Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/252

240 of one of the keepers; and, after these were well established, I added some crustaceans and two little tortoises. This improvised aquarium gave us men, deprived of our freedom, many delightful hours of watching and feeding the fish and the turtles, which grew so accustomed to us that they would take food from our hands.

My second activity was teaching. From the authorities I secured permission to visit the large common cells, where there were sometimes as many as two hundred prisoners quartered in the one room. Here I had long talks and discussions on all sorts of subjects, in order to distract the men from brooding over the stern realities of their position and to put into their hearts and minds the seeds of clean and wholesome thoughts. I remember how I frequently told the stories of some of the great benefactors of mankind to the inmates of Cell No. 1, where one hundred and ten of the worst of criminals, condemned to life sentences in irons, surrounded and listened to me, and how the impressions made by my anecdotes seemed to me quite the same as those on normal men, who look upon a prison as something entirely foreign and far removed from them.

The prisoners came to like and respect me, as they knew that I would not allow an abuse of authority or an unwarranted action to go without protest, and that, if one of the prisoners sought to take liberties with me, I knew how to answer him, just as I had answered Mironoff during the first hour after our arrival. In view of these facts I was chosen at Harbin, and in some of the other prisons, to be the starosta, or headman, of the prisoners. A starosta occupies a position unofficially recognized by the prison as well as by the judicial authorities, is respected and listened to by the prisoners and acts as a mediator between them and the wardens or