When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (6 page)

Rumbuli was initially organized by the more legitimist elements. They had gone the formal route of trying to get permission to landscape the site and hold public ceremonies there. Letters went back and forth between the Jewish leaders and the local Latvian Soviet authorities. Though their requests were never officially granted, neither were they explicitly denied. The group felt that this slight opening gave them license to begin their work. Throughout 1963, they managed to wrangle bulldozers and tractors to move earth, as well as large mounds of sand to fill in the ditches—material donated clandestinely by Jewish factory managers and greased with bribes. The local authorities eventually went further, giving a kind of tacit permission by allowing an empty field next to Rumbuli to be used as a parking lot for the hundreds of Jews who started arriving on Sundays. The more extremist activists had a difficult time deciding how to respond, whether to participate in the revitalization of Rumbuli or protest it for being government sanctioned. Conflict emerged more than once, as when Boris Slovin and Mark Blum made a giant Star of David out of willow branches and placed it strategically at the site so that passengers on every train going from Riga to Moscow could see it. This angered the older activists, who tried to avoid needless provocation, and they forced the young men to take it down. By the time the annual commemoration of the massacre took place, in the fall of 1963, five long ditches had been planted with flowers, and about eight hundred people showed up.

While in other cities small groups of Zionists were just beginning to stir with an interest in Jewish heritage, the Riga Jews were now assembling at Rumbuli formally as a community at least twice a year—on the anniversaries of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the Rumbuli massacre. And the Sunday gatherings continued, giving hope to the older generation that young Jews might meet this way and marry one another. The ground they stood on covered bones, but Rumbuli was more about revival, about growing a new generation who would view their Jewish identity with pride and not simply as a word entered on the fifth line of their passports.

At first, Mendelevich stayed on the margins of this growing but still quite small group of families who organized the Zionist activities. He went every week to Rumbuli, took part in the ceremonies, and read the Jewish samizdat that his cousin Mendel brought him. But as the months went by, he became more and more active, helping to watch over the Rumbuli tools during the week, organizing some of the other young people. The older activists began to see him as trustworthy.

And Mendelevich was becoming bolder. In 1965, as part of a cultural exchange with Israel, which only became possible in the years after the thaw, an Israeli all-star women's basketball team was allowed to tour the Soviet Union. Eventually it came to Riga. Mendelevich was ecstatic. This was unheard-of, and he wasn't going to miss the chance to finally see Israelis—Israeli women, no less—up close. But the Soviets wanted to make sure the event was no more than symbolic, and they gave out the majority of the tickets to Party members. On the day of the game, Jews swarmed around the stadium where the Israeli women were practicing. When the women's bus left to take them back to the hotel, the young Jews started to sing, and through the window Mendelevich could see one woman crying.

That evening the Israeli team lost by dozens of points, but the Jews were thrilled just to have heard the "Hatikvah" played before the Soviet national anthem. After the game, Mendelevich, along with his sister, Rivka, decided to go to the hotel where the women were staying. This was a dangerous move. During Stalin's time, any person who had contact with foreigners was immediately under suspicion. Also, Mendelevich was painfully shy; even at eighteen, despite his ability to speak in front of audiences, he felt uncomfortable talking to strangers. But he forced himself up the stairs and through the front door of the hotel. Once they were in the lobby, a tanned man came up to the two scared-looking teenagers. Mendelevich sensed immediately that he was Israeli. The man said something in Hebrew that the boy didn't understand. Then he handed him two big envelopes. Mendelevich looked and saw that in each one was a Star of David pendant. He could hardly contain his excitement, and he nearly ran off without thanking the man. From then on, even though his father warned him that it was reckless to draw attention to himself at work, Mendelevich never took the necklace off.

