...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.
Dror Eydar..
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."
Posts
