HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN RUSSIA AND POLAND
FROM THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER I UNTIL THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER III
by S.M. Dubnow
A Project Gutenberg EBook
3. MILITARY MARTYRDOM
The ways and means by which the provisions of the
military statute were
carried into effect during the reign of Nicholas I. we do
not learn from
official documents, which seem to have drawn a veil over
this dismal
strip of the past. Our information is derived from
sources far more
communicative and nearer to truth--the traditions current
among the
people. Owing to the fact that every Jewish community, at
the mutual
responsibility of all its members, was compelled by law
to supply a
definite number of recruits, and that no one was willing
to become a
soldier of his own volition, the Kahal administration and
the recruiting
"trustees," who had to answer to the
authorities for any shortage in
recruits, were practically forced to become a sort of
police agents,
whose function it was to "capture" the
necessary quota of recruits.
Prior to every military conscription, the victims marked
for prey, the
young men and boys of the burgher class, [1] very generally
took to
flight, hiding in distant cities, outside the zone of
their Kahals, or
in forests and ravines. A popular song in Yiddish refers
to these
conditions in the following words;
[Footnote 1: Compare on the status of the burgher in
Russian law Vol. I,
p. 308, n. 2. Nearly all the higher estates were exempt.]
_Der Ukas is
arobgekumen auf judische Selner, Seinen mir sich zulofen in die puste Waelder.....
In alle puste Waelder seinen mir zulofen,
In puste Gruber seinen mir verlofen_..... Oi weih,
oi weih!_....[1]
[Footnote 1:
When the ukase came
down about Jewish soldiers,
We all dispersed over the lonesome forests;
Over the lonesome forests did we disperse,
In lonesome pits did we hide ourselves.... Woe me,
Woe!]
The recruiting agents hired by the Kahal or its
"trustees," who received
the nickname "hunters" or "captors,"
[1] hunted down the fugitives,
trailing them everywhere and capturing them for the
purpose of making up
the shortage. In default of a sufficient number of
adults, little
children, who were easier "catch," were seized,
often enough in
violation of the provision of the law. Even boys under
the required age
of twelve, sometimes no more than eight years old, were
caught and
offered as conscripts at the recruiting stations, their
age being
misstated. [2] The agents perpetrated incredible
cruelties. Houses were
raided during the night, and children were torn from the
arms of their
mothers, or lured away and kidnapped.
[Footnote 1: More literally "catchers"; in
Yiddish _Khappers_.]
[Footnote 2: This was the more easy, as regular
birth-registers were not
yet in existence.]
After being captured, the Jewish conscripts were sent
into the
recruiting jail where they were kept in confinement until
their
examination at the recruiting station. The enlisted
minors were turned
over to a special officer to be dispatched to their
places of
destination, mostly in the Eastern provinces including
Siberia. For it
must be noted that the cantonists were stationed almost
to a man in the
outlying Russian governments, where they could be brought
up at a safe
distance from all Jewish influences. The unfortunate
victims who were
drafted into the army and deported to these far-off
regions were mourned
by their relatives as dead. During the autumnal season,
when the
recruits were drafted and deported, the streets of the
Jewish towns
resounded with moans. The juvenile cantonists were packed
into wagons
like so many sheep and carried off in batches under a
military
convoy. When they took leave of their dear ones it was
for a quarter of a
century; in the case of children it was for a longer
term, too often it
was good-bye for life.
How these unfortunate youngsters were driven to their
places of
destination we learn from the description of Alexander
Hertzen, [1] who
chanced to meet a batch of Jewish cantonists on his
involuntary journey
through Vyatka, in 1835. At one of the post stations in
some
God-forsaken village of the Vyatka government he met the
escorting
officer. The following dialogue ensued between the two:
[Footnote 1: Hertzen, a famous Russian writer (d. 1870),
was exiled to the
government of Vyatka for propagating liberal doctrines.]
"Whom do you carry and to what place?"
