Israel Hayom..
19 July '13..
1. Menachem Begin was 28 years old when he was deported to a "re-education camp" on the banks of the Pechora River in northwest Russia. He tells of that episode in his moving memoir, "White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia."
Life in the camp was cruel beyond bearing. The prisoners were put to work laying railroad tracks and suffered illness, hunger, torture, the erasure of their humanity and the loss of hope. Under Stalin's regime, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, imposed a reign of terror, which the best thinkers of Europe's elite justified in countless ways. Begin was one of the pioneers who portrayed the Soviet regime as it truly was. He had an excellent memory.
One of the prisoners was a prominent Jew named Garin, who had been deputy editor-in-chief of Pravda, the Communist Party official newspaper, and a leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party. In the prime of their lives, he and his wife, a scientist ("She is not Jewish, but what does that matter?") were imprisoned for supporting Trotskyist ideas. Interrogated for over four years, he was almost tortured to death and attempted suicide twice. He was finally sentenced to eight years in the Pechora labor camp.
By that time he was a broken man, forced to do backbreaking physical labor even though he suffered from a heart condition and a constant fever. At first he was hostile toward Begin, who had been sent to the camp for his Zionist activity as the head of the Betar movement in Poland and later in Vilnius. Even in the Pechora labor camp, Garin never lost his faith in communism. To him, Zionism and anti-Semitism were two sides of the same coin: "an expression of an archaic, racist and nationalistic legal system." It was axiomatic, to him, that "Zionism was an agent of imperialism."
When one of the prisoners said he did not care if the Germans reached them because he had "nothing to lose," Garin lashed out at him. "I am also a prisoner. I am suffering too," he said. "But my suffering has not driven me out of my mind. I desire the victory of the Soviet Union. Fascism is a deadly danger to all humanity. If the Soviet Union should fall, all the accomplishments of the revolution will be nullified. Have you forgotten how many kindnesses the motherland has done you? And now, when it is in danger, would you betray it?"
2. On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In late July the Soviets, in shock over their defeat, signed an agreement with the exiled Polish government establishing a Polish military force under General Wladislaw Anders, who was imprisoned in Moscow at the time. Polish prisoners were released, but the release order was never given in Pechora. Instead, roughly 800 prisoners were crammed so tightly into the hold of a small cargo vessel that they could not stand or sit, but only lie down. For close to three weeks they sailed northward "to build a new world."
Most of the prisoners on board were hardened criminals. Only a few were political prisoners. Back in the camp, the criminals, known as the Urki, had been in control. Below the deck of the vessel, they abandoned all traces of restraint. It was "a regime of criminals who had no limits, who had absolute power." The Urki spent their time abusing the weaker prisoners until they died. That was how the "slave ship," as Begin called it, became a symbol of the sinking civilization of Europe, which was also ruled at the time by a regime of criminals who knew no restraint.
"In this place of foul odor and darkness," Begin wrote, "of torture and abuse, of threats and terror, the soul of Garin, who had fallen from the heights of power into the kingdom of the Urki in the hold of the slave ship, reached the ultimate point of crisis." His spirit was tormented by years of interrogation, torture, and suicide attempts. He, who had denied his Jewishness, suffered to hear himself called "Zhid," in hatred, "under Soviet skies." "And this tormented soul, whose entire world of dreams and aspirations had collapsed under the blows of reality," could not withstand the test of the slave ship.
3. One day during that hellish voyage, Garin woke Begin up. "Do you remember the song 'Lashuv' [return]?" he whispered, speaking in Yiddish for the first time. Begin did not understand, since Garin spoke the word with an Ashkenazi inflection, with the accent on the first syllable and the vowels pronounced slightly differently, rendering the word as "lo-shuv" rather than the modern Hebrew "la-shuv."
"That's the song the Zionists in Odessa sang when I was a boy," Garin told Begin. "Do you know it?" "Do you mean 'Hatikvah' ['The Hope,' later Israel's national anthem]?" Begin asked. "Maybe," Garin answered. "I remember only the word lashuv." "That's 'Hatikvah,'" Begin said, and quoted: "'Lashuv le-eretz avoteinu' -- to return to the land of our fathers."
