Where the Jews Aren't

by Masha Gessen

  “During a time of anxiety twenty years ago, I was living in my homeland and hoping to leave for Berlin in a year,” he recalled in a letter. “Now I am not going anywhere: all roads are blocked off. Berlin has turned into Sodom, and all our European centers have been destroyed by the Sodomites. America and Palestine are looking at me from the opposite ends of the earth, and I set my sights on them too. But I know that they are unreachable and I am doomed to remain in this ‘vast and fearful desert.’ ”9 The great secular thinker was quoting Deuteronomy, the final book of the Tanakh, in which Moses tells the Jews that if they obey God’s law, they will not be harmed by the people who live across the Jordan River.

  As for his “children in Warsaw,” Dubnow was, of course, right to worry about them. His oldest daughter, Sofia, moved to Vilnius with her family, but her husband, the Bund leader Henryk Erlich, was arrested by the Soviets. He and another Bund leader, Wiktor Alter, were tried and sentenced to death, though their sentences were then reduced to ten years of hard labor. Sofia Dubnova-Erlich ran. Her husband was in a Soviet prison, her father was effectively being held prisoner by the Soviets, and yet she ran, with her two grown sons, first to Japan, then to Canada, and finally to New York. Her older son became an economist; he studied Soviet economics and taught at Columbia University. Her younger son served in the U.S. Army and later headed the Russian department at Yale. Their mother had been brought up right—to run, when one must, without looking back.

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  Within weeks of breaking the nonaggression pact, Germany had taken eastern Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine, the areas that still had the Soviet Union’s largest Jewish population. Nazi troops were marching toward Moscow almost as fast as their feet could carry them, so ineffectual was the Red Army’s resistance. In the face of the coming catastrophe, Bergelson was about to get his voice back.

  Six weeks after the German invasion, Solomon Lozovsky, the Jewish deputy chairman of the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo), the state news monopoly, received a letter signed by eight prominent Jews. They included Bergelson, Kvitko, and Markish as well as the great actor Solomon Mikhoels and a highly decorated poet named Itsik Fefer. The letter proposed “to organize a Jewish rally aimed at the Jews of the USA and great Britain but also at Jews in other countries.” It emphasized that “a rally with the participation of Jewish academicians, writers, artists, and Red Army fighters will have a great impact abroad.”1 It included a list of twelve proposed speakers, fourth among them “D. Bergelson, the great Jewish writer.”2 Bergelson was offering to do for the state what he had done so well before: sell Soviet needs to rich foreign Jews. It would be a fund-raiser for the Soviet war effort.

  On August 24, 1941, thousands of people gathered in Gorky Park in central Moscow to listen to Bergelson and his comrades, led by Mikhoels. The war, it seemed, had lifted the ban on speaking as Jews—not Soviet Jews, not toiling-on-the-land Jews, but Jews who had a history before the revolution, Jews who had been raised reading the Torah, Jews who no longer had anything to fear, because Hitler’s advancing army was within weeks of reaching Moscow.

  The Soviet ban on religious speech had relaxed in the early days of the war, when the Red Army command spontaneously began to rely on clergy—what little remained of it after the years of terror—to pull together and inspire the troops. It is not clear that Bergelson knew this; rather, he, Markish, and the others might have reached for religious speech the way human beings reach for ritual when they experience overwhelming fear. Speaking at the rally, Markish invoked the image of “the biblical Job, stunned by everything that passed before his eyes.” The writer Ilya Ehrenburg, another returned émigré, now on his way to becoming the country’s single most influential journalist, said, “I grew up in a Russian city. My mother tongue is Russian. I am a Russian writer. Like all Russians, I am now defending my homeland. But the Nazis have reminded me of something else; my mother’s name was Hannah. I am a Jew. I say this proudly. Hitler hates us more than anything, and this makes us proud.”3

