Then they tortured him, and threw him into a cell; and when he lay asleep from exhaustion, the priest came and baptized him.

When he awoke, they told him he was a Christian, and brought him the crucifix to kiss.

He protested, threw the crucifix from him, but they held him to it that he was a baptized Jew, and belonged to the Church; and the rest of his life he spent between the prison and the hospital, always clinging to his faith, saying the Hebrew prayers in defiance of his tormentors, and paying for it with his flesh.
There were men in Polotzk whose faces made you old in a minute.

They had served Nicholas I, and come back unbaptized.

The white church in the square--how did it look to them?
I knew.