Page:My Disillusionment In Russia.djvu/215

 the floor for lack of benches, a pathetic lot, bewildered and unable to grasp the combination of events which had caught them in the net.

More than one thousand able-bodied men were locked up in the concentration camp, of no service to the community and requiring numerous officials to guard and attend them. And yet Russia was badly in need of labour energy. It seemed to me an impractical waste.

Later we visited the prison. At the gates an angry mob was gesticulating and shouting. I learned that the weekly parcels brought by relatives of the inmates had that morning been refused acceptance by the prison authorities. Some of the people had come for miles and had spent their last ruble for food for their arrested husbands and brothers. They were frantic. Our escort, the woman in charge of the Bureau, promised to investigate the matter. We made the rounds of the big prison—a depressing sight of human misery and despair. In the solitary were those condemned to death. For days their look haunted me—their eyes full of terror at the torturing uncertainty, fearing to be called at any moment to face death.

We had been asked by our Kharkov friends to find a certain young woman in the prison.