  Bergelson spoke in Yiddish. “Dear brothers and sisters,” he said, as a statesman would say addressing the people he led, as, indeed, Stalin had said at the start of his first speech after the German invasion.4 “Jews of the whole world…It is also [Hitler’s] plan to wipe out all peoples, and in the first place, the Jewish people….The bandit Hitler makes no distinction between workers and manufacturers, between freethinkers and religious people, between assimilated and unassimilated Jews.” Whom was he addressing? American Jews, who needed to hear that Soviet Jews were Jews, too, even if they had for twenty years been “scratching off their own Jewishness until blood starts to run,” as he had written in Forverts? Soviet Jews, who needed to hear that their plight was shared by millions? Himself, because he needed to sound out the line from Psalm 118 that he had used to title his speech: “I shall not die, but live”?5 Emboldened by despair, or perhaps sensing that exhibiting a little liberty would go a long way toward making his appeal effective abroad, he said the words in Hebrew, a language banned by Soviet law nearly twenty years earlier.

  For all people of occupied countries, Hitlerism means slavery, persecution, and torture; for us Jews, though, it means total extermination and the end. The question of survival becomes absolutely clear. It concerns life or death for our people….Vandalizing Fascism still rages. It destroys everything, and we Jews will be the first to be thrown into the fire. Our people, though, will not perish…the people who, thousands of years ago, proudly told its tormentors, Lo amut ki ekhye, “I shall not die, but live.”6

  Sovinformburo organized a radio broadcast of the rally to allied countries and distributed an additional document titled “An Appeal to World Jewry.” Bergelson was almost certainly one of its primary authors.

  Fellow Jews the world over!

  While the murderous fascists have brought a “new order” to the enslaved countries with the aid of the knife, the gallows, fire and violence, Hitler’s bloody regime has brutally planned the complete and unconditional annihilation of the Jewish people by all means available to the fascist executioners.

  In Poland alone, Hitler’s men have tortured and murdered more than three million Poles and Jews in the most savage and shameless way, raped daughters in front of their parents and smashed the heads of children in the presence of their mothers….

  Fellow Jews! As history fatefully willed it, the Jewish people, dispersed throughout the entire world, linked their own culture closely to the culture of peoples all over the world.

  In those countries seized and enslaved by fascism, our unfortunate brothers have become the first victims. The blood of Jews tortured in the burning synagogues of Rotterdam calls out to the entire world, as do the thousands of unmarked graves in the towns and villages of Poland, in which the fascist barbarians buried their victims alive.

  The spilled blood demands not fasting and prayers, but revenge! It is not by memorial candles but by fire that the murderers of humanity must be destroyed. Not tears, but hate and resistance to the monsters and beasts! Not words but deeds! It’s now or never!7

  The way the story is told to this day, back in 1941, no one knew. Even at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961, there was argument about who among the Nazi leadership had learned of plans for a “final solution” and at which point, and the entire year of 1941 was contested territory.8 The people who wrote this address knew. Nothing—not the Iron Curtain or the willful ignorance of the world’s Jews—could shield them from the knowledge, for Hitler had told them all they needed to know back in January 1939, when news from Germany was still being reported in the Soviet press. In a speech at the Reichstag back then, Hitler had predicted that there would be a war that would bring about “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”9

  Few people wanted to know. It appears that only the New York Yiddish dailies picked up the appeal, distributed in the United States by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. This might have been only the second time they c
arried reports of the killing of Jews in Eastern Europe, the first having appeared in July of that year, when they wrote that hundreds of Jews had been massacred by Germans in the occupied territories of Ukraine and Belarus. The New York Times would not acknowledge this information until October 1941—and it was not until at least spring 1942 that a prominent report finally appeared in the Times.10 By this time, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states—those parts of Europe that were home to the largest number of Jews—had been under German occupation for between seven months and two and a half years.

