משתמש:Karny.rubin/Anatoly.rubin
Anatoly Rubin[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
Anatoly Rubin (1928- January 17, 2017)
Biography[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
Early years[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
Anatoly Rubin was born in Minsk, Byelorussia, 1928. His father was religiously observant, unlike the rest of the family. His mother, out of respect for her husband, observed some of the commandments. Anatoly, like his brother and sisters, was drawn to Russian heroic role models. Jews, they felt, were weak and could largely aspire to lives as tradesmen, at best as doctors. From the first, Anatoly wanted to be physically strong and independent, and so he took avidly to sports.
In the Summer of 1941, when he was 13, the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, by way of Minsk. Anatoly was away at Summer camp. When he returned home with other children, all he found were smoking ruins and corpses scattered everywhere. He joined the stream of refugees making their way eastwards further into Russia, strafed from time to time by planes of the Luftwaffe. By the second day, they reached the little town of Smilovichi, some 35 kilometres from Minsk. There Anatoly was reunited with his aunt and her small son. The three of them stayed there with a Jewish blacksmith, until the Germans occupied the town. The arrival of the Germans put an end to all hope of their moving further east, and they were forced to return to occupied Minsk. There they sought out a second aunt, who had lived in the suburbs, and much to his joy Anatoly also found his mother, and two sisters with her. The three of them had gone to the summer camp to look for him. When they failed to locate him, they had taken shelter with distant relatives in a nearby shtetl, until the German bombardment forced them to hit the road again. Like Anatoly, now prevented by the German advance from moving further east, they had returned to Minsk. Anatoly’s elder brother, on the other hand, joined the Red Army and served on the Leningrad front until 1944 when all communication from him or about him was lost. Anatoly's father was at work away from home when the invasion occurred.
He returned to Minsk, only to find the family home burned down. Someone told him that he had seen the family fleeing down the Moscow road. The father set out to find them, and disappeared. Only later did they discover that he had been murdered by a gang of bandits. At 13 years of age, Anatoly was fatherless.
In Minsk, the Germans immediately started to issue Anti-Jewish directives. All Jews had to surrender their valuables. They had to wear an identifying yellow patch on the front and back of their clothes. Finally, they were forced to concentrate in a ghetto that was located next to the Jewish cemetery. Jews were drafted into forced labour crews, It was from there that every day the forced labour crews were taken out on a daily basis to work.
In the ghetto, Anatoly’s mother, along with her son and two daughters lived together with two other families, crammed into two small rooms. To survive, they obtained their daily necessities by bartering their aunt’s belongings through the ghetto fence. They did this at great risk, for the German guards would open fire on them if they were spotted. Anatoly later remembered this as a time of terrible and unrelenting hunger. Their situation was saved by his sister Tamara whose Aryan looks allowed her to pass as a non-Jew. She managed to leave the ghetto and work in the Non-Jewish neighbourhoods. This allowed her to both bring back food and encouraging rumours of an imminent liberation. She also made contact with the Russian underground and smuggled home their publications.
Over the course of the war years, Anatoly was stunned to see those same Russians, whom he had thought so strong and brave, brought low. They made no attempt to rebel and gradually their strength and pride ebbed out of them. After the war, he saw the same thing happen to captured German soldiers. For the rest of his life, he cited these examples when he heard the Jews accused of “going like lambs to the slaughter”. On the contrary, he would recall, there were not a few instances where heroic Jews actually attacked the occupying forces, and in the ensuing confusion succeeded in escaping.
In November 1941, the Germans began the liquidation of the ghetto. The Jews, his family among them, were marched off to the killing pit. However, first his older sister Tamara and then Anatoly managed to escape from the line while being marched to be shot. Tamara joined the partisans, while he fled to the ‘Aryan’ part of the town where, beset by the hatred and physical abuse by the locals, he tried to survive. In the end, he returned to the ghetto, where he lived at first with aunts and worked on the forced labour crews. By this time, those Jews who were still alive were obliged to sew the number of the house in which they lived on their outer clothes, in addition to the yellow patches front and back.
In March 1942, as his labour crew was filing back into the ghetto, they were halted by SS men, who made them approach the barbed-wire of the ghetto fence on the Aryan side, where they were ordered to kneel in the snow. The SS men started calling out the names of Jews with a recognised trade and ordered them to crawl in the snow to a designated spot. Anatoly realised that the Germans were going to kill all those who could not work, i.e. the old, the children, and the sick. Seeing that the Germans had finished bringing people out of the ghetto and that all was now quiet, he started digging a shallow trench under the barbed wire. Twice he managed to dig a shallow trench under the barbed wire, and he made some progress. On his third attempt one of the SS men noticed what he was doing, slammed him on the head and left him lying in the snow.
By the time the SS had completed their sorting out it was getting dark and they ordered the remaining Jews to get to their feet. Realising that the critical moment has arrived, Anatoly curled himself into a ball and jumped into the half-trench he had made under the wire. A soldier fired but missed and he managed to squeeze under the wire and back into the ghetto. There, some of the remaining Jews hid him in their cellar. The next day, he went back to his own house, to a hiding place that had been prepared for just such an eventuality. By day, he continued to work on the forced labour crews, since labourers were fed 30 grams of bread and a ladle of soup for their efforts.
