When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (32 page)

When Kuznetsov finished, they were all speechless. It seemed so easy, just within reach. Even Mendelevich convinced himself for a brief moment that it really was possible they would make it to Israel. But then he remembered the testament he had written, the last will of these people smiling at him on this summer day, and he pulled out of his pocket a folded piece of paper and began to read. He started with an epigraph from Zechariah: "Flee from the Northern land ... Escape, daughter of Zion dwelling in Babylon." The testament clearly defined the group as part of a greater struggle: "We are part of those tens of thousands of Jews who, for many years now, have proclaimed to the appropriate authorities of the Soviet regime their desire for repatriation to Israel. But unfailingly, with monstrous hypocrisy, distorting human, international, and even Soviet laws, the authorities deny us the right to leave. We are impudently told that we shall rot here, that we will never set eyes on our fatherland." Mendelevich wrote that "the fate which awaits us here is at best spiritual assimilation." He demanded that American Jewry awake from its slumber and accused the United Nations and Secretary-General U Thant in particular of being "indifferent to the fate of a whole people," asking him, "Are you simply afraid of infringing upon the interests of a great power? But, if so, who needs you? What right have you to speak in the name of the peoples of the world? We demand that you take steps to put an end to the violations of elementary human liberties which have been going on for many years, to lighten the plight of the three million Jews of the Soviet Union."

Mendelevich added a postscript, which constituted the living-will part of the testament: "P.S. We appeal to all of you with the request that, if our attempt fails, our relatives and close ones be taken care of and protected from paying the price for our action. It should be stressed that our actions represent no danger to outsiders. When the plane takes off, we will be the only ones on board."

The group decided that the women—Sylva, Meri, and Dymshits's wife and daughters—would keep their signatures off the testament. That way they could claim ignorance. Sylva resisted. She wanted to be treated like everyone else. But Kuznetsov prevailed on her not to add her name. She had to think of her elderly father, who would suffer greatly if Sylva was forced to serve a lengthy sentence. In silence all the others signed, each man writing both his name and his city, and then Mendelevich folded up the paper and put it back in his pocket. He would leave it with a friend who in the event of their deaths would transmit their collective suicide note to the West.

As soon as they set out for Leningrad, a day before the zero hour, they felt they were being watched. Nobody saw anything in particular. It was just a feeling and a series of strange coincidences.

On the morning of June 14, Mendelevich went to pick up the Zalmanson brothers. Sylva had left the night before with Kuznetsov. The three Zalmanson children had already stuffed a goodbye note for their father inside the casing of his old shortwave radio. As for Mendelevich, he felt like he was doing everything for the last time: the last bite of bread and cheese, the last look at his father's face at the breakfast table. In the taxi on the way to the airport, he noticed a man riding in the car just ahead of them, a man in a blue suit. When the taxi stopped at a railroad crossing to wait for a passing train, the blue-suited man got out and went into the crossing guard's booth, only coming out once the train had passed. The Zalmansons told Mendelevich he was being paranoid. But as Mendelevich settled into his airplane seat, he noticed that the same blue-suited man was sitting right in front of him.

The group of four who took the train from Leningrad to Priozersk to spend the night in the forest waiting for the plane to arrive also began to feel people were shadowing them. Aryeh Khnokh overheard a man standing in the space between the two train cars saying to another man, "The leaders stayed in Leningrad." Khnokh went back to his compartment and told Boris Penson what he had heard. They could not turn around. They couldn't contact the other group. They could only keep moving. Khnokh shredded an address book that had the names and phone numbers of activists (he and Meri had burned other incriminating documents the night before). He threw the pieces out the window. Then he and Boris took out the two rubber clubs they were carrying and threw them out the window, along with Dymshits's old pistol and a pair of brass knuckles that Israel Zalmanson had made. Sylva suggested they try to lose the KGB men by jumping off quickly and switching trains. They did this. But they had to continue in the same direction. When the next train came they got on and kept moving toward Priozersk.

