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

which meant the immediate end of Jewish organizational life.
    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