by Alan Gold
“Rabbi, why does it matter where the wood came from?”
The rabbi looked at her curiously, as if failing to understand the question. Judita continued. “I mean, I understand the story, but we live here in Russia. Why should this story matter?”
The rabbi was used to Judita’s questioning, but this was more blunt than he had anticipated. He pushed out a reply: “These stories tell us who we are, where we come from, our faith that God has chosen us—”
Judita cut off the rabbi by changing tack. “But Comrade Lenin said that all modern religions and churches, every kind of religious organization, are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the exploitation and stupefaction of the working class.”
The rabbi was speechless as the class drew a collective breath. He smiled, trying to brave her communist leanings. “Yes, child. All modern religions. Ours isn’t a modern religion. Ours is the oldest and best and—”
Judita pushed on bravely. “If what Comrade Lenin said is true, and of course it has to be, then should we not reject these stories? What does it matter if we are Jewish?”
The rabbi was unused to being subjected to an inquisition by a fourteen-year-old girl, dealing with the difference between the doctrine of the state and the doctrine of his faith. He banged his fist on the table, yelling, “Judita!”
But as soon as her name left his lips, he regretted it. The harsh booming of his voice shocked the class, and even plucky Judita cowered for an instant. He realized in the shock of her face that he reminded the poor brilliant child of her father. At the same time, he was furious that here, in the confines of his school, a Jewish girl could reject all that he represented, all that he was.
The distant noise of a door creaking made all of the students shift their attention from Judita to the front of their classroom. With the secret police everywhere, any unexpected noise could herald danger. They all looked at the rabbi, who smiled and nodded to give them confidence, but they knew from his forced smile that he was feeling as ill at ease as they were.
The students listened intently to steps on the upper floors walking in the direction of the basement room. Then the steps—two or three or even more men—could be heard descending the stairs. The rabbi put his finger to his mouth and whispered, “Quiet, children. Silence.”
All the boys and girls, as well as Rabbi Ariel, looked in fear to the door. Any interruption these days almost always spelled trouble. The door burst open, and three men stood there dressed in the uniform of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police: brown army jackets, brown trousers, heavy black boots, and a cap of purple and red stripes above the shiny black peak.
A tall man with a bushy mustache like Comrade Stalin’s stepped forward into the room. He was followed by the other two men. All the soldiers were wearing mustaches. Without even glancing at the rabbi, the first man surveyed the boys and girls slowly, letting them know that he was in command of the room. Only then did he turn and acknowledge the rabbi, who was staring wide-eyed at the three newcomers.
NKVD officers usually came at night to a person’s home. They never knocked but pushed the door in with their feet, dragged the occupants out to a truck, and then drove off. The householders were never, ever seen again. A new family would be in residence the following day, as though they’d lived there all their lives. Rumors said that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people disappeared, never to be seen again. No explanation, no comments from the neighbors, and certainly never a mention of the family who’d lived there the day before.
The rabbi started to speak, but the leader glared at him in such a way that all he could say was “What can I . . . ?”
“You have a pupil. Judita Ludmilla Magidovich, daughter of Abel Abramovich Magidovich and his wife, Ekaterina Davidovna Magidovich. Where is she?”
The rabbi gulped and shook his head.
Without realizing the implications, everybody in the room stared at Judita the moment the Russian policeman mentioned her name. She tried to diminish the size of her body. Ignoring the rabbi, the captain of the NKVD said, “Judita Ludmilla?”
She stood, and the rabbi tried to catch her eye, shaking his head fiercely, silently begging her to sit down. But she didn’t.
“Excellency?” she asked. “Why do you want me?”
He examined her. Most people whom he confronted, either at night in their homes or in the prison cells of the Lubyanka, looked at him in utter horror. But this girl looked him directly in the eyes and didn’t flinch at all.
“Come with me.”
She didn’t move. After a long moment, she asked calmly, “What have I done?”
“I said come with me.”
“And I asked what I’ve done.”
The students, the rabbi, and the other soldiers looked at Judita in astonishment. Nobody ever questioned the orders of a commanding officer, especially not a schoolgirl. And a Jewess. Instead of drawing out his gun or screaming a command at her, he said, “Your country needs you. Now, don’t dawdle, girl. Follow me.”
Judita looked at the rabbi, who stood and said, “Excellency, surely you’ve made a mistake. Look at her. She’s only a child. Let me go with you instead. I’ll answer all your questions. Let me send these children home, and—”
“Silence!” said the officer, and he nodded to the other men in his troop, who walked aggressively through the rows, pushing desks out of the way, and grabbed the young girl’s arm to hurry her to the door.
Before she left the room, she said to the rabbi, “Please, Reb Ariel, tell Mama and Papa that I’m fine and that all will be well. This is Russia . . .”
Once outside the school, Judita found herself in a truck on the way to the center of Moscow. She sat quietly on the seat between the captain, whose name she didn’t know, and the other men, who were never identified.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked softly.
“You’re going to the Lubyanka,” the captain said, looking out of the window at the empty streets of the nation’s capital.
