When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (4 page)

But much worse was to come. By the following summer, Hitler's army occupied most of Latvia. Jews panicked at the German approach, having heard rumors of what was happening in Germany and Poland. Others had memories of being treated well by the Germans after World War I and hoped that the same would be true again. But even if they wanted to, many could not leave in time. Only a small number, about ten thousand, were able to flee farther east into the Soviet Union. The vast majority, about seventy-eight thousand, were stuck.

Their end came quickly. After being corralled behind a double fence of barbed wire in a small section of the old city for four months, the Jews of Riga, by order of Heinrich Himmler and with help from local Latvian volunteers, were liquidated. At four in the morning on November 29, 1941, fifteen thousand Jews were driven outside of the city to Rumbuli, told to undress and lie down, and then shot in the head. A week and a half later, ten thousand more Jews, including eighty-one-year-old Simon Dubnow, the great chronicler of Jewish history, were taken to Rumbuli and murdered.

By the end of the war, there was no Latvian Jewry. A progress report six months after the German invasion, signed by the head of one of the mobile killing units that massacred Jews in the wake of the German army, put the Jewish death toll at 63,238. That included the Jews of Riga. That included the five ditches at Rumbuli. In all, 90 percent of the Jews in Latvia were slaughtered by the Nazis; the rest were scattered through Siberia or starving and lonely in attics and holes waiting for the war to end. The majestic synagogues were burned to the ground. A culture had been totally annihilated; worse, it was as if salt had been spread on the earth so that nothing would ever grow there again.

Yosef Mendelevich was born in 1947 and knew only the world after the war.

His parents were from Dvinsk, in southern Latvia, and they had survived through his father's resourcefulness—he had managed to get a horse and carriage and escape deep into the Soviet Union before the Germans arrived. Like many Latvian Jews, he discovered there was little left of his hometown after the war, so he went to Riga. A committed Communist since the age of sixteen, Mendelevich's father never completely abandoned a sentimental attachment to Jewish tradition. When Yosef was born, his father even found an old mohel to circumcise him, one of the few remaining in Riga. On holidays, father and son would visit the one synagogue left in the city—it was crammed between buildings in the old town, and burning it would have meant destroying the surrounding houses. The Germans had used it as a stable. At home, Mendelevich's mother prepared Jewish meals, matzo balls at Passover and poppy seed-filled
hamentashen
on Purim. Yosef and his sister spent hours peeling potatoes to make latkes for Hanukkah.

But for Mendelevich, the warm world inside did not resemble the world outside. There, he learned early that he was not like everyone else. On the first day of first grade, his teacher asked each child to declare his or her "nationality." Every Soviet citizen was required to carry an internal passport at all times; it gave basic identifying information and, more important, the bearer's
propiska,
the place where he or she was officially registered to live. On the fifth line of the passport was a space for nationality; for most, this was the place to indicate the republic, language, and culture the individual was ethnically connected to: Ukrainian, Georgian, Latvian, Russian. But for 2,267,814 Soviet citizens, the fifth line read
Jewish,
and it indicated only one thing: difference.

In Mendelevich's first-grade class, he was the only one of the forty students who had
Evrei
—Jewish—written on that fifth line. When the teacher asked the children to stand up and state their nationalities, Mendelevich considered lying, but his nose and his name gave him away. "Mendelevich?" the teacher asked. "Jewish," he whispered. The class started to giggle. Among the children, there was a hierarchy of nationalities: the Russians were on top, Ukrainians and Latvians in the middle, the Asiatic peoples of the Far East toward the bottom, and Jews definitely on the lowest rung. The teacher made no attempt to quiet the class. Instead, she looked down at the squirming Mendelevich and asked, "Where does your father work?" He was mortified. It seemed all the other children's fathers were pilots or army officers. His father collected scrap iron. There was no way he could say this out loud. "I don't know," he answered. The laughter bubbled up and exploded as the teacher shook her head. "So big and he doesn't know."

From then on, Mendelevich preferred to stay inside, away from others. He read a lot—many Soviet writers, but also Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. His parents were poor and he was a child eager to please. He tried his best to succeed in school. He made few friends and eventually stopped venturing out into the courtyard to play with the other children.

