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

his connections in the city, he shared his samizdat with him and talked with him about Israel. The first piece of illegal writing Mendelevich read, typed and loosely bound with a needle and thread, was a collection of Jabotinsky's essays.
    That fall, Mendelevich went to Rumbuli for the first time. By then, hundreds of young Jews were arriving every Sunday to work on landscaping the mass graves; delineating them with rocks, planting flowers. The sight of so many young people working together, along with the steady stream of material his cousin was receiving, fed Mendelevich's fantasies about a vast underground Zionist movement operating in Riga. He knew he wanted to be a part of it.

    Hardly anything worthy of the name
movement
existed at the time. The revival at Rumbuli and the clandestine distribution of samizdat, though far from spontaneous, were not the work of any formal organization. Riga's Zionist activity was, more than anything else, the result of a handful of connected families longing to reconstitute the lost world of their youth. The orange of Jaffa's citrus groves, the blue of the Mediterranean at Tel Aviv, and the white of Jerusalem stone had first hypnotized them as children and had never left their mind's eyes. In the secrecy of their homes, they played Israeli music on scratchy phonograph records, tried to teach themselves Hebrew, gathered together to listen to Kol Israel, and eagerly read any Jewish material they could find, including Dubnow's history, which they discovered in personal libraries. But a fear of Stalin and the far-reaching tentacles of his secret police made them keep these activities at a barely audible whisper. Even in the Baltics, where the memory of an openly Jewish cultural life was so fresh, almost no one was willing to test the resolve of the dictator, especially in his paranoid later years when he came to see Soviet Jews as a treasonous fifth column. Those few who weren't careful enough or who were just unlucky were arrested and sent to labor camps for long sentences. It happened all the time.
    This changed in the 1960s with the ascension of Nikita Khrushchev. For his own political reasons, this crude son of peasant farmers, the unlikely winner of the post-Stalin leadership struggle, began a process of liberalization, an airing-out. The terror that had dominated people's lives for the past few decades began to subside. Khrushchev publicly denounced Stalin and his crimes in his 1956 "secret speech" to the Twentieth Party Congress, an instantly famous address that turned a heat lamp on Soviet society and began the process that became known as the thaw. He tore down the barbed wire of the Gulag, freeing tens of thousands of political prisoners in a mass amnesty. Previously banned books and art were suddenly allowed. People were not jailed arbitrarily as they once were. Jews, who at the moment of Stalin's death were terrified by rumors of his plans to deport them en masse to Siberia, could breathe easy again. In the Baltics, the most enlightened and least Sovietized corner of the empire, the thaw presented Jews with an opportunity.
    That handful of Riga families, a few veteran Betar youth, and a couple of men just returning from the Gulag began cautiously, slowly, to open their doors. It helped that in Riga most of the population, including the Communist authorities, were ethnically Latvian. They were resentful of Russian domination, and though most had no great love for the Jews, they largely left them alone. Once the debilitating fear was no longer there, Jews wanted to create a space, however small, for their own national identity. They looked around at the generation born after the war, Mendelevich's peers, and realized that a great tragedy was under way: these young people felt nothing about their heritage but shame. The thaw gave the older Jews a chance to change this, to engage anyone who wanted to learn about Israel or reclaim a sense of Jewish identity. And once this generation saw