Eye-witnesses will never forget one bitterly cold night in January, 1892.

Crowds of Jews dressed in beggarly fashion, among them women, children, and old men, with remnants of their household belongings lying around them, filled the station of the Brest railroad.
Threatened by police convoy and transportation prison and having failed to obtain a reprieve, they had made up their mind to leave, despite a temperature of thirty degrees below zero.

Fate, it would seem, wanted to play a practical joke on them.

At the representations of the police commissioner-in-chief, the governor-general of Moscow had ordered to stop the expulsions until the great colds had passed, but ...

the order was not published until the expulsion had been carried out.