by Masha Gessen
Only later did I begin to grasp the full tragedy of this scene. This was David Bergelson’s way of turning to the free world and asking that he not be judged too harshly for having given in, and having served a false idolatry both in his work and in his personal life. He realized that he was already a prisoner of Soviet reality but I, who was still a Polish citizen, still had a chance to leave the prison that housed 200 million.4
Bergelson turned sixty on August 12, 1944. A public reception was held in Moscow. Eynikayt published a special supplement celebrating his contributions to literature and the theater, and in particular—addressing Bergelson in the second person—it lauded him for “your great and wide-ranging anti-fascist activity. With your fiery words you summon the Jewish masses to battle against the accursed enemy of humankind, against the hangman of the Jewish people.”5 Five days after his birthday, Eynikayt came out with Bergelson’s report on Majdanek—the first death camp to have been liberated, just a month earlier. It was called “The Germans Did This!”
This will be engraved on the memory of humanity for ever….
—In Majdanek!
This is the spit in the face of everyone who feels and thinks and sees in life something rational and good, who believes that it is in man’s power to make life better and more beautiful.
—In Majdanek!
…Was it only Mafeld and Tuman [who ran the camp] who did this? This is the question each of our Red Army soldiers had to ask himself when bearing witness to a field strewn with hundreds of thousands of people’s shoes, soldiers who were led to see a decaying body killed by an electric current, who were led to…[a person] begging, as though for alms, “Please, hang me.”
Who can, in such a moment, attempt to work out how many pairs of shoes on that field belonged to Jews, and how many belonged to Poles, to Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, to Norwegians, or to Serbs? We Jews?…
Almost to the last person he [the German] exterminated our brothers in the occupied regions. In the places where Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian Jews used to live and create, all he left behind was vacancy, and with an abandoned cynicism he inscribed into that vacancy:
—Vilna without Jews!
—Kovno without Jews!
—Warsaw without Jews!
And yet we alone do not have the power to gain restitution for our great tragedy, and the plague called “Germans” is not ours alone. It is a plague on the whole world.6
In July 1943, Eynikayt announced that a single book documenting the killing of European Jews would be created and called on readers to submit their stories; the book would be titled The Black Book, just as Dubnow had imagined. Albert Einstein would write one of the introductions. Bergelson’s old acquaintance Sholem Asch, who’d once tried to persuade him to emigrate to the United States, would be one of its American editors. The entire Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and several other prominent Russian Jewish writers would take part. The Soviet Union’s most popular journalist and Bergelson’s fellow wandering Jew Ilya Ehrenburg would be the editor. It would be a book for reading, a book of heart-rending stories rather than a collection of documents. “This book cannot be good or bad,” Ehrenburg wrote at the time. “We are not writing it; the Nazis are.”7
The book was to be published in eleven languages. The world would know. The manuscript was completed in early 1944.8 The censorship process commenced. Einstein’s introduction had to be dropped because he wrote that the Jews, through their suffering, had earned the right to their own nation-state.9 Parts of the book were published in 1945–46 in the United States and in Romania,10 but the definitive Russian-language edition, titled The Black Book of the Evil and Commonplace Killing of the Jews by the Nazi Occupiers in the Temporarily Occupied Lands of the Soviet Union and in Hitlerite Death Camps on Polish Territory During the War of 1941–1945, languished, designed, typeset, laid out, and unpublished. Times had changed once again. Not only were the Jews no longer needed to organize international support for the war effort; in the new postwar disposition they had become more suspect than they had ever been before. As represented by the JAC, they had had unprecedented contact with foreigners during the war years. In addition, with the founding, in 1948, of the State of Israel, the Jews, in Stalin’s eyes, became, like the other minority nations of the Soviet Union, potentially allied with a foreign power. They became internal enemies.
