The massacre of Jews began in Great and Little Poland, without yielding in point of barbarism to the butcheries which, eight years previously, had been perpetrated in the Ukraina. The Polish hosts of Charnetzki had learned from the Cossacks the art of exterminating the Jews. Nearly all the Jewish communities in the province of Posen, excepting the city of Posen, and those in the provinces of Kalish, Cracow, and Piotrkov, were destroyed by the saviors of the Polish fatherland. The brutal and wicked Charnetzki, to use the epithets applied to him by the Jewish annalists, or, to be more exact, the Polish mob marching behind him, committed atrocities which were truly worthy of the Cossacks. They tortured and murdered the rabbis, violated the women, killed the Jews by the hundreds, sparing only those who were willing to become Catholics. These atrocities were as a rule committed in the wake of the retreating Swedes, who had behaved like human beings towards the Jewish population. The humaneness shown by the Swedes to the Jews was avenged by the inhumanity of the Poles. While the bands of Charnetzki were attacking the Jews in Western Poland, the Muscovites and Cossacks continued to disport themselves in the eastern districts and in Lithuania. Not until 1658 did the horrors of warfare begin gradually to subside, and only after terrible losses and humiliating concessions to Russia and Sweden was Poland able to restore its political order, which had been shaken to its foundation during the preceding years. The losses inflicted upon the Jews of Poland during the fatal decade of 1648-1658 were appalling. In the reports of the chroniclers the number of Jewish victims varies between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand. But even if we accept the lower figure, the number of victims still remains colossal, excelling the catastrophes of the Crusades and the Black Death in Western Europe. Some seven hundred Jewish communities in Poland had suffered massacre and pillage. In the Ukrainian cities situated on the left banks of the Dnieper, the region populated by Cossacks, in the present Governments of Chernigov, Poltava, and part of Kiev, the Jewish communities had disappeared almost completely. In the localities on the right shore of the Dnieper or in the Polish part of the Ukraina as well as in those of Volhynia and Podolia, wherever the Cossacks had made their appearance, only about one-tenth of the Jewish population survived. The others had either perished during the rebellion of Khmelnitzki, or had been carried off by the Tatars into Turkey, or had emigrated to Lithuania, the central provinces of Poland, or the countries of Western Europe. All over Europe and Asia Jewish refugees or prisoners of war could be met with, who had fled from Poland, or had been carried off by the Tatars, and ransomed by their brethren. Everywhere the wanderers told a terrible tale of the woes of their compatriots and of the martyrdom of hundreds of Jewish communities.