the police, or who did not succeed in selling their property for a
mere song--there were cases of poor people disposing of their whole
furniture for one or two rubles--were thrown into jail, or sent to
the transportation prison, together with criminals and all kinds of
riff-raff that were awaiting their turn to be dispatched under
convoy. Men who had all their lives earned their bread by the sweat
of their brow found themselves under the thumb of prison inspectors,
who placed them at once on an equal footing with criminals sentenced
to hard labor. In these surroundings they were sometimes kept for
several weeks and then dispatched in batches to their "homes" which
many of them never saw again. At the threshold of the prisons the
people belonging to the "unprivileged" estates--the artisans were
almost without exception members of the "burgher class"--had wooden
handcuffs put on them....[1]

It is difficult to state accurately how many people were made to endure
these tortures, inflicted on them without the due process of law. Some
died in prison, pending their transportation. Those who could manage to
scrape together a few pennies left for the Pale of Settlement at their
own expense. The sums speedily collected by their coreligionists, though
not inconsiderable, could do nothing more than rescue a number of the
unfortunates from jail, convoy, and handcuffs. But what can there be
done when thousands of human nests, lived in for so many years, are
suddenly destroyed, when the catastrophe comes with the force of an
avalanche so that even the Jewish heart which is open to sorrow cannot
grasp the whole misfortune?....

Despite the winter cold, people hid themselves on cemeteries to avoid
jail and transportation. Women were confined in railroad cars. There
were many cases of expulsions of sick people who were brought to the
railroad station in conveyances and carried into the cars on
stretchers.... In those rare instances in which the police physician
pronounced the transportation to be dangerous, the authorities insisted
on the chronic character of the illness, and the sufferers were brought
to the station in writhing pain, as the police could not well be
expected to wait until the invalids were cured of their chronic
ailments. Eye-witnesses will never forget one bitterly cold night in
January, 1892. Crowds of Jews dressed in beggarly fashion, among the