But when he was ten, in 1957, Soviet reality intruded on him. Mendelevich's father was tried for economic crimes, accused of selling a few grams of lead on the black market. Khrushchev had crusaded against such crimes, and a suspiciously disproportionate number of Jews were tried and sometimes even executed as a result. Mendelevich's father was sentenced to five years and sent to a nearby prison camp, where he was forced to make bricks. Mendelevich's mother took him along when she went to visit her husband, and her son never forgot the barking dogs, the line of soldiers with their guns, and the strange sight of his father in tattered clothes.

His father was released early from his sentence. But a few months after that, his mother died. Mendelevich's alienation seemed complete. By the time he entered adolescence, he was living a double life. In school, he was disciplined. His Russian was so good that he was often asked to read out loud to the class. Once, he was asked to read the part of Maresyev, a pilot, in a famous Soviet novel. Maresyev's plane had been shot down in enemy territory; both of his legs were injured, and he was captured by partisans and interrogated. They asked the pilot who he was. Maresyev's response—"A Russian I am, a Russian"—made the children snicker and Mendelevich blush, but their laughter didn't bother him anymore. His home life, increasingly dominated by thoughts of Israel and revolving around the nightly shortwave broadcasts of Kol Israel, mattered much more.

At sixteen, before he'd even set eyes on Rumbuli, he began finding reflections of his secret desires. He spent the days working as a carpenter's apprentice at a factory, and in the evenings he took classes at School 25. By some fluke, a third of the school's teachers and students were Jews. And unlike at his elementary school, Mendelevich found there was no shame here in being Jewish. On one Jewish holiday, the students even wrote on the blackboard,
No school. Rosh Hashanah.
And to his surprise, he wasn't the only one who dreamed about Israel. Soon he and his new friends were chatting away about what they would do when they got there, what they would take with them, what kind of jobs they might have.

Even more important than his new school was the arrival of an older cousin from Dvinsk who came to stay in his family's home. Small, bookish, and unassuming, Mendel Gordin was studying to be a doctor at the Riga Medical Institute. In 1963, Mendelevich learned that his cousin had a secret. Gordin was part of a small network of Jews that shared illegal books and articles about Israel. It was so dangerous that Gordin kept his extracurricular activities from Mendelevich's father. But Gordin, who was older then Mendelevich by ten years, saw in the teenager a kindred spirit, and although he didn't tell him about his connections in the city, he shared his samizdat with him and talked with him about Israel. The first piece of illegal writing Mendelevich read, typed and loosely bound with a needle and thread, was a collection of Jabotinsky's essays.

That fall, Mendelevich went to Rumbuli for the first time. By then, hundreds of young Jews were arriving every Sunday to work on landscaping the mass graves; delineating them with rocks, planting flowers. The sight of so many young people working together, along with the steady stream of material his cousin was receiving, fed Mendelevich's fantasies about a vast underground Zionist movement operating in Riga. He knew he wanted to be a part of it.

Hardly anything worthy of the name
movement
existed at the time. The revival at Rumbuli and the clandestine distribution of samizdat, though far from spontaneous, were not the work of any formal organization. Riga's Zionist activity was, more than anything else, the result of a handful of connected families longing to reconstitute the lost world of their youth. The orange of Jaffa's citrus groves, the blue of the Mediterranean at Tel Aviv, and the white of Jerusalem stone had first hypnotized them as children and had never left their mind's eyes. In the secrecy of their homes, they played Israeli music on scratchy phonograph records, tried to teach themselves Hebrew, gathered together to listen to Kol Israel, and eagerly read any Jewish material they could find, including Dubnow's history, which they discovered in personal libraries. But a fear of Stalin and the far-reaching tentacles of his secret police made them keep these activities at a barely audible whisper. Even in the Baltics, where the memory of an openly Jewish cultural life was so fresh, almost no one was willing to test the resolve of the dictator, especially in his paranoid later years when he came to see Soviet Jews as a treasonous fifth column. Those few who weren't careful enough or who were just unlucky were arrested and sent to labor camps for long sentences. It happened all the time.

