keep them away with a leafy
branch which he had found, Heaven knows where! I could see no other sign
of green in the place. As we passed, I noticed the branch sweep back and
forth over the sick boy's face, touching the skin. And still the fixed
stare continued, uninterrupted--that blind gaze straight out into
emptiness.
At the farther end, an opening between two of the tenements led into a
garden. This space, too, was crowded with waiting Jews.
"But where do they sleep?" I asked. "Is there room for all those people
in the houses?"
"No," Mme. C---- replied; "not when so many come through as came this
last time. But fortunately, these summer nights are fine; earlier, we
had much rain, and you can picture the suffering. Then there was no
shelter for them at all. They were simply herded into a pen, and many
died from the exposure. Now, however, we have made conditions better
for them."
There was more reality here in the garden, where there was a suggestion
of growing grass and a thin leaf shade. The Jews lay on the ground as
though trying to get some coolness out of the earth. Up and down the
paths walked several spectacled men, who were brought up to me and
introduced as Professor So-and-So, and Doctor So-and-So. They were
constantly trying to get in touch with friends in Kiev or Moscow or
Petrograd, or colleagues in medicine or other sciences, or relatives who
could help them. They worked through the society. By the payment of
certain amounts they could bribe the overseers to let them stay on in
the Kiev detention camp, or even have the liberty of the city. One man,
a rich banker from Lvov, had been officially "sick" for several months,
but as his money had almost given out he was in danger of being sent on
to Tomsk in the near future. He lived in the hospital, where he had
better quarters and food. These professors and doctors, men of wide
learning and reputation, who are recognized as leaders in their
professions, and are constructive, valuable forces in society, were
herded together with the others, and will be allowed to disappear into
Siberia, where their minds and bodies will be wasted, their possible
future activity to count as nothing.
A man in a soiled white coat came up, looked us over with little
blinking pig eyes, and addressed a few words to Mme. C---- in Polish.
"That is the overseer," Professor A---- said to me in English. "He takes
every kopeck away from us. But he is no worse than the rest. All along
the way it is the same thing. One is bled to death." He shrugged
indifferently. "We most of us could have gathered together a little
money. But what will you? It was all so sudden. We had no time. Here we
are, _en tout cas_. And after all, in the end--"
I might have been talking with the professors on the campus of their own
university. They exerted themselves to be attentive and entertaining, as
though they were our hosts.
One doctor said to me in French, "I have seen your wonderful country. It
is amazing. I would like to see it again. I have been asked to lecture.
Perhaps, after the war--"
He broke off abruptly. In a flash the end of his life came up to me.
His work and ambitions, and then the cleavage in his career; the sharp
division in his life; the preparation of years, and then, instead of
fulfillment, an exile to a country where life was a struggle for the
bare necessities of the body--food and shelter. I looked at his
hands--thin and white and nervous. What hideous, despairing moments he
must know!