The small town was already dark when they arrived. Dymshits had drawn a map showing them how to get from the train station to the landing strip, but after an hour of wandering in the blackness, they decided they would pitch a tent in a nearby forest, build a fire, eat something, and try to get some sleep. They would have better luck in the morning. While they were warming themselves by the fire, they suddenly heard people approaching. A young couple walked up to them and asked if anyone had a light for a cigarette. When they said they didn't, the couple walked off. The group decided to take turns sleeping so that two people could stand guard. But it was not easy to fall asleep; everyone was buzzing with nervous energy. The incident on the train and the strange people in the forest had convinced them they would be caught.

In Leningrad, the rest of the group was also anxious that night. Kuznetsov, who was quite familiar with the ways of the KGB, had packed his bags for prison rather than for the West. They would be caught. The only question was when. Dymshits, however, was very confident. And the others contemplated all the possibilities, wondering whether the next day they would be dead, arrested, or in Sweden. Mendelevich and a few of the others camped close to the airport. In the evening, a black Volga parked nearby. Two men emerged, glared at them, went off to urinate, and then drove away. The group had drawn straws to see who would get the few sleeping bags, and Mendelevich had lost. So he lay on the ground, covered by Vulf Zalmanson's coat, looking up at the night sky through a thicket of trees. Eventually, he managed to fall asleep.

At four in the morning, in the forest of Priozersk, another man walked up to the campfire where Sylva Zalmanson was sitting staring at the flames, unable to sleep. He also asked for a light, then bent down to use an ember from the fire. But when he straightened up, he let out a scream, almost like a howl, and the forest was suddenly jolted by people and dogs scrambling toward them. Sylva's breath caught in her throat before she was able to yell. They jumped on her and quickly slipped on handcuffs. Aryeh Khnokh stood up and saw one of the men pull out a gun and shoot at him. He was immediately blinded, his eyes burning. Tear gas filled the air. Boris Penson was the only one sleeping and he was woken up when one of the policemen leaped on top of him in his sleeping bag, pulled him up by the arms, and dragged him away.

Near the Smolny airport, unaware of what had happened to the others in Priozersk, the group woke at dawn to a clear, sun-drenched morning. Vulf Zalmanson went to pick up Dymshits and Kuznetsov and some of the others at the Smolny train station. Anatoly Altman, who had spent the previous day wandering around Leningrad in a daze, marveling at the sights of the imperial city, helped Mendelevich prepare the backpacks the men would carry. Each contained a rubber-coated club. Mendelevich's pack also had rope to tie up the crew, a hunting knife, and a small ax.

When the whole group had arrived, they started trickling into the airport's waiting lounge, trying to appear as if they didn't know one another. The Zalmansons had told Mendelevich to change his appearance a little, just to look less conspicuous. He had been wearing a long brown raincoat and a beret that he used to cover his head in place of a yarmulke. He took off the coat, but not the beret. The waiting lounge was filled with people. There were old people and children, but Mendelevich noticed a disproportionate number of young men, many of whom seemed fidgety and expectant. There was nothing to do now. He just sat down, breathed slowly, and forced himself to remember that he was carrying out God's will.

At 8:35, a voice came over the loudspeaker announcing flight 179 to Priozersk and Sortavala. They were boarding ten minutes earlier than expected. The runway and the AN-2 were within sight through a pair of glass doors. And suddenly they realized that Dymshits was not at the gate. He was the most critical piece. Without him, there could be no hijacking. Mendelevich left his place in line and convinced a policeman to let him exit the building. Outside, not far from the airport, he found Dymshits with his wife and daughters sitting on a blanket, serenely eating their breakfast. Dymshits had thought he had time, not aware that the flight had been called early. They ran together back into the airport and got in line, Dymshits and his family just behind Mendelevich.

