“This House of Torture remains as much as possible in the condition in which the Bolshevists left it and is now shown to those who care to inspect its gruesome and blood-bespattered rooms.
“Week by week the newspapers published articles for and against the nationalization of women. In South Russia the proposal did not become a legal measure, but in Odessa bands of Bolshevists seized women and girls and carried them off to the Port, the timber yards, and the Alexandrovsky Park for their own purposes. Women used in this way were found in the mornings either dead or mad or in a dying condition. Those found still alive were shot. One of the most awful of my own personal experiences of the New Civilization was hearing at night from my bedroom windows the frantic shrieks of women being raped to death in the park opposite. Screams of shrill terror and despair repeated at intervals until they became nothing but hoarse cries of agony like the death calls of a dying animal. This happened not once, or twice, but many times. Never to the day of my death shall I forget the horror of those dreadful shrieks of tortured women, and one’s own utter powerlessness to aid the victims or punish the Bolshevist devils in their bestial orgies.”
(“Bolshevism, Reign of Torture at Odessa,” by the Rev. R. Courtier-Forster, late British Chaplain at Odessa and the Russian Ports of the Black Sea. Reprinted from The Times, December 3, 1919, pp. 2, 3 and 4.)