by Masha Gessen
Samuil was dispatched to the front after three months of training, around the time of Stalin’s Order #227, one of the main ideological landmarks of the war period. In the dictator’s deliriously poetic way, the order read, It is time to stop the retreat. No turning back! This must now be our main slogan. It is necessary to defend every position, every meter of Soviet territory to the last drop of blood, to hold on to every bit of Soviet land and protect it as long as possible. So-called fence-in battalions were now stationed behind regular troops, guns at the ready, to prevent unauthorized retreat.
A memo from the Defense People’s Committee (this is what the defense ministry was called) defined the tasks that now faced the politruks. The memo proposed a brief scenario for the morale-boosting meetings the politruks were expected to conduct:
MEETING TOPIC: On the actions of Komsomol members in the battlefield.
RESOLVED: It is better to die in the trenches than to leave in disgrace. And not only must you stay but you must make sure the person next to you does not leave.
AUDIENCE QUESTION TO MEETING CHAIR: “Are there legitimate reasons for leaving the line of fire?”
ANSWER: “Of all possible excuses, only one can be considered, and that is death.”
To an educated young man like Samuil—a soldier, a Jew—it must have seemed obvious that he could best serve the war effort not just by picking up a gun but by putting his mind, his training, and his rhetorical gift to work. But what did he think of the tactics he was ordered to use? Did he believe it when he told a soldier he should bleed to death under fire rather than seek help? Did he, along with hundreds of millions of his compatriots and zealots everywhere, believe that embracing a container filled with fuel (what is known elsewhere as a Molotov cocktail) and throwing yourself under an enemy tank, or using your body to clog up enemy artillery, was a supreme expression of valor? Or did he believe that a soldier is more than his body, that sometimes valor is found in trying to stay alive?
My grandmother keeps Samuil’s letters—small brittle yellowed sheets—in a black cardboard folder. She has reread them only once, and resolved she would never again subject herself to that kind of pain. I have read them over and over, but they offer no clues to Samuil’s opinion of the vision he worked to advance, convincing soldiers to sacrifice themselves in battle. The letters are a grating mix of heartbreaking longing and turgid rhetoric. Certainly they passed the military censors, and almost as certainly Samuil did not need censors to remind him what could and what could not be written.
Dzerzhinsk, July 2, 1942
Ruzen’ka-love,
I am proud to be walking the ground of a city named for a knight. So what if its avenues are lined with buildings that are far-between and not too tall and that green grass is pushing its way through the sand of its squares? I can still see a city of giant buildings and feel beneath my feet the ringing, mirrorlike surface of paved roads. And so what if the city is dark and its air circled by planes that are guarding its calm and the sirens are howling? I can still see a cityscape of bright lights and thousands of lamps reflected in the fast-flowing waters of the Oka River and feel the air, the light and fresh night air, lowering itself onto the city’s shoulders, drawing in the tender and fragile moonlight that will never again be blocked by the wings of enemy planes. There will be no more sirens. People will forget what a target is. Where the riverbank is now gaping with bomb damage, young couples in love will be descending stairways carved in marble. The forest of factory smokestacks will drown in the green of gardens, parks and groves where happy little Felikses will catch dragonflies, chase grasshoppers and use sand and clay to make statues of the other Feliks, the big one, the one whose bronze bust towers over the city and whose name has been given to this city. This was a Man who had the hands of a laborer, the head of a scholar, the dress of a simple soldier.
He was writing about Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Iron Feliks, the founder of the Soviet secret police. The city named for him, about twenty miles down the Oka River from Nizhny Novgorod (then called Gorky), is home to ten large chemical plants. Today, sixty years after the letter, it is Russia’s most polluted city, where nearly three out of four babies are born with congenital defects and life expectancy stands at fifty. As for Dzerzhinsky, the dismantling of his monument in Moscow in 1991 was probably the most powerful symbol of the victory of democracy—and the repeated attempts to have the monument restored are among the most troubling signs now of the past’s refusal to recede.
Ruzya and Samuil had agreed to name their son Feliks. They just assumed the child would be a son.
AUGUST 31, 1942
Ruzya stares at the tiny bundled-up worm in her arms. They have brought the girl in to nurse because—miracle of miracles—Ruzya’s milk has come in. The nurses of Ashkhabad have not seen breast milk in about as long as they have not had a decent meal.
It is almost five months since Samuil went off to war. Three days ago his parents walked Ruzya to the hospital. Looking at her hugely protruding stomach, the doctor predicted twins—nothing short of a disaster in their hungry Ashkhabad existence. The girl, then, came as a relief. They have already named her Yelena—Yolka or Yolochka for short; she and Samuil once agreed that would be the name if they had a girl—although he, of course, had his heart set on a Feliks.
The baby has latched on with an urgency and a skill that prompted an approving chuckle from the nurse. Now Ruzya sits uncomfortably in the bed, her back against the metal headboard, her shoulders tense and leaning forward, her elbows rigid around the baby. She studies the girl’s tiny round face, or the part of it not obscured by her suddenly huge breast. The baby has black downy hair extending halfway down her wrinkled forehead, a meaty nose with splayed-out nostrils, and eyes of an uncertain dark color. She seems willing to open only one eye at a time. Her lashes and eyebrows are thick, definite, black. Ruzya looks for traces of Samuil, for anything that would remind her of the airy boy with the delicate features, the watery eyes, the faint reddishness, and she sees nothing. Her beloved is a soldier, and she is alone with this strange and separate creature.
