Khortiza, November 15, 1919

We have now reached the stage which I foresaw. There is no physician to be called upon. Both are dangerously ill, and we fear that they will never get up again.

With us at home, everybody is sick, except Marguerite and myself.

One thing which I am very much alarmed about now is the growing difficulty in obtaining fuel for heating the house. I am doing things which seem almost a sacrilege: I felled trees in the orchard. I can think of no fuel but this. Some people cut wood out of their houses, chop off the rafters under the roof.

Marguerite drudges her life out over the work with the sick. Day and night, there is literally no rest for us. Really it is much worse at night time than in the day. We cannot alternate with each other because it takes more than one person at once to take care of the sick. And yet, how little we are able to ease their sufferings. The only ease we can give them is to cool their hot foreheads and hold the glass of water to their lips. They are so helpless. Often we exhaust every means in trying to calm the delirious ones in their ravings. One feels as if he were in a madhouse. While I, for a moment, sat down near the bed writing a few lines of my diary, the eldest girl with a sudden movement of her hand takes from me the sheet of paper in order to read it. She wants to see whether I am writing to a foreign country for help. She has a notion of being taken away from Russia by an airplane. In her state of high fever, the desire to escape from this troubled country had given rise to impossible ideas.

Soon after this she inquired of me “whether the mermaid had arrived to deliver the sugar.” She is longing for sugar. There is no sugar anywhere.

Suddenly my friend rises, puts aside his covers quickly and, with disturbed looks, is ready to leave the room. He says he must help his wife who is endangered outdoors by “those” (mostly we do not name the Anarchists—“those” indicates the whole company). I had much trouble in quieting the man in his delirium.—

I had to go away for half an hour today. I wanted to see whether in our neighbor’s house really exist the same conditions as do in our own. It is the same. And those not yet touched by the malady feel already the shadow of that hand which soon will grasp them too.

The Anarchists began to carry away their sick men into the neighboring villages. Those, however, who are not sick, demand as before our slave service, regardless of whether we can take care of our own patients or not. They are our lords and masters, and we have but to obey, without offering resistance, every arbitrary mood of theirs. We scarcely are able to resist even in moral matters.

A moment ago a student of mine passed by. He gave me some news. All school buildings have become hospitals full of Anarchists. Boys and girls of our community are compelled to do service there. For the first they took the students who are still spared by the spotted fever.

The number of people not yet sick is already so small that the Anarchists could not find enough to do the work for them, and thus they got some more slaves in other colonist villages. As soon as they become sick too, they are taken back into their villages, and thus the contagious illness is spread rapidly all over the country.