She gulped. Every Muscovite, every Russian, was terrified of the Lubyanka, even if they’d never been to the center of Moscow. It had a fearsome reputation. It was a place people went and never emerged, never returned. Some people said at night you could hear screams from inside.
“What have I done?” asked Judita, desperate not to cry.
The captain finally turned and looked at her. “To ask a question like that, Judita Ludmilla, indicates a guilty conscience.”
Judita held her breath and fell silent. She knew she’d find out soon enough.
• • •
Comrade Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria walked the cold Moscow streets with his coat pulled tight around him. It wasn’t a long journey to the Kremlin, perhaps a couple of hundred yards at most, but it could be the most dangerous journey in the world. Not because of criminals or car traffic. Nor because of the numerous checkpoints that were a constant threat to Moscow citizens. Beria was the state security administrator and chief of the NKVD, instantly recognizable to any soldier and therefore safe in that respect.
No, the reason the fifteen-minute walk was so dangerous was because he never knew whether he would return to his office or be murdered at the whim of his leader. Beria was powerful and influential but always walking the tightrope plucked by Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, always in danger of being tossed into the abyss.
The walk was from the hill on Teatralnyy, down the street from Beria’s office in the Lubyanka, past the Bolshoi Theater and the Metropol Hotel and through the massive gates that punctuated the Kremlin’s red walls.
Earlier that day his telephone had rung with the summons to meet with the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Beria assumed a particularly stern voice to the leader’s assistant, saying that although he was very busy dealing with great matters of state, he would make time to see the general secretary and would be there as soon as possible. The truth was that the moment the t
elephone’s bell sounded, apprehension had gripped him. He could have ordered his car and chauffeur, but he needed the walk. He needed to be focused. He needed to think over the past couple of meetings with Stalin and try to work out if he’d done something that might have angered the man. But what? Nothing! Or possibly . . .
He walked through the private entrance in the massive red walls of the Kremlin and found his way over the vast courtyards to where the nation’s most powerful man lived. While he was climbing the stairs to Stalin’s office, he pondered the deeply divergent paths the meeting might take. If Stalin was in one of his jovial moods, the two Georgians would sit for hours eating piroshky and drinking vodka and Alazani wine until the general secretary fell asleep in his chair and Beria could stagger home or to the apartment of one of his mistresses.
But if Stalin needed to be told something, often for the third or fourth time, Beria would have to pretend that the question had never been asked and answer with enthusiasm, praising the leader for his perception. On occasion, if he was lucky, Stalin only wanted his advice on something or confirmation of an order, and then he’d be dismissed, always with thanks. These were some of the better scenarios of how the meeting might go. Sometimes on his way to Stalin’s offices, Beria would stop off at the GUM department store, opposite the Kremlin walls in Red Square. There, he’d be shown into a private room where his usual Georgian vodka would be ready on ice, along with some Beluga caviar. This time he obeyed the call of his master.
He was ushered immediately into Stalin’s offices and found the leader sitting at his desk. Beria tried to see what he was looking at, but the general secretary’s eyes were dead. Expressionless. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. His entire face was like a death mask. It moved only when he spoke, and then his lips barely enunciated the words.
Beria sat and pondered Stalin as though Medusa the Gorgon were on the opposite side of the desk, waiting on his master to acknowledge his presence. Yet Stalin sat reading, making notes. Then he looked up and out the window, staring around the room, looking through Beria, not at him, as though he were invisible. Did ten minutes pass or an hour?
Beria surreptitiously glanced through the window at the onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. It gave him comfort. Not because of any sentimentality for his Russian Orthodox upbringing but, rather, because of his latest stratagem. He’d spent many weeks going over maps of Palestine and the entire area of Arabia, reading the documents of the Jews and Arabs who lived there and the details of the British mandate that enabled the effete government in London to rule the region.
In his readings and study, he’d been surprised to learn that the very church just across the way, the church on the grounds of the Red Square and others in the center of Moscow, were viewed by the Russian priesthood as the equivalent of the holy city of Jerusalem. They even believed that St. Basil’s Cathedral was the very Temple of Solomon itself. This seemed an odd idea. Did these idiot priests have any idea just how far the sun-drenched white stone of Jerusalem was from freezing soil and the iron sky of a wintry Moscow? How much would the stupid Muscovite priests, still faithful to the god banished from Russia by Marx, love to be part of a global plan where Moscow would become the new Jerusalem?
Eventually, waiting for Stalin to acknowledge his presence in the office became too much and Beria coughed apologetically. It was a cautious cough, not enough to be heard but enough to make a disturbance in the funereal quiet of Stalin’s office.
Suddenly aware of the disturbance, Stalin stopped writing and looked slowly up at Beria, sitting opposite him across the desk. “Good afternoon, Lavrentiy Pavlovich. I’ve kept you waiting. I had to finish this communication. Now, you wanted to see me.”
Beria swallowed, though Stalin’s forgetfulness and confusion were not unusual. The general secretary had summoned him, but in the half hour it had taken him to arrive, Stalin had forgotten the reason he’d sent for Beria, or seemingly that he’d summoned him at all. Beria made no indication of this and pressed ahead.