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Within two years of the war’s end, the project of forgetting it commenced. Victory Day, which had briefly been an official holiday, became just another day. War veterans were stripped of the benefits they had been granted. Those who had been maimed were rounded up and sent to places where they would not serve as living reminders of the carnage. Cultural production about the war halted. Bergelson, too, stopped writing about the war—in addition to his articles, he had written two plays, Kh’vel lebn (I will live) and Prints Ruveni (Prince Reuveni, the story of a sixteenth-century false messiah who calls on the Jews to take up arms), and now he turned, once again, to the story of Birobidzhan. He picked up the narrative of a disoriented American Jew pursuing false capitalist ideals in the socialist Eden in the Far East. It was as lifeless as his previous writing on Birobidzhan.
Of the roughly five million Soviet Jews, half had been murdered; perhaps as many as half of the rest had been displaced. Throughout Ukraine and Belarus, German troops had rounded up and, in most cases, killed the Jews in the first weeks after the invasion; over the two to three years of occupation that followed, Jewish homes, entire neighborhoods, and whole settlements had been colonized by the non-Jews, for whom the opportunity to claim additional living space had been one of the few benefits of German rule. At the end of the war, the lucky survivors among Soviet Jews faced the prospect of returning to homes that were no longer theirs, occupied by strangers or former neighbors and surrounded by the memory and, literally, the remains of loved ones they had left behind. Two groups of people—Stalin’s government, on the one hand, and JAC activists and their American allies, on the other—realized this long before the displaced Jews themselves knew of their predicament. Both the Soviet government and the Jewish activists understood that allowing the Jews of Ukraine and Belarus to return to what they thought was home would be a disaster.
There was the idea of resettling the Jews in the Crimea. It seems to have been born—or, rather, reborn, for this had been tried already, before the founding of Birobidzhan—during Mikhoels’s and Itsik Fefer’s fund-raising trip to the United States, on behalf of the JAC, in 1943. They apparently ran their idea by the Kremlin and, thinking it vetted, wrote letters to Stalin and foreign minister Molotov, urging “the formation of a Soviet Jewish republic [that] would solve once and for all in a Bolshevik manner, in the spirit of the Leninist-Stalinist nationalities policy, the problem of the state and legal position of the Jewish people and the further development of its long-lived culture. Such a problem, which was impossible to solve for many centuries, can be solved only in our Great Socialist country.”1 In keeping with the Soviet tradition of obliterating history, the letter pretended that neither Birobidzhan nor the earlier Crimean experiment had existed.
Kvitko was dispatched to the Crimea on a reconnaissance mission. It was as if everyone had forgotten that the Soviet Union had already solved the Jewish problem in full accordance with Leninist-Stalinist nationalities policy, by settling the Jews on the border with China. Everyone, that is, but Lazar Kaganovich, who once summoned several JAC members to rebuke them for the Crimea plan.2 The incident apparently did not frighten the others, but it must have had particular resonance for Bergelson. His last contact with Kaganovich had concerned the ill-fated Yiddish-language conference in Birobidzhan, which Kaganovich had inspired and which would have landed Bergelson in jail had he persisted in trying to organize it. This was the man who’d praised the Khavkins’ hospitality and home cooking and later ruined their lives by accusing them of trying to poison him. Bergelson knew enough not to take part in the Crimea
project. He turned to Birobidzhan, though he never again returned there.
In February 1944, the JAC convened a meeting in Moscow devoted to the future of Soviet Jewry, which represented the absolute majority of the surviving Jews of Europe. The Crimea proposal figured most prominently. But a representative from Birobidzhan argued, as a participant recalled, that “despite all its past failures and difficulties, this was a propitious time to develop Birobidzhan.” Ilya Ehrenburg, the celebrated novelist and war correspondent, was outraged: “You people are trying to create a new ghetto!” In 1944, this was quite a grave accusation. A Yiddish poet recalled that Bergelson “expressed enthusiasm for its natural beauty and its wealth of resources. ‘A Jewish writer, especially a poet,’ he assured me, ‘will find much there to inspire him.’ ” Markish was more circumspect, noting that “it’s so far away from everything!”3
The Jews started coming to Birobidzhan. Some came alone or in pairs, shards of families killed by the Nazis, lone remnants of communities that had been destroyed. Sometimes they were young men who had survived the war as soldiers only to find out that everyone they had known was dead. More often, they were young widows with children, women who had lost their husbands at the front and everyone else back home. They were also children orphaned by the war, collected in the ruins of Jewish Eastern Europe and shipped all the way to Birobidzhan to grow up alongside others of their kind. An American Jewish charitable organization donated the money to start an orphanage.
