When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (5 page)

In the early 1960s, when Schneider was released, he became an important contact with Moscow, where some of his fellow former inmates were trying to teach Hebrew and disseminate information about Israel. The Moscow activists were vital to the Riga Jews because they had access to an essential resource: the Israeli embassy. The Jewish diplomatic presence in the heart of the Soviet capital had existed since the fall of 1948, when Golda Meir (then Meyerson) made a climactic visit to the Moscow Choral Synagogue. As the first Israeli ambassador to the Soviet Union, she drew tens of thousands of weeping, ecstatic Jews into the street during the High Holy Days. From then on, one of the embassy's main missions became finding a way to keep the light of Jewish culture flickering. The effort primarily involved planting Israelis with Slavic backgrounds in the Moscow embassy and giving them innocuous titles such as "agriculture attaché." Their real job was to travel all over the country and distribute Israeli mementos such as miniature Jewish calendars and Star of David pendants, which were usually handed off in a handshake. They visited synagogues and attended the scarce Jewish cultural events. But while the Israelis certainly boosted morale, there was only so much they could do to help the nascent activists. Any overzealousness could get them kicked out of the country or trigger a diplomatic crisis that Israel couldn't afford, especially given the Soviets' recent alliances with Arab states.

These minimal gestures—as dangerous as they were for the embassy staff—were not enough for the self-proclaimed Zionists who began to coalesce in Riga in the early 1960s. The brand of activism they wanted to pursue fell into the Jabotinsky strain of Zionism. They were not afraid of confrontation. In fact, confrontation seemed the only way to get the Soviet Union to allow them the freedom to express themselves as Jews. As for their more distant hope of living in Israel one day, they knew no one was going to hand them that on a platter. They would have to fight. As early as 1964, the group planned to send an open petition to American Jewry demanding that they do something to help the Soviet Jews. Lydia Slovin was charged with confronting an Israeli official on vacation in Minsk with the idea—the Zionists wanted Israeli consent before they sent off the letter. She was told firmly by the Israeli official to drop it. But listening to albums and looking at postcards of Israel, celebrating Passover and Hanukkah, soon became insufficient for the activists. They were restive. And yet they were afraid to openly discuss the possibility of applying for exit visas. No one was allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union; people like Schneider had been arrested for even trying. So the Zionists turned to samizdat. Finding material for duplication, copying it using borrowed typewriters and mimeograph machines, and then distributing it demanded organization and provided an opportunity to expand their circle.

There were only a few sources of samizdat. In Riga, private libraries from before the war that contained unpublished works by Dubnow, Jabotinsky, and others provided much of the material. Tourists dropped off articles and pamphlets, sometimes given to them by the Israeli embassy. And the embassy staff members themselves covertly deposited books in places where Jews might find them, on park benches and inside synagogues.

No book caught the imagination of these Zionists like Leon Uris's novel
Exodus.
Published in 1958,
Exodus
was a strange blend of Zionist polemic, Jewish history, and, most important, soap opera. The book had a huge cast and was about six hundred pages long, but it was centered on the character of Ari Ben Canaan, a member of the Aliyah Bet operation that was illegally smuggling Jews into Israel during the British mandate. It opens in Cyprus with Ben Canaan's attempt to pilot a boatload of Jews from detention camps through the Mediterranean to Palestine. It follows him through the war of independence and the trials and tribulations of his father, a Ben-Gurion type of Labor Zionist establishment character, and his uncle, a Menachem Begin look-alike who heads an organization called the Maccabees, which bears a close resemblance to the Irgun, the terror organization that tried to bomb the British out of Palestine. There is, of course, a love story. Kitty Fremont, a newly widowed, non-Jewish American nurse, finds herself enmeshed in the Jewish independence movement and falls in love with Ari Ben Canaan. The book manages to tell the stories of the Holocaust, early Zionism, and the Russian pogroms. It gives the Zionist movement an incredibly romantic glow.

