When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry by Gal Beckerman Read Free Book Online Page A

Defying the Soviet law that prohibited unauthorized public signs, they took an old board and used a heated nail to inscribe these words:
Here were silenced the voices of 38,000 Jews of Riga on November 29–30 and on December 8–9, 1941.
The makeshift plaque was fastened to a fir tree in an inconspicuous part of the grove. The group of twenty circled the sign as someone recited the Kaddish. It was the first Holocaust memorial service at Rumbuli—and one of the earliest in the entire Soviet Union.
    In the spring of 1963, fifty people gathered to hold a twentieth-anniversary commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. An impromptu committee of organizers was formed, mostly older men who saw the importance of Rumbuli as a focal point to bring Jews together. A critical person in these early discussions was Mark Blum, a young, charismatic Zionist who had become a leader for the newly active Riga youth. The older men, including Rusinek, came up with a plan to renovate the place, plant flowers, and make it a proper burial site, but Blum was the only one who really knew how to engage the young people and interest them in helping out. It was at that Warsaw Ghetto commemoration that the black obelisk was erected, and the organizers decided then that they would get as many Jews as possible to come to Rumbuli each Sunday to landscape the ground.
    Rumbuli was the first group effort for these Zionists, people who had previously relegated their activities to the secrecy of their homes. Almost immediately, differences in style and tactics emerged. There were the legitimists, who wanted official sanction for their activities. And then there were the former Betari youth like Rusinek and the younger hard-liners like Mark Blum, who believed that confrontation with the government was the only way forward, a notion the older Zionists, with their still fresh memories of Stalin, found dangerous. Clashes had already broken out over the question of whether to participate in the few state-sanctioned Jewish cultural activities. Starting in the early 1960s, partly in response to charges of anti-Semitism, Moscow allowed the formation of Jewish choral and drama associations in Vilnius and Riga. These groups had to get approval for every song they sang, and their repertoire subsequently consisted largely of pro-Communist ballads in Yiddish (with lyrics like "
Lenin, tate, zey gebentsht, ost verbreided mensch mit mensch
"—Father Lenin be blessed, you made brothers of us all). But they nonetheless offered rare opportunities for Jewish youth to gather together. That was little comfort to the self-styled extremists who believed that participating in these choirs amounted to collaboration with the enemy, helping the Soviet Union provide visiting dignitaries with supposed proof that Jewish life was thriving. At performances, Boris Slovin would go up to these visitors and whisper one word in their ears:
Theresienstadt.
(This was the name of the Nazi concentration camp set up as a model to reassure the outside world that Jews were being well treated.) Yosef Schneider even joined one of these choirs in an attempt to break it up.
    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