They were referring to the original version of "Hatikvah," the poem "Tikvatenu," written by Naphtali Herz Imber. The refrain of that version is: "Our hope is not yet lost/The ancient hope/To return to the land of our fathers/The city where David encamped." Garin asked Begin to sing it. "I'm not going to make it out of here alive," he said. "I'm done for. You're still healthy. Maybe you'll make it. Maybe one day you'll find my children. Tell them about their father. Tell them I thought of them always. But now, I ask you, please, sing me 'Lashuv.'"
And there, in the ship's hold, in that hell on the water, in the kingdom of the Urki, at the bottom of European civilization even as it sank, Begin and his fellow Jewish inmates sang Hatikvah. Garin listened silently to the lyrics. The Urki awoke. "What are they singing, the Zhids?" they asked, then said mockingly: "They're praying to their God for help." The song went on: "Hear, O my brothers in the lands of exile ... To return to the land of our fathers." The Urki were right, Begin wrote. "This was no song. It was a prayer."
"I felt as though I was reciting the 'vidui,' the deathbed confession, with a Jewish man who, like one who had been taken captive as a child, had grazed in foreign pastures, and when he was about to die, after many torments, returned to his people and his faith."
A communist from his youth, a stranger to the Jewish people and a persecutor of Zionists, Garin had done everything in his power to ensure that "Hatikvah," the hope of return to Zion, would never come true. Instead, he had worked with all his might for the other "hope," that of communism. And what had the revolution, for which he had almost died, done for him? It had branded him a traitor and an enemy of humanity, taken his family from him and thrown him to prison in disgrace.
But at the moment of truth, after having crossed the sea of suffering, what was it that the former deputy editor-in-chief of Pravda, the secretary-general of the Ukrainian Communist Party, remembered? "Lashuv el eretz avoteinu" -- return to the land of our fathers. That was his consolation.
Who was lying there next to Garin? A young man whose Zionist activity had almost cost him his life, whose fate was supposed to be identical to that of his fellow inmate. But 36 years later, that young man would be sworn in as the prime minister of the independent Jewish state. Two men, each with a different fate but a single aim: "To return to the land of our fathers." History has its own ways of teaching us humility.
4. We arrived at the banks of the Pechora River last week, at noon on one of the days of the Hebrew month of Av, an Israeli delegation led by the heads of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, together with Begin's daughter, Hassia. Begin's birthday centenary is this coming Saturday, the Sabbath after the fast of Tisha B'Av that is known as "Shabbat Nahamu" (the Sabbath of Consolation), the word that begins the reading from the Prophets for which it is named -- "Comfort, comfort my people, says your God" (Isaiah 40:1). Begin was named Menachem, "he who consoles," after this very Sabbath of Consolation, on which he was born.
A day earlier, Begin's memoirs were words on a page. On the banks of the Pechora River, they arose, clothed in reality. At the end of the memorial ceremony, I came forward to recite the Kaddish, the prayer of praise recited in memory of the departed. My father died four months ago, and here his memory mingled with that of the young man in the hold of the ship who became a national leader and whose Zionist dream led my own parents here. Before I recited the Kaddish, I told the story of Garin and Begin in the ship's hold on the Pechora River, which had witnessed, for the first time since its waters began to flow, the prayer of Jews to return to the land of their fathers. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, those Jews had cried out from the depths of hell, praying to reach safe haven together with the remnant of their people.
But it was not only for Begin and my father Shmuel that I asked to recite the Kaddish. I said it also for Garin, a son of our people whom history swept far from us. In a peculiar twist of historical irony, Garin received a monument together with other Jews like him in Begin's memoir, and now we, the readers, also remember him through Begin's words.
And then, I recited the Kaddish. Never in its history did the Pechora River hear a Kaddish like it.
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5049
Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.
.
Posts
Thank you Yosef, for bring this and the other pieces you bring together on your blog.
ReplyDeleteYou have become my "go-to" website.
TY Saba Shimon.
ReplyDeleteBs"d
ReplyDeleteIsrael was built up from Garinim of socialist Kibbutzim. These pioneers, chalutzim individually had nothing but collectively transformed the desert and marshes into blooming fields. They actualized the Hatikvah of returning to the Land of their forefathers! The Solialist ideology, from which Communism had its source, channeled properly, was raised to a level of holiness in Eretz Yisrael. May their Neshomas have an Aliya! Thank you for sharing!