“Comrade Chairman, if you remember, you and I had previously discussed the use of Jewish operatives in Palestine. To this end I have begun the process and brought in the potentials. As of yesterday, I am delighted to inform you that the last Jewish spy to be trained has just been put into place. She’s a very young woman, little more than a girl, but utterly brilliant. A real asset. Once she is trained, Operation Outgrowth can begin.”
“What?”
Surely he remembered. It had been discussed last week. Beria spoke again. “Operation Outgrowth. The plan that you approved yourself last year. We’ve been searching for the right personnel, and during this year we’ve identified them. Now we’ve drawn them together. Twelve of them in total. Like Jesus’ disciples. All young Jews, utterly loyal to Mother Russia, but gifted in the language and cultural knowledge of the Jews.”
Stalin continued to stare at Beria, who found the heat in the room overwhelming and began to sweat. Was it all going wrong? Why didn’t Stalin react? Stalin’s face was still a mask. Beria couldn’t tell whether or not he understood, or agreed, or was about to explode with rage.
Nervously, Beria continued. “Allow me to detail the context for your approval. You suggested that as the war against the Nazis was at last turning in our favor, it was time to look beyond the boundaries of the glorious Soviet motherland and think of a new Europe without the boundaries that were in place before the madman Hitler’s adventure. We know, when Germany is defeated, that we might absorb Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the petty principalities of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Albania, Romania, and so on. But there is also the matter of our navy . . .”
Beria looked at Stalin expectantly, but the chairman’s face remained like granite. Did he understand? Did he remember? It was impossible to read Stalin’s mind. He might be forgetful—except where his enemies were concerned—but he was also cunning and guileful and so deadly dangerous.
Again Beria swallowed before speaking. “Might I respectfully remind you, Comrade General Secretary, about the outcome of the Moscow Conference that we’ve just concluded. This did more than agree on an allied pact against the Nazis. Britain’s Anthony Eden, the American Cordell Hull, and our own Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov all agreed on ways to bring this war to a just and glorious conclusion. We must also prepare for the disposition of the world after Hitler and his fascists are destroyed and become a footnote in Russia’s long and glorious history.
“The British and Americans think they’ll be able to acquire territory, so we must be prepared to expand before them. In this, you believed it was the sands of Persia, Arabia, and the oil that lies beneath that should be our focus. But you also thought much further; it was your idea to create a permanent base for our Soviet navy in the warm waters of the eastern Mediterranean.”
He hoped the phrase would alert Stalin’s memory. He waited for some response, but Stalin continued to stare at him. He wondered whether the man had fallen asleep with his eyes open, knowing that Stalin slept one or two hours a night and catnapped during the day.
Beria persisted. “So that we can remove our navy permanently from the Black Sea and base it in the open waters of the Mediterranean . . . so that we’re never again bottled in by Turkey.”
Stalin didn’t blink, frown, or move a muscle of his face. For Beria, it was like talking to a brick wall.
Beria now felt desperate. “Comrade, when Russia is victorious in this evil fascist war, the time is ripe for us to make great gains in the territory of the Middle East. For its oil. For the warm-water port that Mother Russia has always been denied. Palestine is a hotbed of internecine warfare, with Jews fighting Arabs fighting the British. We know that the mufti of Palestine has allied himself with Hitler, so when Hitler is defeated, the Jews will fight the Arabs. And both will no doubt turn on the British. This is a chaos we—” Beria caught himself. “This is a chaos you clearly saw our ability to exploit.”
Stalin nodded. A nod so small and subtle, many would no
t have seen it at all. But Beria saw it.
“Comrade Chairman, this is how I . . . you . . . proposed that we use our Fifth Column Jewish spies within Palestine. To lever our influence and create a Jewish communist puppet state and satellite of Moscow when Palestine gains its independence from its British colonizers, which will give us a warm-water port in the Mediterranean for our glorious navy.”
Suddenly, to Beria’s surprise, Stalin came to life, stood from his chair, and walked over to a huge map of the world hanging on the wall of his office. The moment he stood, Beria sprang out of his chair and stood to attention. Stalin said nothing but simply regarded the map, silently inviting Beria to continue. Beria walked over and tried to make himself slightly smaller than Stalin, who himself was short; there were no men taller than Stalin in his command structure. All the tall men had been removed.
Beria looked at the map and cleared his throat. “Here,” he said, pointing to the Black Sea and the port of Sevastopol, “is where the Russian fleet is currently moored. But we are in danger of our fleet being locked up from winter ice here in the north . . .” Beria pointed to the Russian Baltic ports on the border of the Arctic. “And on the other side of Russia,” he said, moving his hand over the enormous expanse of the nation to the far eastern city of Vladivostok, “the ports are frozen six months of the year. And while our navy is moored in the Black Sea, it’s in danger of being bottled up by the Turks in Istanbul. Operation Outgrowth is a concept that aims to deliver us a permanent warm-water port in the Mediterranean where we can come and go at our will. Our Russian navy will be a foil to the U.S. navy, which feels it can roam the globe freely, as it will be to the British and the French and whoever else underestimates our strength.”
Slowly, Stalin nodded once more and said, “It is a good plan, and you have understood my directions well.”