As soon as Ruzya came home with the baby, they spent a fortune to hire a photographer so they could send Samuil a picture of his baby daughter.
October 3, 1942
My wonderful little daughter,
Goo-goo! Goo-goo, my little Yolochka! Gome on, smile! You already know how to smile, don’t you? Smile, and let’s meet. I am your daddy … I can’t pick you up in my arms today, can’t baby you, can’t pull you out of your swaddles, can’t toss you up to the ceiling, can’t set you on top of the wardrobe—because there is a war on, and thousands of mileposts separating us from each other.
Your mommy, your granddaddies and grandmommies will, of course, be opposed to your sitting on top of the wardrobe and flying up by the ceiling and getting pulled out of your swaddles—but then they don’t understand how particularly wonderful it is to smile from the top of the wardrobe and to make pleasure bubbles up by the ceiling. You’d like it. A lot! I know. As soon as we demolish the fascists and get done with the war, you and I won’t leave a single ceiling, a single wardrobe untouched. But for now we’ll just talk, all right? You stretch your little arms—a sign of consent. Here it is nighttime, and there is cannon fire. Raindrops are hitting the top of this bunker, firewood is crackling in the makeshift stove, the oil lamp is smoking something awful and throwing a yellowish light on this piece of paper and on the faces of my sleeping comrades and on the picture of your mommy. Where you are, the sun is already coming up and you are probably stretching out of your comfortable little bed, shaking your little arms impatiently and making funny smacking sounds with your lips: it’s time to eat.
You are big already. I counted: you are one month and five days old. But it was only yesterday that I found out that your name is Yolochka and you have outstanding eyelashes and feet (they compare your feet with mine, but this is clearly slanderous, baby: I barely fit into size forty-three boots!) and that you are liked as a
granddaughter and niece.
How I would like to sneak a peek at you, through a crack at least, to hold you in my arms for just a minute, but I can’t. This isn’t the right time: I am a soldier, and I cannot leave the formation for even a minute—that would create a gap and play into the enemy’s hands. He is clever, mean and dirty. He wants to take away our happiness and our lives. He is a lowlife, a nothing. He has brought grief and tears into our joyful land. He will be beaten, destroyed! The world will be cleansed of the filth of fascism. That is what the fight is for, the great fight. You came into the world in a time of gunpowder, in the days of the trenches. Fire over Stalingrad accompanied your first scream—your birth! All the brighter and finer for that will your future be. You were born on the eve of amazing events. Autumn. Winter. We will move forward and bring grief to the enemy. You will grow up a free person in a liberated land.
DECEMBER 20, 1942
Ruzya has grown so used to this view, it almost feels like home. It used to feel absurd to look out into your own courtyard, but now she finds its barely perceptible pastels comforting. She stares out the window as she breast-feeds Yolochka, then the neighbor’s son. The neighbor woman has no milk; virtually no one does. Ruzya feeds her baby, and free of charge at that: she hopes and even sometimes believes that her goodness will be repaid, and that Samuil will come home whole. With breast-feeding a barely interrupted process, she uses the time to look out the window, searching for Batsheva returning from the market, Lev coming home from the cafeteria where he has found work as an accountant, and the mail carrier walking into the courtyard with her big black leather bag.
The mail carrier is also an evacuee, a sturdy woman who stomps cheerfully along her route. She likes to hand the mail to Ruzya personally, and Ruzya always tips her in whatever currency she has available—coins or hard candy. When you get so many letters and they are so beautiful, you must reward the messenger.
Now she sees the mailwoman, oddly, before she hears her ridiculous black boots stomping. She is walking quietly, almost slinking along the courtyard, head lowered and shoulders stooped—an obese mouse in a grayish blue uniform. She steps carefully onto the terrace that runs the length of the courtyard and quickly slaps a triangular piece of paper on the table that sits out there on the terrace.
Ruzya pushes back the instant knowledge of what this behavior means, then reclaims it, quickly, for time is suddenly of the essence. With the neighbor’s boy still cradled in her left arm, she jumps up and runs out to the terrace in three quick steps. The mail carrier has already vanished, which must mean that this letter cannot be returned or attributed to some sort of mistake.
Samuil Lvovich Minkin, aged twenty-three, died in battle not far from Moscow on November 30, 1942.
DECEMBER 22, 1942
Four people sit in a terrace kitchen eating and crying. There is a box on the table just outside their window, open, with newspaper scraps still holding the shape of things they were used to pack: a dried melon, a huge batch of homemade nut-and-raisin cookies. They were Samuil’s favorite. The package came back yesterday, marked “addressee dead.” The mail carrier left it on the outdoor table, just as she had the death notice. The people brought it inside, because it was food. They took it back outside because it was untouchable. This morning at breakfast time Batsheva went outside and unpacked the box, silently. They are eating now, sweet melon and salty tears. They are hungry.
