Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers

By Jill Culiner

The Fusgeyers were the thousands of Romanian Jews who, unwilling to tolerate anti-Semitism, left their country on foot between 1899 and 1907, and headed for North America. Destitute but resolute, they supported themselves by giving theatrical performances or selling stories and poems. In North America, some worked as peddlers, shopkeepers, café and restaurant owners, actors, and writers in the famous Yiddish theatre; others helped build the railway west, or worked in the gold and silver mines, or joined the Jewish agricultural communities.

Walking in their footsteps across Romania, and following the immigrant trail across Europe and North America, Jill Culiner's Finding Home is a detailed account of Romanian Jewish history and a touching reminder of the courage of our ancestors.

Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers won The Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum Prize in Canadian Jewish History, and was shortlisted for the ForeWord Magazine Prize Book of the Year Award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Association Boule d'Or
• Release date: Dec 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9782957607310

Jill Culiner

A contemporary artist, writer and photographer, Culiner was born in New York, raised in Toronto, and was granted British nationality. For the last fifty years, she has been living and working in Turkey, Germany, France, England, Hungary, Greece, and the Netherlands. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, and talked about these adventures when a broadcaster onRadio France.Culiner's exhibitions about the World Wars and the Holocaust, La Mémoire Effacée, travelled throughout France, Hungary and Canada under the auspices of l'UNESCO, and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her (social-critical) artwork has been shown in Germany, France, England, Spain, Italy, and Poland.She presently lives in a former auberge in France that is so chaotic and strange, it has beenclassified as a museum: http://www.jill-culiner.comHer non-fiction, Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers won the Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum Prize for Canadian Jewish History and was shortlisted for the ForeWord Magazine Award. Her biography of a nineteenth-century rebel Yiddish poet and singer, A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard, was published by Claret Press in 2022.

Book preview

Trekking into History

Now, among the Jews, these words are heard: Let us go away from Romania, away from the land of our birth where we expect nothing but tyranny and hunger! and since autumn, the widespread immigration resembles a wild flight. In every possible way: by sea, along the Danube, by train or by foot, this mass of people are moving towards the west, towards England, the United States of North America and Canada. Many families allow themselves to be influenced by the Sultan’s promises of colonies in the Near East where hunger and poverty rule. Others hope for a future on the island of Cypress and find none; yet this stream of emigration rushes ahead unheeded ... The extreme poverty of most of these emigrants is heart breaking. The generous help, provided largely by Jews in Germany and Austria, has no more effect than that of a drop of water falling onto a hot stone.

— Edenbridge, Nathanael[1]

MY ROUND-BELLIED PATERNAL grandfather told incomplete tales, heavily laced with brag and impossible to confirm. Greedy, even desperate for images of another world, an elusive Old Country far from domestic Toronto’s dull predictability, I begged for details. Received a pittance, most often a dismissive chuckle. I was only a child, a girl; in his eyes, that wasn’t worth much. My grandmother was even less forthcoming. A specialist in shrugs, she would only murmur, That won’t interest you. I had, therefore, to content myself with shadows.

Born in 1884, in the shtetl of Svyniukhy, Ukraine, my grandfather grew up in an inn (with a linseed oil press), built by his great grandparents. His mother ran the business, supported her four sons and her pious, learned husband who, removed from life’s tedious banalities, studied Talmud. My grandfather, a handsome young man at age sixteen, was determined to be a dandy. At night, he crept into barns, pulled hair from pigs and horses; by day, he sold it to craftsmen. The proceeds were spent on fancy shirt collars, gaining him the admiration of young women and the disapproval of staid elders: sneering, they nicknamed him chotchkeleh, Little Ornament. Untouched by censure, he continued to rebel and cut his long payess, his side-curls, which incurred his devout father’s wrath. And, thus emboldened by vanity, fancy and fashionable, he frittered away long-gone summer afternoons on a bench in front of the inn: Number one post from which to ogle females, he reminisced seventy years later (and chuckled still, a voyeur’s chuckle). Until, finally, he fell in love.