At the Rumbuli memorial ceremony in the winter of 1965, hundreds of people attended, read poetry, and spoke about the history of the place. But Mendelevich felt unsatisfied. After the ceremony, he and his friends went back to his house. He was emotionally wound up and he suddenly felt compelled to say something, to let them know how his soul had been stirred. He talked about the ravages of the war and the responsibility it had bestowed on them to stop assimilating and try to make aliyah—to move to Israel. "Today our fate is in our hands," he said earnestly, his voice near breaking. Then, before he knew what he was saying, he proposed they start a Zionist organization. "Those in favor, raise your hands." Mendelevich looked around the room at his friends, seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who, like him, had been moved by the ceremony, and all their hands were raised high.

But the next morning, Mendelevich regretted saying it. He was worried he might have gotten ahead of himself. Not only was starting an organization a dangerous proposition—the older groups had managed to avoid KGB arrest because they had stuck to small cells rather than one organization with a hierarchy, which the Communists would view as a direct challenge to their authority—but also it wasn't clear to him exactly what this organization should do. In addition, many of those who had been present the day before were chatty and unserious, and probably would not make for good members of a secret underground. Together, Mendelevich and his sister, Rivka, also a passionate Zionist, conducted a virtual purge—that's how they thought of it, so ingrained was the language of revolution. They ended up with a group of four: Mendelevich, his sister, and two of their friends.

Their activities did not change much. Once a week they met at a house outside the city where one of the members lived, and there they read Jewish samizdat, including a full translation of
Exodus.

Yosef Schneider soon found out about the small group and introduced them to another group of four young people. They would meet together often, and sometimes in the evenings they'd have competitions to see who knew more Jewish history. Mendelevich, who thought parties frivolous, enjoyed these social gatherings with people who shared his dreams.

Others formed more small groups that linked up. The groups' goal remained innocuous: to prepare themselves for aliyah when the day arrived. They were not interested in provoking or pushing in any way. In the platform Mendelevich wrote up for the federated groups, he stated this clearly: "Out of an emotional love for our people and a responsibility imposed on us we have come to a conclusion that we must unite in order to work toward the self-awareness of Jewish nationality. Our group's central focus is the promotion of Jewish culture."

They each donated a relatively heavy membership fee, even though they were all students. With the pooled money, they bought a used typewriter so they could reproduce copies of a 1912 Jewish encyclopedia they had found in an old library. They spent holidays together. On Hanukkah they invited friends to come light candles. On Simchat Torah, they danced in the narrow street in front of the one Riga synagogue. They became close friends and, sometimes, even lovers. At least two couples in the group ended up getting married. They created an alternative universe for themselves, one in which Mendelevich thrived. But it was also a fundamentally frustrating universe. They felt themselves increasingly in limbo; bodies on Latvian ground whose souls were somewhere else.

In the summer of 1966, they got news they couldn't believe at first. Geula Gill, a popular Israeli folksinger, and Juki Arkin, an Israeli mime who had studied with Marcel Marceau, were coming to tour the Soviet Union, and they'd be stopping for three shows in Riga. As soon as the concert was announced on Kol Israel, Riga's Jews rushed the box office at the municipal stadium. When Mendelevich got there he found a queue of three hundred and fifty people. He had to run off to the university, where he was studying electrical engineering, to take a physics exam, but all he could think about was the Israeli singer coming to town. It was an anomalous event, made possible only because of the brief warming in Soviet-Israeli relations. When the physics test was completed, he ran quickly from the university back to the line. Thousands were now pushing and shoving to keep their places. Mendelevich and a friend tried to maintain order. Each person in line was allowed to buy two tickets. In order to fool the cashier, Mendelevich came back in different guises: he would remove his glasses one time, then return with them on and his hat pulled down low, then he would take off his hat. In this way, he bought tickets for his whole family for multiple shows.

Every city where Gill performed that July seemed to explode in her presence. Jews stood all night to get tickets. The concerts were crammed. The audience sang along raucously to "Hava Nagilah" and "Havenu Shalom Aleichem." In Moscow, Gill had to perform eight encores. By the time she arrived in Riga, the local police already knew that people would mob Gill and her entourage when they left after the show.