Before the ghetto was finally liquidated, a maid who had worked in his school, a German woman married to a local man, smuggled Anatoly out to relatives of her husband, who lived in an outlying village. He succeeded by using Aryan papers, listing him as ‘Stefanov,’ that he had received from another friend, also a local ethnic German. Anatoly was now able to live and work in the village as a non-Jew, doing farm work and cow-herding. He made great efforts to join the local partisans. When he finally did meet with them, they feared that he had been sent by the Germans and almost killed him. Later he learnt that the partisans had betrayed his sister to the Germans, who tortured and then killed her.
The First Incarceration : An Anti Semantic Slander[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
First spell in labour camp (1946) Rubin had been sent by the local Boxing Federation to take part in a national exhibition of physical culture in Red Square in Moscow. On his return to Minsk, on 11. 14.1946, despite the fact that the war was long ended, he was arrested and jailed for abandoning a military facility. Stalin’s Russia was pursuing an intense series of purges, and a military court sentenced him to five years ‘re-education’ `in a labour camp for his ‘nationalist’ (i.e. Jewish) views, his unhealthy opinions about the Soviet regime, and his destructive influence on the local youth. (He received ‘only’ five years in consideration of his being an orphan and because he had deserted in order to resume his studies.)
Life in prison was oppressive. Anatoly later recalled that Minsk’s prison was marked by a significant class-gap between the ‘regular’ and the criminal prisoners. The latter carried on their own terror regime, and effectively ruled prison life. Thus, an aunt who had survived the war and heard of his sentencing would periodically send him a parcel, which was at once handed over to this ruling clique of criminals. Rubin, together with a few others, a former policeman and a few ex-soldiers, decided to instigate an uprising against them. The experience, he later said, taught him the difference between an organized force and a disunited mass.
Later, he was transferred to a labor camp. The regime at these camps was a combination of hunger, physical abuse and hard forced labor. Many died every day, some from the conditions, while others were murdered by criminals among the prisoners. To his good fortune, a niece had heard of his imprisonment and determined to seek his release. Working her way up the Communist hierarchy, she eventually reached a top-ranking general who ordered a review of his case. His sentence was changed to a twelve month probation. Within a week he was ordered to be released, but it took a further two months for the order to reach him. He set out for Minsk, arriving after a week’s journey, mostly lying either on the tiny platform between the carriages or on the car roof.
He actually wanted to enter medical school but could not get a grant large enough to cover his living costs. The Institute of Physical Culture, on the other hand, not only gave generous grants but larger food rations and an array of sportswear, in other words, food and clothing. He decided to study physical culture. Conditions were still very difficult, and he even supplemented his grant by donating blood. His boxing studies were successful. He won fight after fight and steadily built up his physical strength, further motivated by the fact that he could now effectively defend himself against anti-Semitic attacks, which came from many directions.
Awaking Of National Identity[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
The anti-Semitism which Rubin had encountered from the local Russians during the German occupation, again in prison and the labor camp, and later still during the run-up to Stalin’s Doctors' Trial (1952-1953), slowly and steadily fashioned his Jewishness. As noted earlier, he initially knew almost nothing of Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish culture, the Hebrew literature or Hebrew literature, or even of the newly established State of Israel. He did, however, come to appreciate that he was an unwelcome guest in Russia, and that if he was ever to have a home it could only be in the Land of Israel. Once he arrived at this realization, he devoted all of his thinking, energy and resources to realising this goal. He evaluated everything in the light of his new-found national awareness. He developed pride in Jewish identity, both his own and that of other young Jews he met.
In 1955, Anatoly was in Riga for a boxing tournament. On the street, he heard people speaking Yiddish. He encountered Jews who observed Jewish customs, holidays and traditions. There were open Jewish gatherings. Soviet rule in Latvia only dated to the Second World War, and activists in the various international Jewish organizations, especially Beitar, were still open and active. Well-stocked Jewish libraries had also survived. Upon his return to Minsk, he discovered written materials in the central library, including a pamphlet on Anti-Semitism by the famous writer, Maxim Gorky. He began to refer to material such as this in conversations concerning the ubiquitous Russian Hatred of Jews, which he had both with assimilated Jews and with older people. In addition, young Jews were interested in Gromyko’s and Cherepakhin’s speeches about the establishment of the new state of Israel, with whom Russia then enjoyed warm relations. Anatoly would remind them that they were Jews, and sought to awaken their interest in Jewish life and the State of Israel. His foremost aim, though, was to arouse their national pride. It was in 1956 that he first met foreign tourists, an elderly American couple, first at a concert and then at their hotel. He was hungry for every crumb of knowledge he could receive from them. At the same time, he also described to them what it was like to be a Jew in the USSR, living through the constant waves of anti-Semitism. He asked them to relay this to the United States and Israel. As it turned out, all of these conversations were recorded and used against him at his second trial.
In 1957, a great international Festival of Youth was scheduled to be held in Moscow. Anatoly learned from the newspapers that a delegation from Israel would be taking part. Determined to meet them, he travelled firstly to Leningrad for a boxing tournament and then, leaving nothing to chance, arrived a week in advance in Moscow. Upon seeing the Israeli delegation at the rehearsals for the opening ceremony, he ran up to them and started peppering them with question after question. He stayed with them and among them from morning till evening, all the time asking them more questions; talking with them; and just gazing at these Jews from a free country. He also met other Jews who had come from all parts of the USSR to see the Israeli delegation with their own eyes, to see their dances, hear the songs, and meet the performers. He later described how these Soviet Jews surrounded the Israelis the whole time and could not stop asking them questions. He himself photographed the whole delegation and each single member of it, as well as the Israeli flag. The greatest moment came for these Jews when the delegation celebrated their own Independence Day.
