History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II | Page 8

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