For the handful of Zionists in the Soviet Union, and especially among those in Riga, the book was pure sustenance—many tears fell on the thin typewritten pages. And it served as a remarkable recruiting tool. It's difficult to determine exactly how the book entered these circles, but it's safe to assume that the Israelis had a hand in it since all the copies appeared around the same time. Even though it was written in English, a language not widely spoken in the Soviet Union, the book spread like a virus. In Riga, it found its way to Boris Slovin. Boris hadn't yet met his future wife, Lydia, a blond lawyer; their Zionist cells hadn't crossed. In 1962, Slovin was working at a train station as an electrician. One day a non-Jewish coworker showed him a book he had just been handed by an Israeli diplomat who must have mistaken the Latvian for a Jew. It was
Exodus.
The book was in English, and the coworker thought Slovin might be able to decipher it. Slovin couldn't, but he took it home and passed it on through the Zionist network until Lydia, who knew a bit of English, was brought on as a translator. She wrote a version out longhand, and she was so unsure of her English that if a word she looked up in her Russian-English dictionary had multiple meanings, she simply put all the possibilities in parentheses. Boris received her handwritten translations, typed them out on carbon paper making four copies at a time, and then burned Lydia's originals. He shortened the final version and excised any anti-Soviet sentiment, and he also edited a bit, removing any reference to the affair between Kitty and Ari Ben Canaan, thinking that intermarriage would send the wrong message to Riga's Jewish youth.

Ezra Rusinek, the bare-chested, Israeli-looking man who caught Mendelevich's eye on his first trip to Rumbuli, had managed to get hold of a copy in German. He found a translator and then spent a year meticulously typing out all six hundred pages of the text and making five copies, three of which stayed in Riga and two of which were sent to friends in other cities. So secretive were the separate cells of Riga Zionists that Rusinek was not aware that Slovin was engaged in a similar project. Copies proliferated everywhere. One major source was the prison camps. A group of Jewish inmates inside a Mordvinian camp, Dubrovlag, sneaked in a copy and held nightly readings in which the few political prisoners who spoke some English would read and translate the story. Eventually they transcribed their version into a notebook, which then got passed from one generation of prisoners to the next, converting a few to Zionism along the way. Some who heard it in camps wrote out the story from memory when they were released. By 1964,
Exodus
was a blockbuster in the samizdat circuit. Mendelevich even had a copy, which his cousin had asked him to hide above the cast-iron stove in his room.

But it was more than just the pull of Israel that suddenly inspired Jews to take such risks. It was the push that came with growing knowledge of what had happened during the war. When Adolf Eichmann, a top Nazi official, was captured in Buenos Aires by the Israelis and given a hugely publicized trial in Jerusalem, Jews all over the world confronted the facts of the Holocaust for the first time. Never before had the details been so openly discussed, as survivor after survivor took the stand and faced the glass box where the bored-looking Eichmann sat. David Ben-Gurion had envisioned a trial that would be both cathartic for the Jewish people and useful in making a case for Israel's existence. This is why he balked at the idea of trying Eichmann in an international court. He wanted more than justice; he wanted theater. He wanted the world to appreciate the Jewish tragedy.

When Moscow eventually memorialized the immense suffering of the war, it did so by referring to the trials of "Soviet citizens." No mention was made of the unique fate reserved for the Jews as a people—their loss was subsumed into the twenty million killed in the course of the "Great Patriotic War." But even the Soviets could not ignore the history dredged up by the Eichmann trial, most notably what happened at Babi Yar, the ravine outside Kiev where the Nazis had shot thirty-four thousand people and buried them in a mass grave. On September 19, 1961, the Soviets experienced the first stirrings of this new Holocaust consciousness. That week's issue of
Literaturnaya Gazeta,
the extremely popular and influential cultural and political newspaper started by Pushkin in 1830, contained a poem by up-and-coming young writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Its title was "Babi Yar." After making a visit to the ravine and seeing that it had been turned into a garbage dump, Yevtushenko wrote a lament not only for the fact that "No monument stands over Babi Yar," as the poem opens, but also for the history of anti-Semitism in his country. He invokes Dreyfus and Anne Frank; he imagines himself the victim of a pogrom; and he condemns the reflexive anti-Semitism of his compatriots as being un-Russian. As the poem reaches its crescendo, the non-Jewish poet identifies himself completely with Jewish suffering. For Yevtushenko, redemption for the Soviet Union was possible only with the elimination of all anti-Semitism:

And I myself
am one massive, soundless scream
above the thousand thousand buried here.
I am
each old man
here shot dead.
I am
every child
here shot dead.
Nothing in me
shall ever forget!
The "Internationale," let it
thunder
when the last antisemite on earth
is buried forever.

