ing these words he began to laugh and rudely pinched
one of my companions. In the mean time the soldiers
had filled the glasses with wine. We were forced to
drink it.

When I refused to drink the wine offered me, at a
sign from the officer two soldiers seized me by my arms
and held my head backwards while a third poured the
wine down my throat. The Germans had certainly
mixed some drug with the wine, for all of us as soon as
we had drunk were seized with vertigo. Then they forced
us to leave the cell, either one at a time or in groups of
two. When my turn came, I tried to resist; but the
soldiers picked me up under my arms and carried me
across the corridor. . . . I then lost consciousness.

When I came home on the next morning, I found
my mother in her bed, without consciousness; she was
in a prolonged swoon. I endeavored to bring her to
herself again, but every time she fell back in a faint. . . .

She had undergone the same violence as I. . . . I
decided to leave home to come here to my sister's
house, for after what had happened, my mother and I
could no longer look each other in the face.

The Polish population, the immense majority of which
is profoundly religious, was thunderstruck to learn how the
Germans had behaved towards the miraculous ikon of the
Virgin, the object of all the Catholic pilgrimages, and
throughout the city there was a state of unspeakable moral
depression. Certain ones proposed to carry out a general
mourning. The women immediately adopted this idea;
that very evening they were all clothed in black.

The Germans themselves, told everywhere, how "joy-
ously they had passed the night" at the monastery. It is
related also in the city, that at the end of the orgy in the
monastery, the Germans, after having done violence to the
women, had also offered the basest insults to the members
of the clergy who were among the hostages and of whom
was the prior of the monastery of Iasnogor.

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