A RUSSIAN HOLOCAUST

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 256, 8 March 1911, Page 5

A RUSSIAN HOLOCAUST

PICTURE HALL DESTROYED. AUDIENCE CAUGHT LIKE RATS IN A TRAP. NO REASONABLE EXIT. By Cable—Pr«ss Association—Copyright. St. Petersburg, March 6. A cinematograph fire occurred at Bologne. Ninety persons were incinerated, and forty injured. Received 8, 12.5 a.m. St. Petersburg, March 7.

The inhabitants of Bologne are chiefly railwaymen. Many peasants came to see the cinematograph slides dealing with the liberation of the serfs. It was also the last day of the carnival preceding Lent.

The show was given in a wooden building with three doors, whereof two were closed, and the other barred in order that only one person should be admitted at one time. The windows and shutters were closed. An explosion of benzine oceurred, and in a few seconds the hall was a mass of flames. Twenty-five, mostly men, retained their presence of mind, and escaped by a narrow passage. The rest were burned. { A party of townsmen pluckily dashed into the building in a desperate effort to save their wives and children, but nearly all the. rescuers perished, the fall of the roof completing the holocaust. Firemen were long in arriving, and their efforts were fruitless. They could only help to remove the charred beams and boards from the corpses, many being unrecognisable and in fragments, which the peasants lifted in sleighs by candlelight, and took to the mortuary. There were heart-rending scenes, parents with bleeding hands digging in the smouldering ruins for their children. Ninety corpses have been extricated, but it is believed that 120 perished.