The poem had incredible resonance.
Literaturnaya Gazeta
immediately sold out of the issue containing it. Thousands of students gathered to hear Yevtushenko read "Babi Yar," then stamped their feet and yelled for him to read it again. The strongest proof of the poem's power was the ferocity with which the government tried to squelch it. The papers were filled with denunciations and counter-poems commissioned by the Soviet authorities. They claimed that Yevtushenko's work demeaned the memory of the millions of other Soviet soldiers and civilians who had fallen in World War II. But even Khrushchev's scolding that "this poem does not belong here" could not stop its spreading influence. In April of 1962, Yevtushenko was on the cover of
Time
magazine. That year, Dimitri Shostakovich, the famed Soviet composer who had only recently joined the Communist Party, set the poem to the music that became his Symphony no. 13 in B-flat Minor, opus 113, known simply as "Babi Yar." On the evening of December 18, 1962, the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra first performed the piece, but only after Shostakovich had been forced to change some of the poem's words.

In Riga, the Soviets reluctantly answered the demand for commemoration by holding an official ceremony in the Bikerniki woods, another place outside town where Nazis had brought prisoners to be executed. A few of the lone Zionists attending hoped to hear mention of the fact that most of these prisoners were Jews. But they heard nothing. The murdered were simply referred to as the victims of Fascism. On that day in October of 1962, the Jews at the ceremony, many of whose families had perished in the war, made a decision to find the place where most of the Jews of Riga had been killed. By the following Sunday, they were at Rumbuli, where the remnants of the mass killing were still evident. Defying the Soviet law that prohibited unauthorized public signs, they took an old board and used a heated nail to inscribe these words:
Here were silenced the voices of 38,000 Jews of Riga on November 29–30 and on December 8–9, 1941.
The makeshift plaque was fastened to a fir tree in an inconspicuous part of the grove. The group of twenty circled the sign as someone recited the Kaddish. It was the first Holocaust memorial service at Rumbuli—and one of the earliest in the entire Soviet Union.

In the spring of 1963, fifty people gathered to hold a twentieth-anniversary commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. An impromptu committee of organizers was formed, mostly older men who saw the importance of Rumbuli as a focal point to bring Jews together. A critical person in these early discussions was Mark Blum, a young, charismatic Zionist who had become a leader for the newly active Riga youth. The older men, including Rusinek, came up with a plan to renovate the place, plant flowers, and make it a proper burial site, but Blum was the only one who really knew how to engage the young people and interest them in helping out. It was at that Warsaw Ghetto commemoration that the black obelisk was erected, and the organizers decided then that they would get as many Jews as possible to come to Rumbuli each Sunday to landscape the ground.

Rumbuli was the first group effort for these Zionists, people who had previously relegated their activities to the secrecy of their homes. Almost immediately, differences in style and tactics emerged. There were the legitimists, who wanted official sanction for their activities. And then there were the former Betari youth like Rusinek and the younger hard-liners like Mark Blum, who believed that confrontation with the government was the only way forward, a notion the older Zionists, with their still fresh memories of Stalin, found dangerous. Clashes had already broken out over the question of whether to participate in the few state-sanctioned Jewish cultural activities. Starting in the early 1960s, partly in response to charges of anti-Semitism, Moscow allowed the formation of Jewish choral and drama associations in Vilnius and Riga. These groups had to get approval for every song they sang, and their repertoire subsequently consisted largely of pro-Communist ballads in Yiddish (with lyrics like "
Lenin, tate, zey gebentsht, ost verbreided mensch mit mensch
"—Father Lenin be blessed, you made brothers of us all). But they nonetheless offered rare opportunities for Jewish youth to gather together. That was little comfort to the self-styled extremists who believed that participating in these choirs amounted to collaboration with the enemy, helping the Soviet Union provide visiting dignitaries with supposed proof that Jewish life was thriving. At performances, Boris Slovin would go up to these visitors and whisper one word in their ears:
Theresienstadt.
(This was the name of the Nazi concentration camp set up as a model to reassure the outside world that Jews were being well treated.) Yosef Schneider even joined one of these choirs in an attempt to break it up.