  Three weeks after the rally, German troops took Kyiv, the city Bergelson probably still loved more than any place he had lived. Many of the non-Jewish residents of the city—and, who knows, perhaps some of the Jews as well—welcomed the Germans, who had showered the city with flyers in advance of their arrival, promising an end to the Soviet regime and a life of order and plenty. In five days, Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s majestic central avenue, went up in flames, following a series of explosions of mines apparently planted by the Soviets before they abandoned the city without a fight; most of those killed were civilians. In another two weeks, Nazi troops marched between thirty and seventy thousand Jews, in groups one after another, to a ravine on the outskirts of the city, ordered them to strip naked, opened machine-gun fire on them, and then quickly covered up the ravine, while some of the victims were still alive.11 This method of massacre would be reproduced repeatedly throughout Ukraine and the Baltics, in all the shtetlach, whose names Bergelson still knew by heart.

  In October 1941, panic broke out in Moscow. All hope that the city could be protected was lost; people fled by train if they were lucky, by car, horse-drawn cart, and even by foot if they were not. They took only what they could carry, and they disposed of anything they felt might endanger them, like books on Marxism, party documents, Soviet uniforms—the streets were littered with the skin Soviet people had shed, fleeing. As a newly reintegrated member of the Soviet propaganda establishment, Bergelson was able to leave Moscow during a partial evacuation; he went to the old Volga city of Kuybyshev, where a temporary capital was being set up.

  In the middle of all this, he wrote a play called Kh’vel lebn (I will live), set in the present, in a town facing Hitler’s advancing troops. One of the characters considers suicide. The wise old man character, Avraham-Ber, admonishes him, “We, the ordinary Jews, have seen many dead people in our lives….Yet the more they multiply, the greater our desire to live….They did not commit suicide….They did not stop proclaiming, ‘I shall not die but will live.’ ”12

  More important, he wrote letters. In addition to proposing the rally, Bergelson and the seven other famous Soviet Jews offered to create a committee that would mobilize the world’s Jewry to aid the Soviet Union in fighting Hitler and starting a newspaper. “The Jewish press of Minsk, Kovno, Vilnius, Lvov, Białystok and a number of other cities has ceased to exist,” they wrote to Lozovsky. “We therefore raise before the Soviet Information Bureau the question of the urgent need to establish a Yiddish newspaper. There are sufficient literary personnel as well as printing facilities in Moscow to maintain such a newspaper. A Yiddish newspaper in Moscow will play a major role in organizing the Jewish masses for the support of our homeland.”13 These letters went unheeded. Meanwhile, the Jews of Ukraine were packing their bags and appearing in the designated public squares of their cities and towns at the appointed hour, apparently unaware not only that they would now be marched to a ravine and executed but even that they had particular reason to fear the Nazis.14 All Bergelson could do to counteract this was write a brochure for Soviet Jews, published by Der emes in Moscow in the fall of 1941. “The human imagination is too limited to paint a picture of the atrocities they have thought up,” he wrote. “Haman was nothing but a dog compared to them.”15

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  In the spring of 1942, the Communist Party gave its official permission for the founding of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, with Mikhoels as chair. Mikhoels and Fefer would travel to the United States to personally raise funds. Even the Polish Bund leaders Erlich—Dubnow’s son-in-law—and Alter, who were famous among the Jewish American Left, had been released from prison at the end of the previous year, in preparation for this effort. Soon after the work began, however, they disappeared from view. In 1943, the Soviet Union acknowledged that both were dead; they were understood to have been executed, although years later it emerged that Erlich had committed suicide in his jail cell in May 1942, some time after Alter was executed. The news of the deaths, first reported by the New Republic in early 1943, caused an outrage and even calls for a total boycott of the Soviet Union, but soon was forgotten. Sofia Dubnova-Erlich learned both of her husband’s and her father’s deaths only after she had arrived in New York following a year-long journey.

  The JAC would have a newspaper, published every ten days, to be called Eynikayt (Unity) and to be run by an editorial board of five, including Bergelson, Mikhoels, and Kvitko. It was at Eynikayt that Bergelson finally found the journalistic voice that he and others had for so long demanded from him, back when all he seemed capable of producing came out shrill, as when he wrote his anti-Soviet diatribes for Forverts, or stilted, as when he turned pro-Soviet. Now he was fighting for the survival of his people.