A river meandered through Svyniukhy, right there beside the shtetl where the Jews lived. And one day, my grandfather glimpsed a feminine form over on the far bank. A romance was born, a shtetl romance, an Eastern European version of Little White Dove and Running Bear (or so I made it out to be). Every day the two of them would stand on their respective banks, gaze at each other with longing. She was not, however, Little White Dove, he wasn’t Running Bear. The romance never became an epic one. Neither waded into the middle of the river. Their hands did not meet, their lips never touched and, thus, the Happy Hunting Ground remained forever unattainable. Instead, my great grandfather, a stickler for Jewish law and custom, immediately nipped this silliness in its bud. A decent marriage with a suitable bride, my grandfather’s first wife, was arranged.

At age twenty-one, my grandfather was inducted into the Tsar’s army. He did his level best to be unsuitable for service, poured acid into an ear to destroy the drum. But army doctors remained unimpressed. Another solution had to be found. Perhaps it was time to leave Russia, to abandon the constriction of the shtetl, the control of his father? He had heard much of foreign parts, for an inn is an open window: travellers pass, spin yarns of amusing folk, enticing events and big opportunities, all far beyond village boundaries. Yes, it was time, finally, to make good, to begin life in the fast lane. In 1905, abandoning hearth, wife and a father who cut the collar of his coat (a sign of mourning), my grandfather took the money he’d received as a dowry (five hundred dollars — quite a bit, back then), and set out, on foot, with a couple of friends. They crossed the border into what was then Austrian Galicia, trekked to Vienna, went on to Trieste, and suffered a thirty-day boat journey to New York.

Irritatingly vague when it came to details of this trek, I could only imagine what he stubbornly omitted. Later, when cynicism developed and he presented me with no new images, I began to doubt the tale’s veracity. What choice did I have? Even when he was in his nineties and I begged, prodded and grilled him — his answers remained vague. They had wandered for two years, had gone from shtetl to shtetl, had taken on odd jobs to earn sustenance, had hitched rides in peasant’s horse-drawn wagons. If I wished to believe, only my own imagination would paint in the mud lanes, shtetl interiors, sly beggars and wily characters encountered in Mendele Mokher Sforim’s nineteenth-century autobiographical work Fishke the Lame.[2]

On New York’s Lower East Side, my grandfather took up residence, in around 1907, with an uncle who had hastily immigrated after the theft of a church gem. He got a job packing eggs, then as a debt collector. He also accumulated debts. In a photograph sent back to the Old Country he is elegant, a dandy in suit, cravat and pince-nez, a sophisticate, a man about town. What was the solution to living beyond his means? A hasty retreat to Canada, to northern Ontario, to take up the offer of cheap land for farming.

Like many Jews who came to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with farming in mind, my grandfather had no concept of what breaking up virgin territory entailed; with no skills in that domain, he failed — those trees were so large; how could you cut them all down? When forest fires burnt out his half-hearted attempt at homesteading, he joined other immigrants in laying track for the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway. Then he had a better idea; he’d set up a general store where railway workers could obtain supplies and find accommodation in a small straw-filled barn. This success story, he told with gusto. But the trek? That walk through a world that no longer exists? No, of that he said nothing. Would not satisfy my curiosity.

Only years later did I learn that my grandfather had not been the only person to claim he had walked across Europe; (unsubstantiated) tales of grandparents walking to the ports, or even as far as Paris, Berlin and Strasbourg, have been passed down in many families and become part of Jewish myth. Who really walked? And how far? These questions are impossible to answer. On the roads, there were those fleeing pogroms and persecution, those escaping military service, those who were hungry and desperate, and those too poor to pay for train tickets. All certainly went some distance on foot; when they reached cities, Jewish aid agencies sent them further (and sometimes back) by train. But the most admired, the most well-known wanderers of all, were those who participated in an organized movement of pedestrians: the Romanian Fusgeyers.

