When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (31 page)

Sasha Blank, the veteran activist who had immigrated the year before, would call with Israel's official response. Butman's mother-in-law had been diagnosed with cancer, and Blank, a doctor, had been calling regularly on the twenty-fifth of every month to give him advice. They settled on a code: If Blank told Butman that his colleagues suggested his mother-in-law take the medicine, it meant they were being given permission to carry out the operation; if he said she shouldn't take it, it meant the Israelis were against it. They also took the opportunity to probe what Israeli officials thought of a large demonstration or a press conference. Blank would refer to these as medicines two and three.

The next regular telephone appointment was May 25. Until then, planning was called off. But they all knew, even Butman, that the Israelis would never approve. What official would support an operation that seemed indistinguishable from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's recent hijacking of an El Al plane? In the middle of the Cold War, with America now a close ally, Israel could never sanction such a provocation. It could easily lead to war. Contacting the Israelis was a formality, a way to step back from the brink. Operation Wedding was dead.

***

Mark Dymshits's wife had left him. As soon as he began explaining the plan and how she and their two daughters, eighteen and fifteen years old, could join him, she told him he was crazy and kicked him out. On top of this, he had recently quit his job. He was living alone in a rented apartment, staring at maps of the Soviet Union's western frontier and waiting. He was now a bullet, and May 2 was the target. When Butman told him about the compromise, Dymshits was annoyed and frustrated. Why had he let himself sacrifice so much for such unserious people? How could he ever have trusted such a joker as Butman, Butman and his fifty passengers? Once he calmed down and stopped frantically pacing, he called Kuznetsov.

The mini-cell of Sylva, Mendelevich, and Kuznetsov had also been busily preparing. They took care to recruit the most reliable people they knew. Sylva asked two of her brothers: the younger one, Israel, a twenty-one-year-old student at the Riga Polytechnic Institute living at home, and her older brother Vulf, a lieutenant in the Red Army. Mendel Bodnya, a worker at a local bread factory, wanted to join his mother living in Israel. Mendelevich also asked Aryeh Khnokh, his half-sister Meri's fiancé. Khnokh had only recently moved to Riga from Dvinsk, where he had helped organize an officially sanctioned Jewish choir and had signed his name to the early petitions. Aryeh and Meri had a wedding planned for late May. Mendel Gordin, Mendelevich's older cousin who was one of the first to renounce his Soviet citizenship, had already been fired from his job for refusing to work on Jewish holidays and was now working as a lab technician at a clinic that treated sexually transmitted diseases. He was also on the list of potential passengers. But he told Mendelevich he wasn't interested. He had already chosen his form of struggle: petitions and letters. A few other people who were tapped declined as well. One man was in the middle of his doctoral dissertation and couldn't imagine leaving his books behind.

Dymshits arrived in Riga in late April to meet with Kuznetsov. Together they decided not to wait for Israel's response. The Leningrad problems could be a blessing in disguise—now they could move ahead independently and on a much smaller scale. And they wouldn't be constrained by committees or bylaws.

While Dymshits was at the Zalmanson house discussing the new details, Mendelevich showed up and asked who the quiet, dour-looking man sitting in the living room was. "This is our driver," Kuznetsov said jokingly, not wanting to mention the word
pilot
while they were indoors. He asked Mendelevich to keep Dymshits busy for the afternoon and Mendelevich decided to give him a Jewish tour of the city. But as soon as they got near the Riga synagogue in the old quarter, Dymshits got spooked. This was the closest he had ever come to a Jewish place of worship. After Mendelevich forced a yarmulke on his head, the pilot stepped into the cavernous building, saw the old, swaying men wrapped in tallithim, and jumped right back out into daylight. Mendelevich scrapped the rest of the tour—Rumbuli and the location of the former Jewish ghetto—and instead they made their way to a forest on the outskirts of the city to discuss the new plans in secret.

They would steal a small plane, an AN-2, the kind of twelve-seater Dymshits knew well, and they would work with only a limited group of trusted friends. Dymshits believed that the AN-2s at Leningrad's Smolny Airport were left unguarded at night and that they could easily sneak into one and fly off. Sylva and Kuznetsov volunteered to visit Smolny in a few weeks to see if this was really possible.