Two and a half years later, an army comrade of Samuil’s, another politruk, named Ivan Gordeyev, a blond man with a ruddy face and shaved eyebrows, came to visit Ruzya. By the canon of countless Soviet war movies and books, the purpose of such a visit would be to tell the widow the details of her husband’s heroic and noble death and to forge a bond, always at least vaguely romantic in nature, between the person who loved the late soldier most and the one who saw him last. As his story went, Ivan Gordeyev and Samuil had walked the front line performing the politruk’s most sacred duty—handing out Party membership books just before battle to newly inducted Communists. As they walked back to their camp, Samuil was hit by a piece of shrapnel. He died on the spot, and Ivan Gordeyev was unscathed. By the time Ivan Gordeyev came to meet Ruzya, she could see nothing romantic or ennobling in her husband’s death, the futility of which was made only more clear by his companion’s robust survival.
I have a childhood recollection of the story of Samuil’s death. In this telling, he is warned ahead of time not to venture out of the trenches but insists he must help the men become Communists before they go to battle. This may have been my great-grandmother’s or great-aunt’s version, or I may have borrowed it from some other story from a book, a film, or a lecture. Wherever I got it, this tale is a Soviet literary staple, the quintessential heroic narrative used to teach us about World War II. I think I believed for a long time that the death of a man who risked his life to induct others into the Party was more meaningful than the death of someone who was shot in battle, bombed while digging trenches, executed by the fence-in battalions, or drowned in a puddle.
I have always heard that my grandfather was beautiful: my great-grandmother Batsheva said so, as did my grandmother Ruzya. She said, in fact, that when they walked down the street together, heads turned. I have seen three photographs of Samuil—I do not think there are any others. Two show a confident young man in a narrow tie, with stylishly disheveled wavy hair overhanging smiling light eyes. In the third, which has discolored to a light sepia, he is wearing a military uniform. The hair is gone, the eyes look not scared but a bit lost, and the long thin neck tells you this is the picture of a boy. Aside from the letters, these pictures are the only evidence of my grandfather’s existence.
PART THREE
SURVIVAL
1942–1943
A Courtyard in Ashkhabad
CHAPTER ELEVEN
APRIL 1942
Students are most easily found in the cafeteria. Since university officials decided to attempt a semblance of a semester under the auspices of a local teachers’ college, its cafeteria has become the place where humiliated professors chase down their students, alternately trying to shame them and promising to keep the lecture short enough that they will be able to return to their place in the queue in time to receive the day’s balanda. But this time the dean’s secretary is calling out just one name, and Ester responds instinctively, forgetting even to stake her place before she follows the thin thirtyish woman to the dean’s office.
“Are you Ester Goldberg?” inquires an official matron Ester has never seen.
“Yes.”
“Date and place of birth?”
“Bialystok, January 5, 1923.” She is starting to feel the fear.
“We have received a letter for you.” An arm extending lazily, offering a brown triangle—now triangles have become the rule, since they save money and the censors’ time—a hand reaching for it, the recognition of Bella’s handwriting, the scramble of fingers to open the message, the first in eight months since that letter Bella threw out the train window.
My dear daughter,
I had nearly despaired about finding you. At first I could not write for five months—I will explain later, after I have received your response—and then all my letters to your institute were returned “addressee unknown.” But yesterday I met a woman, also from Bialystok, who told me your institute was merged with the university and the university was evacuated to Ashkhabad. I am writing right away, to say just the main things: I am all right, living in Biysk, in the Altai. The climate is hard, but I am managing to get by. No news about your father. I hope so much that this letter finds you, my girl.
Love, Mama
This is a message by a writer unsure it will be read, a discreet testing of the waters. Ester runs back to her room—stopping outside the building and returning to thank the matron, who acknowledges her gratitude indifferently, then running again—forgetting about balanda and everything else except the post office’s closing hour, by which she has to dispatch her letter. In
the coming weeks, writing furiously back and forth, sometimes every day, their letters usually crossing en route, answers trailing questions by a half dozen missives, they will try to tell each other how they have lived through this separation.
How the cattle-car train carrying Bella and 3,001 other deportees from Bialystok arrived in the Siberian town of Biysk. The journey, if you can call it that, had taken twelve days. The sound of explosions had followed them at first, but they were more concerned with the lack of water and food. Indifference set in, dull as the sound of bombs in the distance, after they passed Moscow. Everyone in Bella’s car survived, thank goodness; though, in the heavy silence of the last few days, they could not be sure until they left the darkness and the stench of the cattle car.
How they were lined up alongside the train and told, by a young NKVD officer, that all of them would be put to work for the benefit of the Soviet state and its military might—this is when they knew what they had been sure of for days: a war had started between Germany and the Soviet Union. The secret-police officer assured them that each would be put to work according to his profession. Bella did not count on a job teaching Polish, of course, but she assumed that the deportees, mostly educated and largely middle-aged, would be assigned to clerical duties. When her job turned out to be digging toilet holes, she complained, “For twenty-four years of Soviet rule they relieved themselves behind the shed, and now they need Bella Goldberg to dig toilets for them!”