Ten Pogromists on Trial in Polotzk
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Ten Pogromists on Trial in Polotzk

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency Mail Service)

Ten former police officers under the Czarist regime are being tried at Polotzk in the Witebsk district in White Russia on a charge of having taken part in the pogrom against the Jews in Polotzk twenty-two years ago, in 1904.

At the end of 1904, the workers of Polotzk, ninety per cent of them Jews, assembled in the market place to hold a demonstration. The Chief of Police ordered them to disperse. The demonstrators replied with revolutionary cries. A detachment of police was thereupon sent out against the demonstrators and dispersed them by force. Immediately after, the mob, led by police officers, began looting Jewish shops in the market place and when the workers fought back the police called out a military detachment which shot into the crowd, many people being killed and wounded.

This was the signal for a pogrom in Polotzk which raged for several days. Scores of Jews were killed and wounded hundreds of Jewish houses and shops were looted and demolished. The Jewish self-defence was surrounded by soldiery and when they surrendered the soldiers shot them down in cold blood.

Forty witnesses have been called, nearly all of them Jews who lost close relatives in the pogroms.