"Well, sir, you see, they got together a bunch of
these accursed
Jewish youngsters between the age of eight and nine. I
suppose they
are meant for the fleet, but how should I know? At
first the command
was to drive them to Perm. Now there is a change. We
are told to
drive them to Kazan. I have had them on my hands for a
hundred
versts or thereabouts. The officer that turned them
over to me told
me they were an awful nuisance. A third of them
remained on the road
(at this the officer pointed with his finger to the
ground). Half of
them will not get to their destination," he added.
"Epidemics, I suppose?", I inquired, stirred
to the very core.
"No, not exactly epidemics; but they just fall
like flies. Well, you
know, these Jewish boys are so puny and delicate. They
can't stand
mixing dirt for ten hours, with dry biscuits to live
on. Again
everywhere strange folks, no father, no mother, no
caresses. Well
then, you just hear a cough and the youngster is dead.
Hello,
corporal, get out the small fry!"
The little ones were assembled and arrayed in a
military line. It
was one of the most terrible spectacles I have ever
witnessed. Poor,
poor children! The boys of twelve or thirteen managed
somehow to
stand up, but the little ones of eight and ten.... No
brush, however
black, could convey the terror of this scene on the
canvas.
Pale, worn out, with scared looks, this is the way they
stood in
their uncomfortable, rough soldier uniforms, with their
starched,
turned-up collars, fixing an inexpressibly helpless and
pitiful gaze
upon the garrisoned soldiers, who were handling them
rudely. White
lips, blue lines under the eyes betokened either fever
or cold. And
these poor children, without care, without a caress,
exposed to the
wind which blows unhindered from the Arctic Ocean, were
marching to
their death. I seized the officer's hand, and, with the
words: "Take
good care of them! ", threw myself into my carriage.
I felt like
sobbing, and I knew I could not master myself....
The great Russian writer saw the Jewish cantonists on the
road, but he
knew nothing of what happened to them later on, in the
recesses of the
barracks into which they were driven. This terrible
secret was revealed
to the world at a later period by the few survivors among
these martyred
Jewish children.
Having arrived at their destination, the juvenile
conscripts were put
into the cantonist battalions. The "preparation for
military service"
began with their religious re-education at the hands of
sergeants and
corporals. No means was, neglected so long as it bade
fair to bring the
children to the baptismal font. The authorities refrained
from giving
formal instructions, leaving everything to the zeal of
the officers who
knew the wishes of their superiors. The children were
first sent for
spiritual admonition to the local Greek-Orthodox priests,
whose efforts,
however, proved fruitless in nearly every case. They were
then taken in
hand by the sergeants and corporals who adopted military
methods of
persuasion.
These brutal soldiers invented all kinds of tortures. A
favorite
procedure was to make the cantonists get down on their
knees in the
evening after all had gone to bed and to keep the sleepy
children in
that position for hours. Those who agreed to be baptized
were sent to
bed, those who refused were kept up the whole night till
they dropped
from exhaustion. The children who continued to hold their
own were
flogged and, under the guise of gymnastic exercises,
subjected to all
kinds of tortures. Those that refused to eat pork or the
customary
cabbage soup prepared with lard were beaten and left to
starve. Others
were fed on salted fish and then forbidden to drink,
until the little
ones, tormented by thirst, agreed to embrace
Christianity.
The majority of these children, unable to endure the
tortures inflicted
on them, saved themselves by baptism. But many
cantonists, particularly
those of a maturer age (between fifteen and eighteen),
bore their
martyrdom with heroic patience. Beaten almost into
senselessness, their
bodies striped by lashes, tormented to the point of
exhaustion by
hunger, thirst, and sleeplessness, the lads declared
again and again
that they would not betray the faith of their fathers.
Most of these
obstinate youths were carried from the barracks into the
military
hospitals to be released by a kind death. Only a few
remained alive.
Alongside of this passive heroism there were cases of
demonstrative
martyrdom. One such incident has survived in the popular
memory. The
story goes that during a military parade [1] in the city
of Kazan the
battalion chief drew up all the Jewish cantonists on the
banks of the
river, where the Greek-Orthodox priests were standing in
their
vestments, and all was ready for the baptismal ceremony.