This changed in the 1960s with the ascension of Nikita Khrushchev. For his own political reasons, this crude son of peasant farmers, the unlikely winner of the post-Stalin leadership struggle, began a process of liberalization, an airing-out. The terror that had dominated people's lives for the past few decades began to subside. Khrushchev publicly denounced Stalin and his crimes in his 1956 "secret speech" to the Twentieth Party Congress, an instantly famous address that turned a heat lamp on Soviet society and began the process that became known as the thaw. He tore down the barbed wire of the Gulag, freeing tens of thousands of political prisoners in a mass amnesty. Previously banned books and art were suddenly allowed. People were not jailed arbitrarily as they once were. Jews, who at the moment of Stalin's death were terrified by rumors of his plans to deport them en masse to Siberia, could breathe easy again. In the Baltics, the most enlightened and least Sovietized corner of the empire, the thaw presented Jews with an opportunity.

That handful of Riga families, a few veteran Betar youth, and a couple of men just returning from the Gulag began cautiously, slowly, to open their doors. It helped that in Riga most of the population, including the Communist authorities, were ethnically Latvian. They were resentful of Russian domination, and though most had no great love for the Jews, they largely left them alone. Once the debilitating fear was no longer there, Jews wanted to create a space, however small, for their own national identity. They looked around at the generation born after the war, Mendelevich's peers, and realized that a great tragedy was under way: these young people felt nothing about their heritage but shame. The thaw gave the older Jews a chance to change this, to engage anyone who wanted to learn about Israel or reclaim a sense of Jewish identity. And once this generation saw that they could do something—that by showing a young person a map of Israel, teaching him some Hebrew songs, and exposing him to Jabotinsky's essays, they could alter his sense of himself—the small freedom granted by the thaw became insufficient. It only made them hungry for more.

In this way, Riga became the epicenter of a new type of Soviet Jewish activism. It started in the living rooms of people like Boris and Lydia Slovin. Coming back to her small Latvian town after the war, Lydia found that her home had been destroyed, as had the Jewish high school where her father had been a teacher. Her family moved to Riga, where she went to school and received a law degree in 1952. Like many in these early Zionist groups, Lydia was affected by the news in the fall of 1956 that Israel, in an operation conducted with Britain and France, had conquered the Sinai Peninsula. The anti-Israel rhetoric that followed inspired a few families to go pray in the synagogue for the safety of the Jewish State. One of the first pieces of samizdat distributed by Slovin's small group in the late fifties was Ben-Gurion's speeches on the Sinai campaign. Zionists met with friends for whispered discussions even though they lived in cooperative apartments where all that separated one family from the next was a thin sheet. The artist Yosef Kuzkovsky, who had become a famous painter in the socialist realist style, produced portraits of Lenin and Stalin for official consumption but kept hidden in his house a giant canvas he had been working on for years,
The Last Way
—
Babi Yar;
it depicted a group of Jews being marched to their deaths under a cloudy sky. It was a photograph of this painting that was later framed and hung on the obelisk memorial at Rumbuli.

Crucial in turning these individual acts into a movement were those former prisoners who had done time in labor camps as punishment for Zionist activity—it hadn't taken much for them to be arrested, usually a letter written to Israel or possession of any type of Zionist paraphernalia. The bonds formed in the prison camps became an important factor in establishing connections between the various centers of Zionist activity. Addresses were exchanged, codes for communication were established. Once they returned to their cities, these ex-inmates were not only the most fearless activists—they had already experienced the state at its worst—they were also hubs of information and material. In Riga, Yosef Schneider was one of the people who filled this role. In 1955, an uncle of Schneider who lived in Israel sent him a package containing a few photographs of Zionist leaders. Displaying a brazenness that would have meant death just a few years before, Schneider took one of the portraits—Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel—and put it in the window of his photography studio on the main boulevard of Riga. Even more audacious, the Chaim Weizmann picture replaced a photograph of Lenin that had occupied the spot (there was indeed a vague resemblance between the two bald and goateed leaders). This was clearly asking for trouble. In 1955, Schneider was one of the earliest to apply for a visa to leave the country. He was turned down then and six more times over the next two years. A former officer in the Red Army, he trained a group of Jewish men in marksmanship in an attempt to form a Jewish self-defense group. When the KGB finally came to arrest him, in 1957, it was for taking notes while listening to Kol Israel broadcasts and for allegedly slandering the Soviet Union in letters to his uncle. What they found searching his house didn't help him: along with his rifle, pistol, and bullets were Yiddish newspapers, a map of Israel, and the words to the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikvah," written on a scrap of paper.