  Bergelson’s first essay for Eynikayt was called “May the World Be a Witness.”

  May the world bear witness that the following will take place. The Jewish people once created a book that, for thousands of years, has been read more than any other book. That same Jewish people will find within itself sufficient strength to create a book that, for thousands of years, will tell the world about fascist atrocities everywhere, in every corner of every country where the Nazi jackboots have trampled.1

  Simon Dubnow, who may have been the first to suggest the idea of a book—The Black Book—that would document Nazi crimes against the Jews, had been dead almost a year when Bergelson set out to tell the story of the Holocaust in his articles. His first one, published in September 1942, was called “Gedenkt” (Remember) and related the story of the Jews of Vitebsk, who were massacred on October 8, 1941. He kept at it, looking for and finding ways to write something beyond a litany of losses, feeling his way to creating something like a dirge, a text that could convey the full weight of what was being killed: an entire world.

  On May Day 1943, he published an homage to Kyiv, then still under German occupation:

  From high up on Khreshtchatik one can descend all the way down to Podol. It is better to go on foot rather than to drive. On the right, at the very edge of the hill’s peak, the tram-car goes up and down, like a rhythmic, creeping funicular. A bit farther away you can see the Dnieper playing with its depths. An old river, perhaps even greying a little, it seems, but none the less still playful. It plays with the sun on hot summer days. It plays with the storm-clouds in late autumn. It plays with ships and barges that glide over it, and it plays with all the smallest splinters that skip along its waves when it is just beginning to freeze over. It is an old-young river. From its highest of heights and lowest of depths it reflects the image of Kiev, also a playful, old-new city.2

  It was the city of Bergelson’s youth, the city where he had become a man and a writer, the city where his son had been a baby and he himself had careened from mad hope to desperate fear, the city he had escaped with his wife, his son, and his friends. He had traveled the world looking for a home, he seemed to have all but forgotten his Kyiv, but as he neared his sixtieth birthday, the pain of seeing Kyiv destroyed—rather, of having enough information to imagine the destruction with striking clarity—proved searing. He described it now as a Jewish city:

  From the Black Sea to places beyond Kiev, in all cities and towns, every Friday at sunset, at exactly the same hour, at exactly the same minute, at exactly the same instant, Jewish windows were aflame with candlelight.

  Under Soviet rule, Kyiv remained a Jewish city. The Germans had killed it. Bergelson wrote o
f Podol, the poor, filthy Jewish trading area of Kyiv:

  All that’s left of Podol are empty ruins. From twisted balconies hang the ropes and nooses of gallows. In a grave near the Jewish hospital lie fifty-six thousand Jews, shot to death or buried alive. In the Goloseyev forest at the edge of Demievka, by the glow of nocturnal fires German soldiers receive their hangman’s pay for smashing the heads of hundreds and hundreds of Jewish children against the trunks of trees—for each smashed child’s skull, a full glass of schnaps….Oh, Kiev, tortured city, slaughtered but at the same time not slaughtered, on your devastated hills! You will surely be asking, “Where are you now, my children?”3

  This child was now back in Moscow, apparently torn like never before between his need and desire to do what he could to speak for the Jews of Europe and his shame at being allowed to utter but a few of the words that welled up. The Polish Jewish poet Rokhl Korn, who spent the war years in Russia, working with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, described a heartbreaking scene in Bergelson’s home.

  He took me by the arm and led me into his study. He stopped in front of his portrait which was hung on the wall and asked: “Do you see him?” I answered: “Yes, who painted it?” being sure he wanted to comment on the painter. But as though he had not heard the question he kept pointing his finger at his own portrait and like one possessed he shouted into my ear: “Look at him, take a good look at him—I hate his guts—the filthy scoundrel!”