The Riga group was eager to move forward, so Kuznetsov and Dymshits met with Butman in Leningrad on May 1, a day before the original operation would have taken place, to find out what would happen if the Israelis said no, as seemed likely. Not being members of the organization, they reminded Butman that they were not compelled to abide by its decision. He agreed but asked only that if they continued with the hijacking that "Jewish ears should not stick out from it." He didn't want his Zionist organization implicated. Butman asked that Kuznetsov's two non-Jewish friends be included in the new plot and requested that Kuznetsov and Dymshits avoid making any ideological statements at the press conference in Sweden, should the hijackers succeed. Finally, Butman wanted advance warning. He was uncomfortable throughout the conversation. He had lost control over the operation. Dymshits and Kuznetsov now seemed to be on the same team, and he was just another obstacle for them to overcome.

Kuznetsov had always thought the Leningrad organization was sloppy in their planning—talking about the hijacking indoors and letting too many people in on it. As it turned out, by the beginning of May, the KGB had a pretty good idea that something was in the works. On April 30, Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, had sent a memo to the Central Committee identifying Butman, Dreizner, and Chernoglaz as leaders, outlining the organization's objectives, and even introducing the word
ulpan.
At the end of the note, he added, "Unconfirmed sources report that at the meeting of the committee on 26 April of this year an action was proposed, the nature of which is being kept in strictest confidence and for the implementation of which Jewish nationalists living in Riga are being enlisted." He remarked, accurately, that "the majority of the members of the committee spoke out against the action, fearing that it could pose a threat to their organization and to its members. Thus, they considered it necessary to receive sanction from Israel's ruling circles."

Andropov knew about not only the organization's existence but also its divisions. And, even more important, he had information that pointed to Riga as the new center of the plot.

It was a strange kind of bliss. Mendelevich couldn't really articulate it, but he knew that escape was God's plan for him. This didn't necessarily make him optimistic about his prospects. On the contrary, nobody was more sure that the group would fail, that it would end in death or arrest. But in his mind, this only added to the righteousness of the act. After putting in his second request for an exit visa early in 1970, he was actually worried for a moment that it would be granted and he would be prevented from participating. It was a holy undertaking, and like Dymshits, though for vastly different reasons, he needed it to be realized. Even when he perceived it as a suicide mission, he remembered and felt almost encouraged by an image he had once seen in a newspaper: a Buddhist monk sitting cross-legged at an intersection in downtown Saigon in 1963, flames engulfing his body and licking the top of his head as he waited patiently, not moving a muscle, to die.

He did, however, worry about his little half-sister Meri. She was eighteen, planning to marry Aryeh Khnokh at the end of the month, and though Mendelevich was more than willing to sacrifice his own life, he did not want to be responsible for jeopardizing hers. Khnokh had enthusiastically accepted the offer to be part of the hijacking. There was no way to convince him now that he should relinquish his spot. But Mendelevich did try to talk him out of taking Meri. He listed all the reasons why he was sure they would not succeed. Then Khnokh revealed that Meri was pregnant, and he wouldn't be able to live with himself if he got out and left a wife and child here. Better that they tie their fates together. Mendelevich suggested that once he was in Israel, Khnokh could petition for Meri and the child to be let out so they could join him. But this was all speculation. No one knew what would happen. At the end of the conversation, perhaps only to relieve Mendelevich's anxiety, Khnokh agreed to leave Meri behind.

On May 23, Khnokh and Meri were married. Mendelevich, clean-shaven and dressed in a white polo shirt, posed for photos with his new brother-in-law and his sister. Meri had a large Star of David around her neck and a bouquet of flowers in her arms. Mendelevich was preoccupied but happy, even singing during the reception, something he was generally embarrassed to do.

Conspicuously absent at the wedding were Sylva Zalmanson and Kuznetsov. They had gone to Leningrad with Dymshits to take a nighttime tour of Smolny Airport. The next day, they returned to Riga with bad news. Smolny was guarded by both dogs and watchmen, and the AN-2s were chained together every night. It would not be as easy as they had thought. Mendelevich was crushed.