Having gotten to know one of the delegation’s official leaders, Rubin arranged to meet him to get books and souvenirs for the Jewish youth of Minsk. However, when he arrived at the set time it was obvious that the delegation was being closely followed by KGB men and that the exchange of material could not take place. One of the KGB officers followed Rubin, although all he managed to get was the delegation leader’s address. Despite all of these obstacles Anatoly still managed to accumulate a significant quantity of books, leaflets and souvenirs. For him, this was a real treasure. His eyes shone when he imagined how the Jews of Minsk would react to this hoard. Back in Minsk, he spoke expansively to anyone who would listen about what he had learnt in Moscow. He regaled and inspired them with his fierce thirst for information about Jewish things ; his desire to broadcast this information was like a fire in his bones. In light of his overpowering enthusiasm, it is not surprising that he ignored all the rules of caution, especially since he was totally inexperienced in the ways of underground activity.
Interrogation, Investigation and Trail[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
Sensing that the KGB was closing in on him, he safely hid all of the potentially dangerous and/or incriminating materials (he could not bring himself to destroy them). When he was finally arrested, he carefully planned how to conduct himself in the coming the interrogation. When his KGB interrogators demanded that he reveal the names of all his friends and acquaintances he gave them the names of those with whom he shared no ‘Jewish business,’ mostly non-Jews and work colleagues. When the interrogators put to him a raft of other names and asked what his connection to them, he replied that he knew some of them, some though sports and others because of a shared interest in books. The investigators pressured him, to reveal (and, thereby, incriminate) those who shared in his Jewish activities. To this, he replied that he would not help them frame anyone. Before they thought to search him he managed to get to a lavatory and get rid of pages from a notebook containing coded names and information, that he had on his person.
At one stage they took him to an acquaintance’s apartment, where he had deposited his briefcase of Zionist materials. He could not understand how they knew of the place. Had his fellow-activist revealed it? Had the apartment been bugged and their talk overheard? When the officers opened the briefcase, and spread out its contents, he noticed a piece of paper with the phone number in code of an Israeli embassy staffer. He asked for a glass of water and managed to swallow the paper, while drinking the water. Realising what he had done, the agents cuffed his wrists and ankles and threw him into solitary confinement.
As the interrogation proceeded, it became apparent that the KGB had amassed accurate information not only on him but on his friends, acquaintances and even his relatives. They told him who he had met and when, and what they had discussed. They knew what had been said in his apartment down to the last detail. (Indeed, after his trial, one of his relatives told him that a listening device had been secreted in the attic above his apartment. A technician who was invited to repair the phone had asked the relative, “What’s this cable doing leading up into the attic?” The bug immediately vanished. Later, they discovered that the woman living in the neighbouring apartment, who had collaborated with the Germans during the occupation and had even had a son by a German, had moved over to collaborating with the KGB. She had shared her apartment with a ‘flatmate’ who had noted down every visitor to Rubin's apartment and recorded reams of incriminating talk.)
Anatoly knew that evidence obtained by bugging and photographing was not admissible in a court of law. In his innocence, he believed that this legality would be observed. In the course of his trial he was rudely disabused of his naïveté. The greater part of the charges brought against him were based precisely on this “inadmissible evidence,” and his denials and refutations and those of the other persons charged were simply ignored. Some eighty witnesses were interrogated, among them those with whom he had undertaken no Zionist activity. The USSR had not reached yet the stage where mere acquaintance with an accused person was enough to earn a jail sentence. However, being ‘invited’ for questioning by the infamous KGB, was enough to give people weeks of sleepless nights. However, despite all the various ‘methods’ of interrogation employed against him, Rubin never broke. He did not give up a single name, and admitted to nothing.
The official list of the charges that were brought against him was heavy: treason, attempted assassination of a senior party leader and government minister (in this case, the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev himself), anti-Soviet propaganda, the dissemination of Zionist literature, ties with the Israeli embassy and the inflaming of nationalist passions. Two weeks into his interrogation a new investigator, one who was familiar with Jewish issues, arrived from Moscow. His assignment was to persuade Rubin to denounce Israeli embassy staff for conducting subversive activities, under the guise of diplomatic activity. Rubin retorted that as far as he knew, he had not given the slightest indication to justify such a malicious act. After this no further attempt was ever made to recruit him as a collaborator.
Two others had been arrested along with Rubin. One was the wrestling champion of the Minsk republic, who was an ordinary Jew. However, on a trip to Poland, Jewish refugees from Minsk had given him books, pamphlets and newspapers from Israel in French, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish, and also a sealed package to take back to Rubin . The wrestler did as he was asked, without even checking to see what he was carrying. This is precisely what Rubin told his interrogators. The wrestler confirmed this in his separate interview, even though he and Rubin had not coordinated their testimony. (This would prove to be of great help to the wrestler at his trial).
Rubin's second co-accused was a doctor, two years older than him and the son of a veteran communist with long years of underground activity to his credit. Rubin knew a lot about the doctor’s interest in Zionism. He viewed him as a potential Zionist and gave him printed materials which the doctor passed out among his acquaintance. Once arrested, however, the doctor broke immediately, revealing everything that he knew. Indeed, he even wrote a letter of confession and penitence, which he addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Under interrogation, he heard of activities of which he had been unaware, yet he Immediately put all the blame on Rubin. For his part, Rubin willingly accepted all the blame for acts which had been proved against the doctor. He asserted that he had persuaded the doctor to do them; that he had indeed given him reading materials and that all the responsibility for the doctor’s actions lay on his shoulders. Anatoly adopted this course of action, because in his eyes the issue was not his own actions but his conviction that all three of the accused were perceived to be representatives of Zionist Jewry. Hearing how the doctor behaved, he felt shame that the doctor was a Jew. The latter was the only one at the trial to state that Rubin planned to kill Khrushchev, alleging that Anatoly had asked the doctor for cyanide. Some of the poison would be inserted into a bullet intended for Khrushchev and with the remainder he would commit suicide if caught. Needless to say, the KGB never presented any further evidence that assassination had been Rubin's intention.
