Describing in detail how the savage mob raged for several hours beating up every Jew it caught, stabbing many of them, breaking windows with rocks, and looting whatever they could lay their hands on, the memorandum emphasizes that “the authorities remained inactive until the municipal sanitation workers joined the hooligans.”
Touching upon the anti-Jewish riots which followed the next evening in Forstadt, near Grodno, the memorandum declares that a detail of ten policemen would have been sufficient to check the hooligans from invading Forstadt. This detail was, however, not assigned by the authorities.
“The pogron in Forstadt was even more terrible than in Grodno and lasted from ten o’clock in the evening until two the next morning without any interference whatever on the part of the authorities,” the memorandum says.
The memorandum enumerates all Jews who were wounded by the hooligans and estimates the number of seriously injured Jews at more than fifty.
“That the hooligans felt perfectly secure and immune in their dastardly activities and feared no interference on the part of the authorities is made perfectly obvious by the fact that they attacked and robbed Jews in the very center of the city, right near the Governor’s residence and but a few steps away from the office of the local military headquarters,” the memorandum points out.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
