How Americans and Japanese saved 800 Russian children

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The usual summer holidays in the Urals for Soviet schoolchildren suddenly turned into a three-year odyssey halfway across the world.

On May 18, 1918, almost eight hundred children left Petrograd (present-day St. Petersburg) to have a summer vacation in the Urals. No one could have imagined that soon they would find themselves in mortal danger, travel around half the world and return home only two and a half years later.

Lost

In November 1917, Petrograd experienced a revolution organized by the Bolsheviks, which was soon followed by a hungry winter. In the spring, educational institutions together with their parents decided to send eleven thousand schoolchildren in an organized way to so-called children's summer nutritional colonies throughout the country, where they could gain strength and improve their failing health.

About eight hundred of them were unlucky. Accompanied by several hundred educators, they set off on an ill-fated trip to the Ural Mountains.

As it turned out, the worst time for this trip was hard to imagine. At the same time, as trains with children followed to the east of the country, an anti-Bolshevik uprising was flaring up there. In just a few weeks, the vast region of Siberia and the Urals was engulfed in civil war.

Children became powerless eyewitnesses of hostilities, being in their very epicenter. Today in the area where their colonies were located, the Reds could dominate, and tomorrow it was already occupied by the Whites. “The streets were shot through and through,” recalled one of the colonists, “and we hid under the trestle beds and looked in dismay at the soldiers who walked through the rooms and lifted our mattresses with bayonets.”

By the end of 1918, Petrograd schoolchildren found themselves in the rear of Alexander Kolchak's attacking white armies to the west, and it was now simply impossible for them to get home. The situation was aggravated by the fact that money and food supplies were rapidly running out, and children met the coming winter in summer clothes.

The rescue

Quite unexpectedly, the American Red Cross, which was operating in Russia at that time, became interested in the fate of schoolchildren. Gathering children from all the colonies into one near the South Ural city of Miass, he took them under his care: he gave out warm clothes, organized everyday life, regular meals and even established the educational process.

The Americans, whenever possible, informed the Soviet government about the life of the colony and sent letters from their children to their worried parents in Petrograd who were unable to find a place for themselves. The parties discussed various possibilities for evacuating children, but none of them was implemented.

With the defeat of Kolchak in the summer of 1919 and the approach of the Red Army to the location of the colony, the American Red Cross decided to take schoolchildren away from the war zone to Siberia, and then to Russky Island near Vladivostok.

In the spring of 1920, the evacuation of US troops from the Russian Far East began. The American Red Cross mission also left the country with them. She did not want to leave the children to the mercy of fate, but she also did not have the opportunity to take them with her. Then the Americans turned to the Japanese for assistance, deciding to evacuate the children to France.

Red Cross employee Riley Allen managed to charter a Japanese freighter. At the same time, its owner, the owner of the shipping company "Katsuda Steamship company, LTD" Katsuda Ginjiro, at his own expense completely re-equipped it for the transport of small passengers: beds and fans were installed, an infirmary was organized.

On July 13, 1920, the Yomei Maru with the flags of Japan and the United States on the masts, with a huge red cross painted on the pipe, left the port of Vladivostok and set off, as it turned out later, on an almost round-the-world trip.

Halfway across the world

The shortest route across the Indian Ocean was abandoned on the advice of doctors. In the midst of an exhausting summer, this could be too dangerous for the health of children.

Through the Pacific Ocean, the ship headed to San Francisco, and from there to the Panama Canal and to New York. The Yomei Maru and its little passengers drew the attention of the American public. Crowds of journalists greeted them in the ports, and President Woodrow Wilson and his wife sent them a welcoming speech.

“Various New York organizations entertained our children every day. A boat trip along the Hudson River, a party in the Bronx park and a city tour by cars were organized on a special, truly wide scale,”recalled the captain of the Japanese ship Motoji Kayahara.

Because of the raging Civil War in Russia, the American Red Cross planned to leave Petrograd schoolchildren in France for some time, where places were already prepared for them to live.

This provoked violent opposition from the latter, who, together with their educators, sent a collective message to the Americans. “We cannot go to the state, thanks to which the population of Russia in tens and hundreds of thousands died and is dying from the consequences of the blockade (the economic blockade of Soviet Russia by the Entente powers), the grave of hundreds of thousands of Russian young forces,”the appeal said, which was signed by 400 people.

As a result, it was decided to deliver the children to Finland, neighboring with Soviet Russia. The Baltic Sea, where dozens of mines have drifted since the First World War, has become the most dangerous section of the route. The ship was forced to go at a slow speed, constantly change course, make stops not only at night, but also during the day.

On October 10, 1920, the Yomei Maru arrived at the Finnish port of Koivisto, just tens of kilometers from the border, where the long journey ended. Here the children will be handed over to the Soviet side in groups through the border points. “Since we left Vladivostok, we went through the heat and cold together, during these three months the children made friends with the crew members and sadly repeated 'sayonara, sayonara' (goodbye!) When leaving the ship,” Kayahara recalled.

The last schoolchildren-travelers returned home in February 1921. Having already matured and matured, they arrived at the same station in Petrograd, from which they went on a short-term, as they believed, trip to the Urals almost three years ago.