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

his nose and his name gave him away. "Mendelevich?" the teacher asked. "Jewish," he whispered. The class started to giggle. Among the children, there was a hierarchy of nationalities: the Russians were on top, Ukrainians and Latvians in the middle, the Asiatic peoples of the Far East toward the bottom, and Jews definitely on the lowest rung. The teacher made no attempt to quiet the class. Instead, she looked down at the squirming Mendelevich and asked, "Where does your father work?" He was mortified. It seemed all the other children's fathers were pilots or army officers. His father collected scrap iron. There was no way he could say this out loud. "I don't know," he answered. The laughter bubbled up and exploded as the teacher shook her head. "So big and he doesn't know."
    From then on, Mendelevich preferred to stay inside, away from others. He read a lot—many Soviet writers, but also Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. His parents were poor and he was a child eager to please. He tried his best to succeed in school. He made few friends and eventually stopped venturing out into the courtyard to play with the other children.
    But when he was ten, in 1957, Soviet reality intruded on him. Mendelevich's father was tried for economic crimes, accused of selling a few grams of lead on the black market. Khrushchev had crusaded against such crimes, and a suspiciously disproportionate number of Jews were tried and sometimes even executed as a result. Mendelevich's father was sentenced to five years and sent to a nearby prison camp, where he was forced to make bricks. Mendelevich's mother took him along when she went to visit her husband, and her son never forgot the barking dogs, the line of soldiers with their guns, and the strange sight of his father in tattered clothes.
    His father was released early from his sentence. But a few months after that, his mother died. Mendelevich's alienation seemed complete. By the time he entered adolescence, he was living a double life. In school, he was disciplined. His Russian was so good that he was often asked to read out loud to the class. Once, he was asked to read the part of Maresyev, a pilot, in a famous Soviet novel. Maresyev's plane had been shot down in enemy territory; both of his legs were injured, and he was captured by partisans and interrogated. They asked the pilot who he was. Maresyev's response—"A Russian I am, a Russian"—made the children snicker and Mendelevich blush, but their laughter didn't bother him anymore. His home life, increasingly dominated by thoughts of Israel and revolving around the nightly shortwave broadcasts of Kol Israel, mattered much more.
    At sixteen, before he'd even set eyes on Rumbuli, he began finding reflections of his secret desires. He spent the days working as a carpenter's apprentice at a factory, and in the evenings he took classes at School 25. By some fluke, a third of the school's teachers and students were Jews. And unlike at his elementary school, Mendelevich found there was no shame here in being Jewish. On one Jewish holiday, the students even wrote on the blackboard,
No school. Rosh Hashanah.
And to his surprise, he wasn't the only one who dreamed about Israel. Soon he and his new friends were chatting away about what they would do when they got there, what they would take with them, what kind of jobs they might have.
    Even more important than his new school was the arrival of an older cousin from Dvinsk who came to stay in his family's home. Small, bookish, and unassuming, Mendel Gordin was studying to be a doctor at the Riga Medical Institute. In 1963, Mendelevich learned that his cousin had a secret. Gordin was part of a small network of Jews that shared illegal books and articles about Israel. It was so dangerous that Gordin kept his extracurricular activities from Mendelevich's father. But Gordin, who was older then Mendelevich by ten years, saw in the teenager a kindred spirit, and although he didn't tell him about