The doctor’s cowardice infuriated Rubin. He felt, both during the trial and while he was in the labor camp afterwards, that he was not just seen as a man named Rubin, but that he represented his entire people. He believed that the way others regarded him was significant for the future of that people. For these reasons, it was important to him that he retain his dignity, proving for once and for all that Jews were people of steadfast principle, and neither cowards nor traitors. Over the course of his interrogation he also realised that the KGB were bent on inflating the case against him at any price, in order to implicate the Israeli embassy. Specifically, they sought to prove that Rubin was under instruction from the embassy to assassinate Khrushchev and that the package was brought to him from Poland contained directives for espionage on behalf of a second ‘interested foreign power’ (viz. Israel). Rubin, obviously, steadily denied all of these manufactured claims.
The most dangerous of the charges against him was that of attempted assassination of Premier Khrushchev, since that carried the death penalty. He was endlessly questioned on this point, and had persisted in his absolute denials, despite their threats and claims to have already discovered the weapons he had planned to use. However, Anatoly had prepared himself mentally for his ordeal. He remained calm, and showed himself capable of bearing himself with confidence. He refused to accept the court-appointed lawyer to defend him, choosing to defend himself. Nevertheless, the court appointed a defence attorney, no less than the chairman of the Byelorussian bar. The trial lasted five months. For four of them he was kept in solitary confinement.
After the trial, he learnt that the KGB had ripped up the floors and walls of his apartment and even brought in a mine-detector. They had gone as far as search the village where he had lived during the war and tried to extort information by threats from the father of the family he had lived with. Eventually they convinced themselves he knew nothing. The treason charge was dropped during the interrogation. Rubin hoped that the trial would be open to the public and that he could exploit the dock to defend his worldview. However, the proceedings were all carried out behind closed doors. Brought to the courthouse, he saw friends and family waiting in the corridor with fearful and alarmed faces, the women in tears. He greeted them cheerfully. His two fellow-accused sat alongside him in the dock. He pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him, as opposed to his two co-defendants, who immediately pleaded guilty. He admitted that literature that was found in his possession was his. However, he asserted that he did not regard the materials as being anti-Soviet and denied his guilt on that charge. The lawyers for his co-defendants placed all the blame for any criminal activity on him. His court appointed lawyer admitted that he was guilty of grave crimes, although he endeavoured to mitigate the verdict by recounting his life history: viz. during the war he had been held in a ghetto and orphaned at the age of 13; that the anti-Semitic Fascist Nazis had slaughtered his whole family, which accounted for his adult sensitivity to anti-Semitism; that brushes with a few anti-Semitic hooligans since then had brought him to over sensitivity, which Zionist propaganda had then exploited.
Twenty witnesses testified at the trial, only those who could support the charges. Several actually repudiated their testimony under interrogation, pleading that they had been in fear and had been interrogated without let-up for up to 8 hours. The prosecutor emphasized Rubin’s intention to assassinate Khrushchev. However, in his closing remarks, he admitted that since the plan had not been put into action, it would be treated under clause 70 of the Byelorussian legal code, which banned anti-Soviet propaganda. He asked that Rubin be sentenced to five years re-education in a labour camp as the organiser of a criminal cell. The doctor was sentenced to two years and expulsion from the Communist Party and the wrestler to six months.
When Rubin was permitted some closing remarks. He persisted in defending his actions, spoke of state-sanctioned anti-Semitism, of the suppression of the Jews’ national life, and of an enforced conformity. His goal, he said, was now to leave for his homeland, Israel. Up to this moment his defence lawyer had been assuring his family that he would not get more than three years. However, after Anatoly’s speech, the judges reconsidered and sentenced him to six years, as a result of his impudent conduct in court and his refusal to recant his criminal views.
Upon his arrival at the labour camp, he discovered that the KGB had spread the word that he had planned to blow up the Minsk hotel; that he had been caught in the company of an agent who had given him information to take to the West; and that a half million rubles in foreign currency were found in his possession. The residents of his war-time village were told that he and the father of the family he lived with had planned to print counterfeit rubles.