Mendelevich stood in the Riga Municipal Sports Stadium shivering with emotion. The small woman onstage was singing in Hebrew. Throughout the performance, dozens of bouquets of flowers traveled over the heads of the crowd toward the stage. Someone yelled for Gill to sing the song of the Palmach, and Mendelevich closed his eyes and joined the audience in the lyrics he had been singing for the last three years on his way to Rumbuli. Arkin, the mime, acted out a scene that the Riga Jews instinctively understood: a man is carrying a flag and walking against a strong wind with much difficulty, and only after many laborious steps does he finally plant the flag in the ground. Vague enough not to be understood by the KGB agents wandering the stadium, it was clearly a reenactment of Israel's struggle.

After the final performance, the audience started leaving the stadium to escort Gill and Arkin to their waiting cars and buses as a way of wishing the Israelis farewell. But blocking all the exits and in full riot gear were groups of policemen who refused to let the audience members past. A big crowd that included Mendelevich surged forward and pushed into the square in front of the stadium. The police tried to block the Jews from approaching Gill's car, where she sat waving goodbye. At one point, shoving people back, a policeman put his hands on the chest of fifteen-year-old Naomi Garber, the daughter of Zionist activists. She was so startled that she slapped the policeman, and he grabbed her by the arm and led her to the police wagon. The sight of Naomi being dragged away inflamed the crowd even more and they began shouting and pressing on the police. Boris Slovin, witnessing the scene, yelled, "Jews, what are you doing? The Fascists are grabbing our girls again."

Within minutes, a riot ensued. The young boys who hung around Mark Blum taunted the police, at one point grabbing a policeman's hat and tossing it between them. They shook the car carrying Garber, trying to stop it from leaving, and they clung to the buses in Gill's motorcade, which was slowly making its way through the square. And the police struck back, swinging at the crowd with batons and yelling curses. When the melee was over, Blum gathered some of his boys and marched to the police station to try to free Garber. When he arrived, he was promptly arrested.

Mendelevich watched the confrontation, stunned and unable to move. The violence was astounding and honest—a physical manifestation of all the frustration they felt, the energy, the tension that could not be resolved. And he was scared. Violent protests against the regime were unprecedented. Fear kept everyone from even complaining, let alone fighting back. What the riot made clear to Mendelevich as he watched the sweating, surging crowd was that the status quo could not stand. Otherwise, this violence would not be the end of the story, but its beginning.

A
DOLF EICHMANN'S TRIAL
in Jerusalem shocked American Jews as much as it did the Jews of Riga. Hours and hours of testimony streamed through radios and television sets. Survivor after survivor took the stand, some screaming, some crying. Up until that point, what would become known as the Holocaust had been spoken about rarely if at all, and then only in the neutered terms of a crime against humanity. Now the trial made abundantly clear that this crime had been committed against Jews—as a race, as a people—and that the horrific particulars now unleashed into the world could never again be forgotten. One survivor who testified was Yehiel Dinur, the author of books signed only with the word
Ka-Tzetnik
(Yiddish for "concentration camper") and the number that had been tattooed on his arm. Seconds before fainting to the floor he prophesied, "I believe with perfect faith that, just as in astrology the stars influence our destiny, so does this planet of the ashes, Auschwitz, stand in opposition to our planet earth, and influences it."

Lou Rosenblum was a scientist in Cleveland, Ohio, who worked for the federal agency that would soon become NASA. He was tall and broad-shouldered and wore thick horn-rimmed glasses; a forceful and passionate yet gruff-looking man who loved his work and his young family. And he was one of those American Jews who couldn't tear themselves away from the trial; he followed it closely until the day in May of 1962 when Eichmann was hanged and then cremated, his ashes scattered into the Mediterranean Sea. But for Rosenblum, the survivors' horror stories were more than a lesson in evil. They also pointed to complacency in the face of evil. A series of questions drummed away at him: Why? Why had not one government lifted a finger while European Jews were being gassed and burned? Why did they miss so many good opportunities for rescue? Where had American Jews been during it all? Had they really been too scared to push, to make any noise, to force the problem on FDR or Churchill or someone who could do something to make it stop?