The Abyss of Despair

Yeven Metzulah,the 17th century chronicle depicting Jewish life inRussia and Poland during Chmielnicki Massacres of 1648-49, by Rav Noson Hanover, painfully reveiws the forerunner to the holocaust. Three hundred years before Hitler, Jews in Poland and Ukraine suffered an attack unprecedented in its brutality and scale.In 1648 until 1650s, Ukrainians led by Bohdan Chmielicki waged a revolution against Polish rule. In every town they entered, not only did the Ukrainians attack the Poles, but they massacred all the Jews.Approximately 100,000 jews were killed and nearly 300 Jewish communities were destroyed. Cossack cruelty was so great that many Jews preferred to flee to captivity under Tartars, to be sold as slaves.

The following excerpts describe eyewitness accounts of the atrocities :

In the city of Mogila they slaughtered 800 nobles together with their wives and children as well as 700 Jews, also with wives and children. Some were cut into pieces, others were ordered to dig graves into which Jewish women and children were thrown and buried alive. Jews were given rifles and ordered to kill each other...They surround young women and, as they struggled to escape, cut their clothes from their bodies. Then they performed abominations on them until they died screaming....
They arrived... (disguised) as if they had come with the Poles... in order that he open the gates of the fortress... and they succeeded... and they massacred about 6,000 souls in the town... and they drowned several hundreds in the water and by all kinds of cruel torments. In the synagogue, before the Holy Ark, they slaughtered with butchers' knives... after which they destroyed the synagogue and took out all the Torah books... they tore them up... and they laid them out... for men and animals to trample on... they also made sandals of them... and several other garments".
Some were skinned alive and their flesh was thrown to the dogs; some had their hands and limbs chapped off and their bodies thrown on the highway to be trampled by wagons and crushed by horses; some had wounds inflicted upon them and were then thrown on the street to die a slow death. They tore open women and then whipped them forcing them to crawl to their deaths.... others were buried alive. The enemy slaughtered infants in their mothers' laps. They were sliced into pieces like fish.... The infants were hung on the breasts of their mothers. Some children were pierced with spears.
"They ripped up the bellies of pregnant women, took out the unborn children, and flung them in their faces. They tore open the bellies of some of them and placed a living cat within the belly and they left them alive thus, first cutting off their hands so that they should not be able to take the living cat out of the belly ... and there was never an unnatural death in the world that they did not inflict upon them."

In another account from a Rabbi Shabbetai ben Meir HaCohen (the Shach), who survived Gezaras Tach V'Tat:
"On the same day 1,500 people were killed in the city of Human in Russia on the Sabbath. The nobles [Cossacks] with whom the wicked mob had again made an alliance chased all the Jews from the city into the fields and vineyards where the villains surrounded them in a circle, stripped them to their skin and ordered them to lie on the ground. The villains spoke to the Jews with friendly and consoling words: 'Why do you want to be killed, strangled and slaughtered like an offering to your God Who poured out His anger upon you without mercy? Would it not be safer for you to worship our gods, our images and crosses and we would form one people which would unite together.' "But the holy and faithful people who so often allowed themselves to be murdered for the sake of the Lord, raised their voices together in almighty in Heaven and cried: 'Hear of Israel the Lord our God, the Holy One and the King of the Universe, we have been murdered for Thy sake so often already. O Lord God of Israel let us remain faithful to Thee.' Afterward they recited the confession of sins and said: 'We are guilty and thus recognize the Divine judgement.' Now the villains turned upon them and there was not one of them who did not fall victim."



Also, Eli Weisel's fictitious work on those years is a tremendously worthwhile read
-amshinover lives in amshinov plus or minus a week