St. Petersburg

... Consequently, the atmosphere in Bialystok was not conducive to artists and dreamers. Painters, poets and writers had found no welcome there, needing to travel instead to St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Wilno and other more inviting places. Bialystok did have one painter, Rozenecki, who used to take walks in the streets dressed in a uniform and wearing long hair. He did not earn a living from his painting and gave art lectures in schools for an income. Rozenecki taught and encour- aged the famous Bialystoker painter, Benn (Ben-Zion Rabinowicz), who now lives in Paris and whose artistic works are quite popular. ...

... Several Jewish leaders risked their lives by appeal- ing to the authorities, pleading with them to stop the killing and the looting, but to no avail. One of these leaders did manage, however, to steal out of Bialystok, and from a neighboring town he sent a telegram to the Duma, the Russian parliament in St. Petersburg. This cable, revealing the pogrom in Bialystok, generated a storm of protest in the Duma, which immediately sent a delegation of three deputies to Bialystok. They arrived on Saturday, June 3rd, the third day of the pogrom. As soon as they appeared on the scene, the bloodshed ended and the police unsuccessfully attempted to erase the grisly signs of the slaughter. The deputies saw for themselves the great destruction in the city, as well as the large number of victims. Their bodies were gathered from the streets and from their homes and taken to the Jewish hospital, where they were laid out in long lines. The observers also saw pools of warm blood that extended from the streets to the hospital — the blood of murdered and wounded Jews. ...