Two days later in Leningrad, Butman received the phone call he was waiting for. As for the first medicine, all the best experts in Israel had been consulted, he was told, and the answer was "categorically" no. The tone of Blank's voice was unambiguous. As predicted, the Israelis would not give their blessing. Blank also said no to the second medicine (the protest), and advised proceeding with great caution on the third (a press conference). That was it. Butman accepted his fate, was almost relieved, and began making plans for a three-week vacation with his family in Siversky, a resort town not far from Leningrad.

As May dragged on into June, Kuznetsov held together the Riga group. He told them they could carry out the hijacking, and they believed him. But after the trip to Smolny with Dymshits, the way forward was no longer clear.

Just as he was about to call it off for good, or at least to wait a year, as he had suggested to Dymshits earlier that month, he received a phone call. It was the evening of June 1 and Dymshits was on the line, his voice frantic. He told Kuznetsov to come to Leningrad as soon as he could. When Kuznetsov arrived, a week later, Dymshits could hardly contain himself. He had found another way, almost by accident. He had started looking for work again and had gone, as he had many times in the past, to Smolny to see if there were any openings for pilots. And there he noticed something strange. On the schedule, a flight that hadn't been there before was listed, Smolny-Priozersk-Sortavala, flight 179, tracing a course that ran parallel and extremely close to the Finnish border. It was an old route that had been canceled, but now it seemed to be running again. An idea had entered his head, fully formed. They would board the Smolny flight; hijack the plane when it landed at Priozersk, a small town on the shore of Lake Ladoga; leave the two-man crew tied up on the landing strip; and then fly the plane over the Finnish border and on to Sweden. Dymshits had quickly bought a ticket and flew the route. Priozersk was as desolate as he imagined, just a battered runway in the middle of a forest. It was a perfect plan.

When Kuznetsov arrived, they flew the route together and began filling in details. Dymshits did not want to waste any time. The longer they waited, the more chance something could go wrong. The route could be canceled again or the secrecy of the operation could be compromised. They would carry out the hijacking the following week, on Monday, June 15.

Mendelevich was ecstatic to hear about the new plan. He began working on a kind of last testament for the group to sign and leave behind—a statement, in case they were killed, that would make their objectives clear, that would ensure their deaths would not have been in vain. Kuznetsov had included two of his non-Jewish camp buddies, Yuri Federov and Alexander Murzhenko, in the hijacking, and so Mendelevich insisted on some kind of declaration of the group's Zionist dreams and motives. His sacrifice would seem worthless otherwise.

On June 10, standing in a shady circle underneath a tree in Shmerli Cemetery, almost all the Riga participants met as a group for the first time. Sixteen people would take part in the hijacking: Kuznetsov; Sylva; her two brothers Israel and Vulf; Mendelevich; Aryeh Khnokh and—he insisted, now that he was her husband—his pregnant wife, Meri; Dymshits and his wife (they had reconciled) and their two daughters; Boris Penson, a local painter; Mendel Bodnya, who hoped to be reunited with his mother; Anatoly Altman, a recent arrival in Riga from Odessa, a free-spirited Buddhist; and the two non-Jews, Federov and Murzhenko.

Kuznetsov explained how the hijacking would work. Twelve of them would be passengers that morning on the first flight out of Smolny. They would fly to Priozersk. When the pilot stepped outside to open the plane's hatch, Kuznetsov and Altman would jump on him, subdue him, and tie him up. At the same moment, Mendelevich and the Zalmanson brothers, both big men, would grab the copilot in his seat before he could reach for the revolver in his briefcase. Waiting for the plane in the forest surrounding the Priozersk landing strip would be the four other participants—Mendelevich demanded that his sister be in this second group. The four would run up to the crew members with their sleeping bags. The pilot and copilot would be placed in the sleeping bags and left in the forest with a bottle of vodka to keep them company until they were found. Dymshits would then take off and, as in the original Operation Wedding plan, fly low enough to evade radar detection; they'd pray that there was enough fuel to get them all the way to Sweden, a four-hour trip.