Persecution in Romania:

The Roots of the Jewish Exodus

UNTIL 1940, THE HEART of the Yiddish-speaking world spread over Poland, western Russia (now Ukraine and Byelorussia), the Baltic countries, Bessarabia, eastern Hungary and Romania. Here is where the uncountable number of shtetlach could be found. Neither towns nor villages in their own right, the shtetl was the Jewish section of a village or town: a village within a village; a village within a town. And shtetl life often contrasted sharply with that in surrounding non-Jewish areas, as Isaac Astruc from the Alliance Israélite Universelle noted:

The town, with its train station that is almost monumental, with its beautiful park, large paved avenue, clean sidewalks and two storey houses ... seems to be a European town. But penetrate the streets surrounding the main artery which is inhabited by the Jews and the disillusion is cruel. [Here] as in other Moldavian towns, all concern is for the Christian areas. In the Jewish areas, those on foot are stuck in the mud in winter and suffocate from the dust in summer ... in doorways, under stairways, in squalid rooms, at the bottom of damp cellars, there, covered in rags, they clump together, one on top of the other and families of three, five, eight, ten, doze where they can.[3]

Jews had long resided in the Romanian principalities of Walachia and Moldavia, probably arriving with the Romans as purveyors to the army, also as soldiers. But, when Christianity spread, attitudes to the Jewish presence soon changed. Although forbidden to inhabit certain streets and districts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Jews were nonetheless summoned by Moldavian boyars (landowners) to establish and populate new market towns, yet the Christian Orthodox Church decreed that Jews were never to become an acceptable part of Romanian society. In 1640, the Church Codes of Walachia and Moldavia banned all relationship between Jews and Christians; in 1771 and 1803, religious books of anti-Jewish incitement appeared. As in other European countries, when state coffers were empty, Jewish money became an object of pursuit; blood libels — Jews were accused of killing Christian children and using their blood for ritual purposes — were instigated and these resulted in pogroms.

In 1819, Russia occupied the principalities of Moldavia and Walachia, which had long been under the orders of the Turkish sultan. Although the Turks had been fairly liberal towards Jewish residents, under the virulently anti-Semitic Russians, conditions worsened for them. The Russian occupation also infuriated non-Jewish Romanians; modern, young intellectuals educated in France, were nurturing dreams of a Greater Romania. Two revolts failed, one in 1821, another in 1848, but ten years later, after the Peace Treaty of Paris concluded the Crimean War; Moldavia and Walachia were finally united; Bucharest became the capital of the new country.

In 1859, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, a prominent figure in the 1848 Revolution, became Prince of Moldavia and Walachia, and he declared himself willing to emancipate the Jews in exchange for financial compensation. However, the Jewish Community failed to seize the opportunity, dithering over the sum to be paid, quarrelling over the necessity of obtaining political rights — the Orthodox claimed such rights would only encourage modern thought and cause believers to stray from the righteous path. When, in 1866, a constitution was produced, the seventh article stated that Romanian citizenship would be restricted to the Christian population only. Romanian Jews were now foreigners, and anti-Semitism was part of national identity.

There were protests from the West. On March 3, 1878, a congress presided over by Bismarck produced the Treaty of Berlin: the independence of Romania was recognized, its borders set, but the new country was instructed to extend full civil rights to its non-Christian inhabitants.[4] Still enflamed by the new feelings of nationalism, the Romanian government ignored the injunction and introduced measures that would condemn the Jewish population to poverty.

The Sanitary Laws of 1885 and 1893, concerning all aspects of public health, declared that Jewish pharmacists could no longer acquire or manage pharmacies. Although a Jew could be engaged as a country physician, the position had to be ceded when a Romanian claimed it. Jews could no longer work in psychiatric institutions, they could not be received as free patients in hospitals. To clear areas of their presence, Jewish houses were demolished under sanitary orders.

Laws against peddling were put into effect and the definition of the word peddling was stretched to include shop owners as well as market sellers. As an example, three hundred Jews were rounded up, put into prison, severely beaten, and their goods were confiscated. Others had the clothes taken off their backs and used as evidence in false accusations of peddling. The tobacco trade was also cleared of Jews. Individual cities were allowed to create their own economic restrictions: in Botoşani, Jews were banned from selling soda water, spice bread, certain cakes, sugar and from transporting baker’s bread. In Iaşi, Jewish women were forbidden to sell sugar, flour, or goods manufactured by their families for the market. Albanian Christians and Moslems who also traded as peddlers, going from village to village, exchanging merchandise for eggs, poultry and other products, were allowed to continue on in their trade.

