Khortiza, February 15, 1920

After the first excursion I had dared to make in most unfavorable weather, I had to stay in bed again for a few days. The temperature was rising, and there were all the symptoms of inflammation of the lungs, especially there were those vehement pains which put one out of breath.

Today, however, I feel better. I even got out of bed. I am disgusted with that bed; it is too short for me to stretch out my limbs. This was so uncomfortable during all those forty days of my illness. But there was no other bed available.

I am sitting here, covered with my overcoat, which I was able to keep because of its poor condition probably, and I am cold, although close enough to the stove. I found a piece of a broken looking-glass today, saw myself and was frightened: scared at the sight of myself. The eyes are sunk deep into the sockets, the head is spotted with bald places where the hair fell out, the beard is neglected and is growing irregularly. That is the picture of all of us. The women had to cut off their hair as short as possible, because of the difficulty of caring for it and because it falls out anyway.

In the afternoon the feeble smile of winter sun fills the damp room. I take my pencil. There are only a few sheets of white paper left. Therefore I have to economize to the utmost, for there is no paper in all Russia, I believe. Even if some speculators would have some I never would be able to get it from them because they ask money.—

In the Nicolaipol county, they say, the spotted fever is raging just as here. The widows of the village Dubovka, whose husbands were all killed one night, died of the spotted fever with the exception of a very few. Who wonders? They had, after that terrible night of slaughter and after the succeeding time of care and sorrows, no strength left to resist the malady. They arc dead as their husbands are. We are not pitying them, but we pity their children. In that farming village alone there are left two hundred orphans. The houses of their parents are destroyed. Either they were pulled down to get the wooden parts because of the priceless value of wood in the steppes of the Ukraine, or they were burned down. Thus the children are to be distributed amongst the sixteen remaining villages. I am mistaken. There are in this district no sixteen villages left. In four of them all inhabitants have been driven out. The former beautiful homes are laid in ruins. And for these few people who are still alive quarters must be provided. There is no other way for us than to accept them into a communistic life.

Indeed, we become willing to help. Never before in our days of wealth would we have responded so quickly to a call for help. That is the way we act and re-act, we human beings. I am thoroughly convinced of the fact that the Western-Europeans would not do very much for us even if they knew conditions here. Their feelings would probably respond a little for a quarter of an hour when hearing all these things, but, besides alms, they would hardly bring us any help. I will not be too hard on them either, for they simply cannot enter into our helpless situation. I know Western Europe pretty well. I lived there for many years, and in different countries.—

What a big “emigration” has taken place. Forty percent of our population here has been settled in the cemetery. In Khortiza there were, besides the mill-owners and the craftsmen, thirty-eight farmers. Seven of them are still living. Some entire families died out. In some houses were found people who had been dead for eight days. One man was found cowering in a corner. In all probability he had broken down from exhaustion, and starvation had done the rest, for there was not found a bit of bread in that house.

In many cases this is the situation: parents have died and children survived. Without outside help they too are mostly lost.

Some political, inexperienced people got a notion, or a hope at least, that the English, the French, or the Germans, or even the Americans would come to occupy these territories and thus help us. Foreign nations will not trouble themselves about us; if they did, they would get for thanks only pestilence and revolutionary doctrines.