The children were housed in one of the two-story wooden barracks that made up most of the city of Birobidzhan now. It was staffed entirely with Yiddish-speaking teachers, tender aging Jewish mothers led by Matvey Khazansky, a Red Army officer who had been injured in the war but managed to march into Berlin with his troops. Nicknamed Mota by the kids, he was a patriot of Birobidzhan, one of the old breed who dreamed of a mini-state with Yiddish as its official language, and a devout Communist. He managed to fit a twelve-foot portrait of Stalin into the building. Whenever the Jewish orphans wanted to be really, truly, totally believed, they said, “I give you my word, for the sake of Lenin, Stalin, and all our great leaders.” Mota was as tough a taskmaster as the great leader he adored. Misbehavior such as cutting classes at the Yiddish-language school was punished with ten lashes of a soldier’s wide leather belt. School-age children had to contribute to running the house by performing such tasks as splitting frozen coal apart with an ice pick or getting water from the well in any weather, including the kind of regular winter weather in which hands froze to the metal handle even through mittens.4
It had been a decade since purges had devastated the autonomist project. Israel Emiot, a Polish Yiddish poet who had survived the war in Siberia, now arrived to be the new bard of Birobidzhan—in essence, to take over Bergelson’s old job. He described what he found: “The Jewish cultural situation was lamentable, to say the least. The only Yiddish newspaper there had been shut down by decree during the war. Only one Russian daily—with an occasional Yiddish page—was being published. The whole thing was most painful. The Yiddish typecases in the print shop were full, expert Yiddish typesetters were walking around idle, and no Yiddish publications were being printed.” Birobidzhan was a shadow of the illusion it had once been. The Yiddish theater founded by Kazakevich was still functioning, though Kazakevich himself had moved to Moscow in 1938. There was a Yiddish secondary school, where, Emiot wrote, “Jewish youngsters could be heard fervently reciting the words of Mendele, Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Bergelson, Hofshtein, and other writers. But the official language of the region was no longer Yiddish, as it had been in 1936, when the courts, the police department, the city administration, and various other official activities were conducted in that language. The Pedagogical Institute, which until 1937 had a department for training Yiddish elementary grade teachers, was closed.”
Still, Emiot, for one, found reasons for pride and hope. A couple of Bauhaus buildings had been constructed before those plans were scrapped—the hospital and the theater—and new Jewish doctors and Jewish actors were now arriving in the region. “There were definite signs of a revival,” he noted. “Early in 1945 a Yiddish anthology was published. The Yiddish theater showed evidence of new life. Several local Yiddish playwrights were writing for the theater’s repertoire….More Yiddish writers had come to settle. There was talk of opening a Yiddish college.” Most of all, Emiot noticed that Birobidzhan was apparently immune to the anti-Semitic resurgence in other parts of the Soviet Union. “A Jew could still feel at home in Birobidzhan….I recall an incident where one such character got drunk and in broad daylight began bellowing, ‘Bey zhidov! Beat the kikes!’ In no time he was surrounded by a crowd of Jewish war invalids who took off his coat and whacked him so unmercifully that he had a miraculous change of heart. ‘Lyublyu yevreyev! I love the Jews!’ he protested. The Jews of Birobidzhan did not hesitate to use their fists to answer anti-Semitic slurs.”
The schoolchildren had their own choir, which performed songs in Yiddish; they were known all the way to Khabarovsk for their uniforms: bright white shirts with pants and bows of red velvet, courtesy of the American charities that seemed to be showering Birobidzhan with gifts.5 A small group of writers and poets was starting a new literary journal in Yiddish, to be called Birobidzhan. The group revolved around Lyubov Vasserman, a poet who had been born dirt-poor in Poland; had still been a teenager when she emigrated to Palestine, where she worked as a domestic and was arrested as a subversive; and had finally settled in Birobidzhan. (She was one of the young poets who had so charmed Bergelson during a hike when he had first visited Birobidzhan.) Her husband, Moshe Bengelsdorf, had come from Argentina; he worked at the Jewish theater.6 The journal’s planning meetings were held at their apartment.