Although 15 percent of primary and secondary school pupils were Jewish, the new laws of 1893 and 1896 excluded them: less than 10 percent of Jewish children were permitted to attend elementary schools. When Jewish communities tried to open their own schools, the authorities blocked their attempts. The laws of 1898 barred Jews from upper and agricultural schools. Although allowed to attend schools of commerce, arts and trade, a quota was imposed; only one-fifth of the available places could be occupied by aliens; tuition for aliens was so exorbitant, it precluded their attendance. Anti-Semitic propaganda became so respectable, it was taught in state secondary schools. The Grammatica Romana Escercitii Bucurescu instructed:

Never believe a Jew, even when he is on the point of death.

A Hebrew never dines until he has cheated someone.

In almost all the Moldavian villages, the inns are held by Jews who, resembling dangerous leeches, suck the peasants of their wealth by encouraging them to drink.[5]

Further measures prohibited male Jews from becoming officers in the military, customs officials, journalists, craftsmen and clerks. Although Jews had traditionally been owners of the isolated inns along the country’s roads, new laws limited the distribution and sale of alcohol to those registered to vote. As foreigners, Jews could not vote; unable to obtain or renew licences, the inn-keeping families — men, women, and children — were expelled at bayonet point, and their stocks were liquidated. Jews could neither own nor cultivate land, farmers were no longer authorized to employ them; they were expelled from villages on the slimmest of pretexts.

Letters of distress began to flood into the offices of the Alliance Israélite in Paris:

Hoping that you will take an interest in the miserable state of the Jews of Romania, I would like to make known to you the following: I, Sloim Strul Ferarcu, worker ... formerly serving in the army under the Romanian flag, now find myself chased from the commune where I have lived all my life because of a simple caprice of the mayor, Duca, and the notary Strajescu. On the excuse that the owner of the house in which I live is a Conservative whereas the leaders are Liberals, all my miserable belongings were, by force, transported into the open fields and exposed to the weather. To complete my unhappiness, my wife, unable to support so much misery, became mad.[6]

Eventually, 20,000 Jews found themselves on the streets of Romania and dying of starvation. There were many suicides in Iaşi, Bacau and Roman, and more letters flowed into charitable agencies:

I am in the greatest misery with seven children and because of the impossibility to earn money, I am condemned to die of starvation. I hope you will come to our aid.[7]

I am begging you with tears in my eyes. I am a poor tailor with six children and I am unable to earn enough money for our daily bread. Please have the goodness to come to our aid and protection because I am starving to death with my children.[8]

I am a worker without work. I don’t have daily bread to offer. My children scream for bread and there are days when I don’t come home out of pity for the children, I can’t see this pain.[9]

As early as 1870, Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, the first American Consul General to the united principalities of Moldavia and Walachia, visited Bucharest and tried to influence the government on behalf of the country’s beleaguered Jews.[10] But the inaction of the ministers and a pogrom in the city of Ismail, in 1872, soon convinced Peixotto that the only solution was mass immigration to the United States, a suggestion the Romanian authorities initially approved. However, as non-citizens, Jews were unable to obtain passports. Peixotto and his friends in the United States put new pressure on the government; it agreed, in principal, to grant passports to those wishing to leave. The agreement was merely a foil, for the power to issue passports remained with local officials and often depended on bribery. Many emigrants would leave Romania without papers.

Peixotto’s plan of mass emigration was rejected by many European and American Jewish leaders in a conference held in Brussels in 1872: it was feared both that Christian wrath would be wakened and philanthropic agencies overwhelmed. But the solution was greeted with enthusiasm by Romanian Jews. With Peixotto’s encouragement, local Jewish communities formed emigration societies that took up subscriptions to pay the costs of those wishing to leave and provided maintenance for widows, the elderly and the disabled who would remain.