At the command
to jump into the water, the boys answered in military
fashion "Aye,
aye!" Whereupon they dived under and disappeared.
When they were dragged
out, they were dead. In most cases, however, these little
martyrs
suffered and died noiselessly, in the gloom of the
guard-houses,
barracks, and military hospitals. They strewed with their
tiny bodies
the roads that led into the outlying regions of the Empire,
and those
that managed to get there were fading away slowly in the
barracks which
had been turned into inquisitorial dungeons. This
martyrdom of children,
set in a military environment, represents a singular
phenomenon even in
the extensive annals of Jewish martyrology.
[Footnote 1: A variant of the legend speaks of a review
by the Tzar
himself.]
Such was the lot of the juvenile cantonists. As for the
adult recruits,
who were drafted into the army at the normal age of
conscription
(18-25), their conversion to Christianity was not pursued
by the same
direct methods, but their fate was not a whit less tragic
from the
moment of their capture till the end of their grievous
twenty-five
years' service. Youths, who had no knowledge of the Russian
language,
were torn away from the heder or yeshibah, often from
wife and children.
In consequence of the early marriages then in vogue, most
youths at the
age of eighteen were married. The impending separation
for a quarter of
a century, added to the danger of the soldier's apostasy
or death in
far-off regions, often disrupted the family ties. Many
recruits, before
entering upon their military career, gave their wives a
divorce so as
not to doom them to perpetual widowhood.
At the end of 1834 rumors began to spread among the
Jewish masses
concerning a law which was about to be issued forbidding
early marriages
but exempting from conscription those married prior to
the promulgation
of the law. A panic ensued. Everywhere feverish haste was
displayed in
marrying off boys from ten to fifteen years old to girls
of an equally
tender age. Within a few months there appeared in every
city hundreds
and thousands of such couples, whose marital relations
were often
confined to playing with nuts or bones. The
misunderstanding which had
caused this senseless matrimonial panic or _beholoh,_[1]
as it was
afterwards popularly called, was cleared up by the
publication, on April
13, 1835, of the new "Statute on the Jews." To
be sure, the new law
contained a clause forbidding marriages before the age of
eighteen, but
it offered no privileges for those already married, so
that the only
result of the _beholoh_ was to increase the number of
families robbed by
conscription of their heads and supporters.
[Footnote 1: A Hebrew word, also used in Yiddish, meaning
_fright,
panic_.]
The years of military service were spent by the grown-up
Jewish soldiers
amidst extraordinary hardships. They were beaten and
ridiculed because
of their inability to express themselves in Russian,
their refusal to
eat _trefa_, and their general lack of adaptation to the
strange
environment and to the military mode of life. And even
when this process
of adaptation was finally accomplished, the Jewish
soldier was never
promoted beyond the position of a non-commissioned
under-officer,
baptism being the inevitable stepping-stone to a higher
rank. True, the
Statute on Military Service promised those Jewish
soldiers who had
completed their term in the army with distinction admission
to the civil
service, but the promise remained on paper so long as the
candidates
were loyal to Judaism. On the contrary, the Jews who had
completed their
military service and had in most cases become invalids
were not even
allowed to spend the rest of their lives in the
localities outside the
Pale, in which they had been stationed as soldiers. Only
at a later
period, during the reign of Alexander II., was this right
accorded to
the "Nicholas soldiers" [1] and their
descendants.
[Footnote 1: In Russian, _Nikolayevskiye soldaty_, i.e.,
those that had
served in the army during the reign of Nicholas I.]
The full weight of conscription fell upon the poorest
classes of the
Jewish population, the so-called burgher estate, [1]
consisting of petty
artisans and those impoverished tradesmen who could not
afford to enrol
in the mercantile guilds, though there are cases on
record where poor
Jews begged from door to door to collect a sufficient sum
of money for a
guild certificate in order to save their children from
military service.
The more or less well-to-do were exempted from
conscription either by
virtue of their mercantile status or because of their
connections with
the Kahal leaders who had the power of selecting the
victims.
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 23, n. 1.]
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