Sholom Schwartzbard was extraordinarily calm under the investigation of the French police authorities.
In reply to the questions put to him by the officials he declared: “I wanted to kill Petlura. I have killed him. I am satisfied that I killed him and I am confidently awaiting justice.”
Mrs. Anna Schwartzbard, when examined by the police today, declared that before the assasination, her husband sent her a message explaining that he was going to do his duty and is assuming sole responsibility for his action.
“For a long time my husband was melancholy and nervous. I never knew the cause of it, but looking back, I remember that his depressed mood dated from the time that Petlura started to publish his Ukrainian weekly “Tryzub” (Trident) in Paris. My husband always read this periodical and became terribly excited and moody. On Tuesday morning he refused to eat breakfast. When I asked him whether he was ill he replied ‘No but my nerves are gone.’ He then went out and the next I heard was of the assassination,” she declared.
Mrs. Schwartzbard further stated that while she remained in Petrograd, Schwartzbard went with a regiment of the Red Army to the Ukraine. He later joined the Jewish Self-Defense Corps in the Ukraine. “We returned to France from Russia in 1920. The pogroms haunted him since then. He never spoke of anything else except the pogroms. He wrote continually about the pogroms. He was about to publish a book on the pogroms in the Ukraine. Several exceipts from the book appeared recently in the “Petit Parisien.”
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.