The plight of Romania’s Jews also attracted the notice of the press in Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London and demands that Romania adhere to the Berlin Treaty increased. But the Romanian press responded that the government was merely taking certain measures against foreigners in the interests of the native population. Adolphe Crémieux, French senator, former minister of justice and then president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an organization created to aid Jewish victims of pogroms, famines and epidemics, delivered a speech in the Romanian parliament. However, Crémieux had no more success than Peixotto. Even Sir Moses Montefiore, once sheriff of London (he had received his baronetcy because of his humanitarian efforts on behalf of Jews), founder of agricultural communities in Israel and of shelters for immigrants in Rotterdam and London, had failed. He had come to Bucharest in 1867 and demanded that Prince (later King) Carol I put an immediate stop to the persecutions. But the prince merely besieged his father, Anton von Hohenzollern, with letters begging him to find a way of evading the country’s obligations towards the Jews.[11]

In 1899 and 1900, harvests were poor and a severe depression gripped the country. Anti-Semitic decrees were applied with new severity and anti-Jewish speeches were delivered in parliament. Riots took place in several towns and, encouraged by the anti-Semitic prefect Cananâu, a pogrom broke out in Iaşi:

For several hours there was fighting, merciless blows, pillaging, and devastation, all under the paternal eyes of the police authorities and the army, which interfered only to hinder the Jews from defending themselves.[12]

In May 1900, the Alliance Israélite Universelle of Paris sent their representative Isaac Astruc, a teacher from Rushtshuk, Bulgaria, to Romania. A descendent of Sephardic Jews, Astruc’s primary goal in Romania was to discourage emigration, especially for those who stood little chance of meeting the increasingly stringent North American entry requirements, and to establish schools, aid services and food banks within Romania. Although Astruc visited seventy-two towns and townships and remained in the country for twenty years, he was unable to discourage mass emigration.[13]

One destination of Jews leaving Romania was Israel (then Ottoman Palestine) where Romanians founded two of the oldest villages: Rosh Pina and Zikhron Ya’akov. London and Paris with their large Jewish communities also attracted many. But most emigrants dreamt of a new start in North America: between 1871 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, almost 30 percent of Romanian Jews migrated to Canada and the United States. In 1881, the philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch established the Baron de Hirsch Institutes in both Montreal and New York and the Jewish Colonisation Association in London. He also purchased tracts of land in North and South America for needy Jews wishing to farm and sent representatives to Eastern Europe to inform Jews about emigration possibilities.[14] In this, de Hirsch was helped by Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, Canada’s High Commissioner to Great Britain. In 1882, Galt and the London Mansion House Committee arranged for Jewish farmers to be granted homesteads and financial assistance. In 1884, a book vaunting the opportunities of farming in Manitoba was translated into Yiddish and put into circulation in Romania by a Hamburg shipping agent, and the philathropist Maurice de Hirsch was sending representatives to Eastern Europe with information about emigration. In 1890, he granted $20,000 to the Montreal Hebrew Benevolent Society for the purchase of a building for welfare work (it was named the Baron de Hirsch Institute) and assisted in establishing the Hirsch Colony farming community in the west.

Leaving the country en masse, Jews sold their possessions and travelled at their own expense by train and ship. The impoverished and desperate attempted to reach the Austro-Hungarian border on foot, but the risks were great. Unprotected, alone, victims of a hostile population and the anti-Semitic police, Jews were rounded up, accused of being peddlers, beaten, thrown into prison or deported (probably murdered) and never seen again.[15] There was only one solution: those wishing to cross Romania on foot had to do so in groups.

The Fusgeyers and the Jewish Pedestrian Movement

AFTER 1899, THOSE WHO organized themselves into groups to walk across Romania called themselves fusgeyers (pronounced foosgayer — the Yiddish word for foot-goers, pedestrians or wayfarers). Fusgeyers were healthy, professional men and women: trades people, artisans, workers and students who trained in long-distance walking and vowed to share their last morsel of bread with one another. Groups organized themselves in cities all across Romania — Bârlad, Adjud, Iaşi, Roman, Bacau, Bucharest, Galați, Brăila, Ploieşti, Râmnicu Sarăt — and they named themselves accordingly: The Bârlad Fusgeyers, The Foot Wanderers from Roman and One Heart of Galatz. Others were organized by profession: The Painters and Dyers of Bucharest, Students Workers and Clerks of Bucharest, but there were also The Wandering Jew and groups composed entirely of women — one was called Bat Ami (Daughter of My People).[16]