The Return To The Gulag - A Zionist Movement Coming To Being[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
At the labour camp everything was familiar from his first sentence ten years before, with the exception that now the majority of prisoners were political internees, whereas under Stalin they had been regular criminals. The first camp he was sent to was Lagopunkt 11, next to the Yavas train station. Here, the inmate population was extremely diverse. The greater part were serious war criminals, such as the commanding officers of Gestapo Investigation units with hundreds of thousands of deaths on their hands, mostly Jews. When asked what they were in for and their inevitable answer was, “Because of the Yids”. About a tenth of the population of the Mordovia camps was composed of Jews who had been sentenced for various “crimes”. Some were ‘revisionists’, who still believed that the anti-Semitic character of the USSR was capable of change. Some had written denunciations of Soviet anti-Semitism, and for this libel had been sentenced to 3-8 years. Some had been convicted of Zionist activism. These last came from every corner of the Soviet Union, from Moscow, Leningrad, Riga, Kiev and elsewhere. Rubin saw in these largely young people, the first buds of a Zionist efflorescence. Until his second spell in the labour camp, Rubin had thought that he was alone in a sea of assimilating and terrified Jews. Now, for all their diversity of views, on one subject all the Jews in the camp were united and of one mind—Israel. They met together regularly to exchange information. Each one recounted what he had read and heard about Israel. Veteran Zionists recounted chapters from its history, culture and traditions. Some knew Hebrew and began giving lessons. In the absence of textbooks and dictionaries, they compiled their own small dictionaries by taking Russian primers and writing the Hebrew for each Russian word above it. They composed and learned by heart frequently used sentences. They celebrated every Jewish holiday. For this activity, which was forbidden both within the camp and in the USSR generally, they would gather in one of the clothing storerooms to hear one of the older inmates recite the prayers. As far as was possible they observed the commandments, and on Yom Kippur every one fasted, religious and secular alike. For them this was not only a religious observance, but a demonstration of national unity. They fashioned old silver coins into Magen David pendants, which they wore under their shirt. They did all of this, under conditions of back breaking, draining forced labour, and constant hunger.
At every moment, Anatoly reminded himself that he was first and foremost a Jew, and that as such, it was vital that he stayed clean of any trace of collaboration. In addition, he demanded no less from all of the other Jews. There were, of course, informers who were KGB ‘volunteers’ and those who joined the camp Culture and Education units. Among the Jewish political inmates, however, there was an unwritten, iron-clad law that no one was to join any officially organized structure or activity and or to collaborate in any way with the camp’s administration. If, in a moment of weakness, one of them did so, he was immediately totally estranged by all the others.
When circumstances seemed to offer prospects for Rubin’s early release, family members seized the opportunity and submitted a formal request for his release. The camp commandant informed Rubin of this development and told him that as commandant, he had to draw up a prisoner assessment. The hint was obvious, and shortly afterwards the commandant included him in a list of inmates who were willing to undertake “public activity”. Upon hearing this at a camp assembly, Rubin jumped to his feet as if bitten by a snake and angrily demanded that his name be removed from this “blacklist”. He added that he would not let them use him for any of their dirty business. Anatoly was taken off the list, but warned that he would pay a price for his actions. Two weeks later, the Prosecutor General revealed the price. For his negative behaviour he would never be eligible for commutation of his sentence. His fellow inmates actually thought that he would have been better off by waiting before removing himself from the “public activity.” Rubin, however, was convinced that he had made the right choice, and carried it out in the right way. Later, though, the officer responsible for the ‘public activity’ told him that his worst sin had been declaring his refusal to cooperate at a public assembly, where he was a bad example for the other prisoners.
From time to time the inmates were moved from one ‘maximum regime’ camp to another, where the work involved sawing logs into short planks and loading them onto transport. In the summer, they worked 11-12 hours a day in the open under a sweltering heat. In winter, in impossible freezing temperatures of—minus 30-35 degrees Celsius. For this they received 2000 calories a day of cold food. During this time, Rubin was not accorded the typical status of a ‘prisoner not requiring guarding’. His inquiry as to why revealed that there was a stripe across the cover of his dossier, indicating that he had either attempted or planned escape. Since he had done neither, he inquired further. He learned that his dossier contained his full biography, including his flight from the Minsk ghetto (and the Nazis). This was enough to classify him as having rebellious tendencies, which required keeping him under constant surveillance!
From 1962-1965, the last three years of his sentence, Rubin and other political prisoners, were subjected to an especially strict regime, one that was reminiscent of the worst days of Stalinism. Hence, in all that time he received but one parcel from the outside, and that was by ‘mistake’, as it came just as he arrived at a new camp and had not yet ‘quarrelled’ with the new administration. This camp was Lagopunkt 10 where all prisoners wore striped overalls, were held in cells after work, and denied the ‘privilege’ of walking around the camp grounds. The rations were also several grades severer than in other camps. The prisoners made great efforts to obtain reading materials, but if they were discovered these were immediately confiscated, as occurred when the magazine Novy Mir published Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. The enraged deputy governor for Political Affairs went even further. Gathering the prisoners together, he screamed a furious foul-mouthed denunciation of the author, saying that if it had been left to him Solzhenitsyn would already have been in Lagopunkt 10 alongside them. The book, he screeched, was a disgusting libel of the Soviet Union and its institutions. He then turned to Anatoly and yelled: “You, Rubin, am I not right?” Rubin calmly sharply replied with a famous saying from Krylov’s Fables: “There’s no point raging at the mirror if it’s your face that’s all twisted.” He was careful not to spell out the implications of his words, but the next day he was called out and informed that his intended meaning was perfectly clear and that steps against him would be taken. Two days later he found himself on a transport to a new camp.
It was extremely hard for the Jewish inmates to get news about what was happening among the Jews in the world outside. They were reduced to searching the local newspaper for the smallest scraps of information. Any article or note that had even the slightest implication for the USSR’s Jews was seized on and at once passed on within the camp and to other camps via prisoners on ‘transport’.
