Poymanniki is a strange word unfamiliar to us that came from the middle of the 19th century. By itself, this word does not cause much fear, but when you learn about grief and human suffering associated with it, you involuntarily change your attitude towards it.
Soldier service in the second half of the 19th century in Russia
And so, where did this word come from ... The life of a soldier during the time of serfdom in Russia was unbearable and difficult. It is a fact that 25 years of service for many meant parting with home and loved ones forever. But even harder and more painful was the soldiery for the Jews.
You need to start with the fact that the Jews were taken into soldiers and youngsters. Before the onset of real military service, these "soldiers" went through a true hell.
Having shaved their foreheads, put on them excessively long wide government overcoats, pulled bottomless, gray caps over their children's heads, they were driven by whole herds of thousands of miles, and under the scorching sun, and through slush, and into the cold. Some were placed in cantonist schools, and most were given to the care and feeding of the settlers of individual settlements.
Tired, tormented by hunger and eternally tortured, many of them died, and many converted to Christianity, not out of conviction, of course, but out of fear or under direct coercion ...
Captives and the cold summer of 1853...
In July 1853, such a legislative measure was launched against the Jews, which is probably only appropriate in relation to criminals.
Every Jew, no matter how old he was, caught without a written form (passport), surrendered to the recruits without any trial or investigation. And anyone who caught a Jew without a passport could turn him in for recruits by writing to his own account. Such a deliverer received a receipt and he could use this document himself or resell it to another, as a commodity, as a right to life ...
Trading in recruitment receipts, and in fact human trafficking, has become commonplace. Passportless Jews were hunted like wild animals.
Entire families of unfortunate poor people who did not have the means to pay taxes and to order a new written form from their distant homeland were denounced and handed over to local authorities. Surrendered old and young ...
About nonhumans and stolen children
There were such non-humans who by force pulled the boys practically out of the arms of their mothers or lured children out of schools and synagogues with a penny and gingerbread.
They took them away several miles away and there they handed over these little imaginary vagrants as recruits, passing them off as their sons or in order to obtain a valuable receipt.
There were cases when people who had passports were forcibly taken away and destroyed, and then the robbed were handed over to recruits as without passports ...
These are the people who were recruited, and in the middle of the 19th century they were called captives ...
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