It is unknown how many Fusgeyer groups existed, how many participants there were in each (although most ranged from between forty and three hundred walkers), or how long the Fusgeyer movement existed; the American Jewish Yearbook of 1903 mentions that, of the two to three hundred Jews leaving Romania each week, many were planning to go on foot.[17] By then, anxious to alleviate suffering, the Jewish Colonisation Association paid the transportation costs of all artisans as well as for the families of those already in America and who possessed one hundred and fifty francs. In 1907, mass immigration was still under way in the wake of new expulsions of Jews from villages in what the Vienna Allianz called "a silent and bloodless massacre.[18]

Before leaving the country, Fusgeyers established a press in which they bid farewell to their old homeland in sentimental songs, poems and stories and appealed for financial aid:

Brothers, Fellow Believers,

With heavy hearts we leave the land of our fathers to wander in foreign places. Need and misery are the driving forces of our desperate project. We have drunk the last bitter drops from the cup of suffering, fought for existence with courage and perseverance and withstood everything with stoic calm but in vain! Our strength has deserted us and we can hold out no longer. Hope and your noble hearts are now our only support. Your generosity is the only possible shelter for our desperate struggle.

Brothers! Think of the suffering of our wives and children, think about our grief stricken parents and you will not remain indifferent. On our long journey we will be at the mercy of the weather, hunger and thirst. Relief can come to us only through your sympathy. Our heart-felt thanks and God’s blessing will accompany your support.

— The Foot Wanderers from Roman[19]

Although dozens of these newspapers and brochures appeared, there was never more than one issue of each; sold along the way, they were used to raise money. More funds were raised when Fusgeyers gave amateur theatrical performances and choral concerts in towns with Jewish communities.

The routes that Fusgeyers took across Romania varied; some crossed in a southeasterly direction, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, and turned northwest after Ploieşti, following the main road to the (former) border crossing at Predeal. Others travelled over Bukovina (Austro-Hungary) to Brody in Austrian Galicia. Once across the Romanian border, Jewish aid associations provided funds for the train journey to the ports of Hamburg and Rotterdam. Although the original idea had been to cross all of Europe on foot, the Austro-Hungarian government, long overwhelmed by stragglers and beggars on their roads, passed laws allowing only those with train tickets over the border.

Members of those Fusgeyer groups who could afford to do so, wore uniforms. Others sported distinguishing caps or straw hats and leather peasant sandals (apintosh or opinci). They carried lanterns for walking at night and marched into towns with an organized, military-like pomp. It was, no doubt, this display of dignity and courage that roused the admiration of the populace; careful to circumvent towns where officials were said to harbour anti-Semitic feelings, Fusgeyers recounted how impoverished Romanian peasants waited for them along the road, offering water, bread, food, tobacco, wine and blessings for a safe journey. Naturally, such reactions annoyed the Romanian government; it responded to the adverse publicity with denials of ill treatment and discrimination.

Jews of Romania have no cause of complaint either against the Rumanian people or the Rumanian government. The emigration question was inflated by a few roving Jew-vagabonds. These irresponsible Jews exploit the ignorance of their co-religionists and threaten them with being deprived of their livelihood as a result of the crisis.[20]

Encouraged by the success of the Fusgeyer movement, others who were impoverished, aged and unable to carry out the long trek soon began their own expeditions.

Brothers of Israel, Unable to further endure the misery into which we have been plunged, condemned to die of starvation because we no longer have anything left to sell and because we are threatened with expulsion from our homes to be forced to wander in the streets, we — 200 families, in total 800 people — have united in the decision to leave the country on foot.[21]

Although these desperate attempts quickly disintegrated, Isaac Astruc sent reports of deprivation, homelessness and starvation:

In Galatz reality goes far beyond imaginable horrors ... I saw famished people, children who were dying because they hadn’t a piece of bread to eat or even, although it is hard to believe, a drop of water. One of the first groups I encountered ... was composed of fifty-two families, in total 220 people, installed in the courtyard of a synagogue. They had been parked in this nauseating courtyard for ten days.

I must mention another group of sixty families who are presently living in the open air in an abandoned cemetery. One has to imagine 300 people, men, women and children wandering through the cemetery like famished wolves, burnt by the sun during the day, tormented by mosquitoes in the night, all three hundred of them with bare feet, sick, some moaning, others crying; fever-racked women who are incapable of feeding their young, the