One of the prisoners in Rubin’s new camp was a well-known writer who was allowed to get books from home — a privilege that he owed to having once done research on Lenin. He made friends amongst the many Jewish inmates and even defended them against anti-Semitic assaults. One day he said to Rubin: “Tolya, I’ve got a book in English called Exodus about Israel and the Jews in general. Take it, read it, I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.” At this time, Rubin’s knowledge of English was limited. It was, however, sufficient for him to recognise that the book was a treasure. Other Jews in the camp who were more fluent in English, immediately organised a group reading in an out- of-the-way spot. It took them three days to finish the book and the impression it made on them was enormous. They were determined not to let it out of their hands. Rubin approached the owner and asked him if he would give it to them as a gift. This he did, most willingly. The first thing they had to do, Rubin realised, was to disguise the book so that it wouldn’t show up in a search. A fellow inmate who’d done a bookbinding course did a beautiful job of re-covering it as a Soviet textbook. When camp wardens did their frequent cell searches, their unchanging routine with foreign-language books was to turn at once to the last page which, as in all Russian books, set out the book’s content and status. Exodus now found itself designated in Russian — “English fiction: Student textbook”, which was enough to satisfy the wardens. The book was put with all the other English-language books for general use and so passed from hand to hand, read by one group of inmates after the next, Jews and non-Jews alike. Rubin also managed to get it to other camps and in everyone it was drunk in like water in the desert.
Rubin knew from the first that were the book to be found in his possession his sentence would be extended even further and that, as a ‘known criminal’, he would be subjected to a ‘special regime’ camp. However, since he appreciated the book’s unique value he felt that the risk was worth taking. When the book reached its seventh camp it found there a Jew who, although his English was not perfect, undertook to translate it into Russian. The undertaking was extremely arduous and, even more so, dangerous. The translator resorted to one imaginative subterfuge after another to keep the wardens’ gaze unsuspecting. But the translation was finally completed. Immediately, Leon Uris’ Exodus was smuggled out to the ‘outside world,’ that beyond the camps. There it fulfilled a critical and formative role in awakening the national consciousness of Soviet Jewry. All of this was the result of one man’s courage and determination, Anatoly Rubin.
Rubin later recounted that throughout his incarceration, he made a strict point of never showing weakness and never failing to do his full share of the forced labour. Thus, while working in pairs on the logs, he would never be the first to suggest a cigarette break. Keeping this up was extremely difficult, especially as he suffered from frequent migraine headaches. Nevertheless, despite these conditions, his health and fitness held up well. It was only as the prospect of his release began to arise that his health began to falter as a result of the endless stress of hunger rations, physical strain, and punishing conditions. Throughout spring of 1964, the inmates worked while standing in pools of freezing water, and the pain in his feet and legs built up till he could hardly sleep at nights. The primitive medical treatment that they were afforded was useless. All he could do was to desperately await his release date, which had been set for Tuesday, December 8, 1964. However, things got complicated. At work, a Russian nationalist inmate started badmouthing Israel and Zionism. Rubin approached him and asked what his problem was and why the badmouthing. The Russian retorted: “I know you’re a Zionist and you mistreat Arabs! You’re worse than the Fascists!” Sincere there was no point in arguing with the man, Rubin adopted other ‘means of persuasion,’ his fists…He was then taken back to the camp and sentenced to ten days of solitary confinement. To the verdict were appended the victim’s statement that he had been attacked by a Zionist and a doctor’s certificate listing the damage (cuts, bruises, a broken tooth etc) that Anatoly had inflicted on the Russian Anti-Semite. Rubin, for his part, got to inaugurate a new solitary confinement cell—a cold, damp block, two metres by one-and-a-half. Anatoly emerged from solitary confinement looking as though he had undergone a prolonged and serious illness. His Russian nationalist ‘victim,’ on the other hand, had feared retribution and requested a transfer to another camp. As Rubin’s release date approached, the camp authorities initiated a policy of releasing inmates who were nearing the completion of their sentences. This early release was on the condition that they signed an application for pardon, which was effectively an admission of guilt. Upon being offered this ‘deal,’ Anatoly refused and once again found himself in a ‘debate’ with the KGB. The latter’s representative accused the Jews of being a nation of swindlers, pimps and thieves. “If you look out of the window at the criminals camp,“ Anatoly shot back, “you will see that it is full of murderers, gangsters, rapists and robbers and that most of them are [non-Jewish] Russians. The only conclusion is that so must be the Russian nation.”
On December 7th, 1964, the day before his release, his friends gave him a farewell party, each contributing whatever he could to the festive meal. They exchanged addresses and arranged to continue their joint work. The next day he was minutely searched, but all the materials that he would need for his future work had already been smuggled out of the camp. And so, after six years in the Gulag, he made his way to the train, still only half aware of his changed status. His friends waved and he waved back. He was, however, bitter. He was bitter at their situation. He was burdened by the feeling that no more than a few steps separated him from the world of the nightmarish world camps in which he had spent six long years. He felt deeply the painful awareness that he had to leave his comrades behind. “I was stepping out,” he later said, “into the biggest prison camp of them all—the Soviet Union itself.” Thanks to his time in the camps he now had real friends in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Riga and many other towns. Prior to his release, he had been in contact with some of those who had been released before him. He travelled to Minsk by way of Moscow and the sudden transition from the camp climate to the hustle and noise of Moscow came as a shock. Friends introduced him into their circles and took him from one gathering to another. After four days, he travelled on to Minsk but stayed for only a day before departing for Riga, where more friends, and a more Jewish atmosphere, awaited him. At get togethers, the youth sang Jewish songs and danced Jewish dances. They attended the synagogue and made trips to the Rombula ravine where the Jews of Riga had been massacred by the Nazis and their local helpers and their bodies dumped in mass graves. Rubin knew many of the local activists and thirstily drank in the latest news from Israel. He put together a collection of Jewish publications and finally left for the station accompanied by these newly made friends. At the station, though, it became clear that the KGB was also accompanying him. He made his farewells and climbed into coach 7, certain that if the KGB were already tailing him in Riga he could expect them to be waiting for him in Minsk. So, he moved to another carriage farther back in the train. As a result, the train pulled into Moscow and the local KGB agent did not find him in carriage 7. The agent decided that Anatoly had given him the slip and that they now had to discover his new whereabouts. An hour after Rubin got to his Minsk apartment, a man in plain clothes turned up. He identified himself as a police official and began asking the residents about Rubin. When Rubin himself appeared, he mumbled something about employment arrangements and registering his residence but it was obvious that he was only there to record his address. Rubin started to look for work but no one wanted him. For two months he knocked on office doors but met only a variety of rejections and referrals to higher authorities or to the party central committee for some official authorisation. No one wanted to take the risk of employing him without this insurance.