The doors opened and they began walking onto the tarmac. Another group of passengers whose flight had also just been called walked next to them in a parallel line. When they were just a few feet from the plane, a man in the line of other passengers yelled, "It's starting!" And just like in Priozersk, policemen emerged from everywhere, clubs in hand and German shepherds at their sides. Someone pounced on Mendelevich and he could feel his glasses crack against his face when his head hit the ground. Looking sideways through the broken lens, he saw almost all the members of the group lying facedown, their hands bound with rope. Only Dymshits was on his knees, his face covered in blood. He had been shot with some kind of irritant to paralyze him. His wife and daughters lay pale and shaking next to him. Mendelevich closed his eyes.
It's over,
he thought with some relief. His old life—with all the compromises and terrible longing—was over.

***

The authorities finally had the opportunity they had been looking for, a chance to prove to the world that these so-called Zionists, increasingly gaining sympathy in the West, were nothing but hooligans.

In March of that year, the Soviets had launched what could only be called a public relations offensive to counter the angry petitions and letters of Jews who had been refused exit visas and whose statements were being widely publicized in the West. In accordance with what the Central Committee called its Plan for Basic Organizational and Propaganda Measures Connected with the Situation in the Middle East and the Intensifying Struggle with Zionism, it authorized a large, televised press conference that would condemn Zionism's attempt "to act as a vanguard of imperialism." The pièce de résistance was a collection of prominent Soviet Jews who would denounce Zionism and proclaim their love for the Soviet Union.

On March 4, under glaringly bright lights, forty Soviet Jews sat on a stage at the House of Friendship in Moscow. Many had never even publicly identified themselves as Jews—like the redheaded prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, known to Soviet citizens for her famous interpretation of the Dying Swan in Tchaikovsky's
Swan Lake.
Facing an audience of a few hundred journalists, Leonid I. Zamyatin, head of the Foreign Ministry's press department and a non-Jew, began by reading a letter signed by fifty-two leading Jewish figures, many of whom were seated behind him: "'Every day brings new reports about the crimes of the Israeli military, reviving memories of the barbarity of Hitlerites. This aggression has become a component of the imperialist, neocolonialist plot directed against the people and progressive regimes of the Middle East and closely intertwining the interests of oil monopolies and international Zionist operations ... Zionism has always expressed the chauvinistic views and racist ravings of the Jewish bourgeoisie. It has now reached the apogee in preaching national intolerance and hatred. Zionists supply imperialism with cannon fodder in the struggle against the Arab people.'"

At the question-and-answer session, some of the participants, such as Arkady Raikin, a well-known comedian and a Jewish boy from Riga, looked uncomfortable and remained silent, while others strongly defended the Soviet line. Veniamin E. Dymshits, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the Soviet Union, a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, waved around a copy of the Soviet constitution and insisted that no country in the world treated Jews better than the Soviet Union did, not even America. Another panelist, Ilya A. Yegudin, a Ukrainian collective-farm chairman, said: "I have had Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in my Jewish home, at my table. In what other country could that happen?"

Butman watched the spectacle on his television in Leningrad. Mendelevich watched it in Riga. They were both shocked and saddened at the lengths the authorities would go to to denounce Israel. But neither knew that this was just the opening act. The main anti-Zionist show was still to come.

The KGB had discovered the hijacking plot slowly, starting with Operation Wedding in Leningrad and then tracing it to Riga. The hijacking was a gift—a blatantly illegal act that the West could never condone. That December, representatives of seventy-seven Western countries were planning to draw up the Hague Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft. Knowing that this was in the works, the Soviets saw an opportunity to put more than just the hijackers on trial. The whole Zionist movement could be condemned as dangerous and seditious.

The KGB came for Butman at the Siversky dacha where he had been vacationing with his family, reading books to his daughter Lilya and following the World Cup on television; Israel had managed to qualify for the finals in Mexico City. As the KGB was arresting the hijackers on the Smolny tarmac, another group of agents in leather jackets carried out an intensive search of the dacha and eventually drove Butman away in a black Volga, taking him back to Leningrad. Dreizner was at work when they came for him. So was Chernoglaz. By the evening of June 15, all the members of the Leningrad organization's central committee, eight men, were sitting in prison cells in the Big House, the nickname for Leningrad's KGB headquarters, even though their participation in the hijacking plot had ended almost two months earlier.