Transports of new settlers were arriving almost daily. Emiot described the way they were greeted: “Jubilant crowds jammed the railroad stations. The city’s Young Pioneer groups came to toss fresh flowers at the incoming trains. All the orchestras in the area joined the celebration and played lively Jewish tunes. The eyes of the immigrants brimmed with tears of joy. The new arrivals were put up temporarily in barracks, in private homes. Jews danced in the street. Yiddish writers read their work before gatherings of new immigrants.”
Documents preserved in the state archives in Birobidzhan report that hundreds of families were arriving from the Crimea and Ukraine. When I was in Birobidzhan in 2009, I interviewed the man who was perhaps the last surviving voluntary settler in Birobidzhan. Ninety-year-old Iosif Bekerman told me he had been born to an impoverished family in a shtetl in Ukraine. He was in the city of Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, studying to be a pharmacist, when the German army marched into Ukraine from the west. Bekerman had suffered a serious injury as a child; when I met him, he was about four foot eleven, his left arm significantly shorter than his right and hanging limply. While he had probably been stronger and taller when he was a young man, during the Soviet war with Germany he had been judged unfit for military service. He was lucky enough to be evacuated and survive far from the front line, in the Urals. When he went home after the war, the locals explained to him that all the Jews of his village had been rounded up in February 1942 and buried in a single pit. “They told me that pit was heaving for days because so many of the people were buried alive,” Bekerman said. Only two Jews in the entire village had survived, both of them hidden by Ukrainian peasants; one of them was Bekerman’s aunt.
Bekerman returned to Kharkiv to finish his education and to dream of Birobidzhan; he had read about it in the Yiddish-language papers, and he was convinced it was the promised land. He signed up to become a settler as soon as he graduated, and he arrived in Birobidzhan in the summer of 1948. “I asked the head of the pharmaceutical department, I said, ‘I wrote you a letter asking to come and you never wrote back, why didn’t you write back?’ and she said, ‘What is good here?’ And I knew what she meant, she meant there is nothing good here.” He told me of the wooden barracks saturated with the stenc
h of too many human lives crammed together; wooden sidewalks laid right over swampland, its own stench stubbornly seeping through; and the mosquitoes. “But I didn’t turn back.”
“Why didn’t you turn back?”
“Where would I go?”
Bekerman was assigned a job at a pharmacy in Teploye Ozero (“Warm Lake”), a new settlement outside the city, and a room in a barracks to go with the job. Some months after he moved in, a trainload of Jews arrived. “They were all from Odessa,” he told me. “They had been evacuated to Siberia, and they weren’t allowed to go back. They were rerouted to Birobidzhan.”
It seems that the Jews from Ukraine and the Crimea, arriving at the rate of about a thousand families a year starting in 1947, were ones who had tried to return to their homes on the scorched earth of the former Pale only to discover that the native anti-Semitism, reignited by the years of Nazi occupation, was no longer contained by the Soviet authorities. Jews found that they could not reclaim their homes, occupied by non-Jewish locals for years by now, or, often, find jobs or even secure the documents necessary to live legally in their hometowns. The authorities offered an alternative, however: free railroad tickets to Birobidzhan and help resettling there.
Birobidzhan authorities were overwhelmed and complained bitterly in reports to party higher-ups: “Local resettlement organizations [in Ukraine] have been acting irresponsibly in selecting settlers for the collective farms of our region and, in going after quantity, have sacrificed the most important parameter: quality. Many of the arriving families have no members capable of working. For example, of eighteen families arriving from Belotserkov, twelve had no adult able-bodied family members. We complained about this to the Soviet of Ministers of the USSR [Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic] and received an answer acknowledging that our complaints were justified.”7 These were the poor, maimed, weakened, and hungry Jews who no longer had any home anywhere, and they were not welcomed here. Nor did most have anywhere else to go.