Initiating Zionist Activity In Minsk[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
Suddenly, only a month or so after his release, he received an oficial letter informing him that the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union had reviewed his case and had determined that the charges against him were unfounded. Hence, it not only declared him totally innocent, it accorded him full rehabilitation and restored all of his civil rights. This dramatic development was a direct result of the deposing of Nikita Khrushchev by his Politburo colleagues in October, 1964. This allowed judges to reopen cases that were associated with his name, without fear of reprisal. Rubin’s case fit that description. Now organizations could employ him without hesitation, and he was soon employed by the Minsk municipal hospital as a senior physical exercise teacher.
At the same time, he began to set up activities to teach the city’s Jews, particularly the younger ones, about Judaism and the State of Israel. His long-term goal was to instil in these assimilated Jews feelings of national pride and to prepare them for a return to their historic homeland, Israel. Once again, he started collecting reading materials about Israel. Soon he had created his advance guard of Jews who were totally committed to the cause of national revival.
This time, however, he knew that he remained a KGB target. He was very much aware that he must not, under any circumstances, put these youngsters (who were not under suspicion at the KGB) at risk. On the positive side, he was now a seasoned veteran of underground activity and had graduated with high marks from the KGB trifecta school of interrogation, investigation, and labour camps. He took great care not to form large groups, and to compartmentalize all those involved. He would pass materials and information only to his few intimates. These would then transfer these to the members of their own, restricted circles. And before so entrusting them he would instruct them in how to behave if caught and how their investigation/ interrogation would proceed. He also advised them to pass on this instruction to all contacts before entrusting them with ‘incriminating’ matter. This caution, it proved, would save him and many young men from the labour camps.
The Zionist materials were distributed via a decentralized, and highly compartmentalized network. Several times it happened that someone would approach him and suggest, in absolute secrecy, that he give him a booklet to read that Anatoly himself had put into circulation. Some well trained contacts were entrusted with printed material from Israel, such as articles by the Zionist thinker and Revisionist Zionist Leader, Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky. Other contacts were, at first, too afraid to even touch Israeli publications in their hands. They were still paralyzed by the fear of even touching of something from ‘the other side of the frontier’. Such as these, however, were interested in Judaism, in Jewish History and Culture. So, they might later come to Anatoly or others and ask for relevant reading material. Jabotinsky’s writings were especially popular with the young, who translated them into Russian and ensured them a wide circulation.
To obtain all of this material, Rubin had to travel to other towns, where he had friends from the camps. In order to undertake these trips, he adopted an ingenious strategy. Health regulations maintained that anyone who donated blood received two days off of work. Anatoly combined these with the regular, weekly day of rest, which allowed him three-day trips away from Minsk.
On one of these trips, in this case to Riga, he learned that people were being taken in for interrogation for having had contact with him. Hearing this, he immediately returned to Minsk in order to warn his young contacts. There he learned that another close acquaintance, who had received reading material about the Six-Day War from him, had been arrested. He immediately warned his contacts and friends to get rid of anything in their homes which could be used as evidence against them. He also reiterated his instructions as to how they should handle themselves while under KGB interrogation. He was sure, however, that irrespective of the precautions took to keep his activities secret, that sooner or later he and others would come under investigation.
Yet, as before, he could not bring himself to destroy the large amount of compromising material that he had accumulated in his apartment. Instead, he put it into locked suitcases which he gave to people whom he could trust. He cautioned them, however, that if the KGB were to ask them, they were to declare that they had received the cases locked and unopened and understood that they contained family valuables that Rubin did not want to keep in his own rented apartment.
Anatoly’s next step was to go to Moscow to pass on his warning to activists there, as well as to the wife of the acquaintance who had been arrested. She, however, had already been tricked into giving the KGB all of the information in her possession. Fortunately it was not much.
Over a long period of time, almost every friend and contact of Anatoly was detained and questioned by the KGB. When his own turn came, at last, it was the personnel manager at his hospital who delivered the KGB’s invitation to present himself at KGB headquarters that very same day.
To prevent his interrogation from resulting in an arrest, he decided to deny everything, even when the denial was illogical, for he knew that in Russia a ‘no’ always remained a ‘no’. He was interrogated for five days in a row, from morning to evening. Each day he emerged exhausted from the intense grilling. On the sixth day, the agents arranged a confrontation between him and his friend, the arrested contact. Rubin immediately realised that the interrogators had tricked the latter into breaking and revealing everything he knew, by convincing him that Rubin had, himself, told them everything. In order to show his friend that this was not the case, Anatoly violated the rules of interrogation by jumping up and declaring that everything was a lie and that he had never given the acquaintance anything of the sort. Yet, it did no good for the latter continued to spill out everything he knew in the fullest detail. Rubin persisted in his assertion that it was all a ‘frame’, that everything that he was ‘spilling’ was imaginary from beginning to end, and that he could not understand why his acquaintance was trying to incriminate him. He told the interrogators that he couldn’t fathom what they had done to the acquaintance to make him lie like that.
