RED TERROR

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 944, 10 April 1930, Page 12

RED TERROR

ANOTHER HORROR STORY WOMAN’S ORDEAL IN RUSSIA Graphic stories of the ordeal of Christians in Russia were related recently by an Englishwoman who has just escaped after nearly 12 years of the Terror. The woman, an artist, was at Odessa at the outbreak of war. Her fiance, a Russian, was shot for his royalist sympathies, and she was thrown into a Bolshevik gaol and twice taken by a firing squad to be shot. She escaped toward the end of last year by means of smuggled papers and arrived in London penniless. As she is afraid that friends who assisted her in Russia may suffer, her name is withheld. “I had saved several thousands of pounds,” she said recently, “but when the Bolshevik revolution came everything I possessed was confiscated, including my jewels, furs, money and stocks. “In April, 1920, I had my first taste of Bolshevik prisons. With hundreds of French, Italians, and Poles I was arrested because I refused to surrender my jewels and other personal possessions. “Old men and women were huddled into filthy cells. A Greek who was in the same cell as I was taken out and shot because he had sold his diamond ring to get food for his family. I was kept in prison for five months, and during the whole time I had to sleep on the stone floor. Spitting on the Cross “Twice I was taken out at midnight and told that I was to be shot, but each time I was taken back to the cell. This form of mental torture is frequent, and nobody knows when he or she may be taken out and shot on some pretext. “When I came out of prison I was destitute and refused permission to leave Russia, as I was regarded as an enemy of Bolshevism. “Soon after this the Bolsheviks began their campaign against the Christian churches. Children were taught to spit on the Cross and to deride religious symbols and those connected with the churches. “During those years, of: my own knowledge, hundreds of Russian priests had their tongues torn out and their eyes burned. “The Terror was intensified last August, when Sundays were abolished. Children are not allowed to use the word ‘mother’ and are taught that she is ‘the woman who bore you.’ It is a crime to be found in possession of , a Bible or a religious book, and ren- » ders anybody liable to be thrown into prison and shot or done to death in more horrible fashion.” The woman declared that everywhere in Russia she found a growing hatred of the Bolshevik regime, and added:—• “I am very fond of the Russian people. Ido not think the Bolsheviks will succeed iu stamping out religion, but if the Terror continues it will end in a religious civil war.”