Faced with Rubin’s stubborn refusal to admit anything, the chief interrogator ended the interrogation, and even closed the investigation against him. As it happened, it was this strategy of unrelenting rejection that saved him. Anatoly was not even called to testify at his acquaintance’s trial, at which the latter was sentenced to eighteen months in an intensive regime labour camp. All of Rubin’s young fellow-activists, those whom he had instructed in how to conduct themselves under interrogation, did so with exemplary control, even at the price of expulsion from their school or college.
Soon after sentence was passed, Anatoly heard stunning news. The authorities in Riga had started to issue permits to leave for Israel to selected Jews. He at once travelled to Riga to see friends who had received such permits. He asked them that once they arrived in Israel, they endeavour to elicit an official invitation for him to make his home in the Jewish State. Within three weeks, the invitation duly arrived and the OBIR, the government department responsible for such matters in the Soviet Interior Ministry, in a radical departure from previous practice, actually registered the invitation. Albeit, they procrastinated for six weeks, but Rubin was finally summoned to OBIR and informed by its director: “You have been granted a travel permit. It’s better you bunk off to this Israel of yours than stay here poisoning the minds of Soviet youth.” Anatoly later observed that this remark was already behind the times. For the movement of Jewish national revival in Russia had already gained so much momentum, that no power in the USSR could halt it.
Leaving (Step) Mother - Russia[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
Activists were typically given several months to prepare for their departure from the USSR. As the first Jew from Minsk to receive an emigration permit after the Six Day War (when the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Israel), Rubin was given but twelve days. During those twelve days, he undertook a series of trips to bid farewell to his friends, old and new. Even so, a large number of these came to the train station to see him off in person. They did so even though they knew that the KGB would also be there. Fear no longer cowed them. There were speeches, and they sang Israeli songs and danced well into the night. They had even come equipped with a loudspeaker which blasted out the celebrations at full volume. Everything was now in the open, and they would no longer hide their feelings. Even some of Rubin’s non-Jewish friends came to see him off.
Once word had gotten out that Anatoly was leaving many Jews sent him their names and addresses, asking that they too be sent an official invitation to make aliyah (immigrate) to Israel. They all pleaded that Israel not remain silent, but should do all in its power to help them leave the Soviet Union. They implored Israel to hear the voices of their brothers and sisters, and let forth an expression of solidarity that would not be silenced. Rubin knew all too well that he had more than once felt this sense of being alone and friendless. He keenly recognized that it was one of the hardest feelings to bear. He also knew, with absolute clarity, that if the Jews of the USSR were to sustain their strength and hope, they had to know that they were not alone. They had to be constantly reminded that their brethren were thinking about them and doing their utmost to rescue them.
Before Anatoly could board the train, he had to pass through customs control, which included a body and clothes search. Still, even after he had passed into a fenced-off area one of his friends managed to get to him and pass him a pack of developed films. He knew what he had been given. The films carried the secret stamp of the KGB, if he had been found with them he would be sentenced to ten years in the Gulag. At this point, he was more afraid of losing his one chance to get to his homeland than of the possible ten years in the camps. Still he felt that he could not refuse the package. Fortunately, the package was not discovered and it arrived safely with him, in Israel.
In Israel[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
Rubin landed in Israel on May 1, 1969, and was sent to an absorption centre in the northern town of Carmiel. There he found a large group of Russian Zionist activists who, like him, had been allowed to leave as part of the KGB’s attempt to break the movement of Jewish and Zionist national revival. Passionate in their conviction that the time had come for open and public action against all attempts to halt the emigration from the USSR he and his friends, Joseph Khrul and Joseph Schneider, wrote to the then prime minister, Golda Meir, and were soon invited to talks at her office in Tel Aviv.
The meeting was crowded, for an 18-strong group from Georgia had also been invited, along with attorney Lidia Slovina and her husband, themselves Zionist activists from Riga. The attendees all wanted to know why more was not being done to get Russian Jews out of the USSR. They then set out their reasons for adopting drastic measures to achieve that goal, especially organising demonstrations around the world. The Prime Minister explained to them that Israeli current policy was to maintain public silence on the question. Recent experience with Romania seemed to support such an approach. The Romanian Communist regime had been quietly persuaded to release its Jews. However, as soon as their emigration was made public, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu put a stop to it.
Upon emerging from the meeting, the attendees concluded that they would have to take action themselves. Two of them at once, at their own expense, flew to the United States to arouse public opinion there. At the same time, NATIV (a department of Israel’s Foreign Ministry that was tasked with fostering Jewish education and awareness behind the Iron Curtain, and in facilitating emigration to Israel) decided to send two representatives of its own to the America to do the same. The first was Joseph Khrul, he was followed soon thereafter by Anatoly Rubin. At the time, the media was prohibited from publishing the names of those who had left the USSR (along with the fact that anyone was getting out at all). One American newspaper, though, had not heard of the prohibition and published Anatoly’s name and everything he told them.
Back in Israel, when Russian Aliyah activists failed to persuade either NATIV or the Israeli government to do more, they declared a hunger strike in front of the Wailing Wall. NATIV strongly opposed this move. It proved, however, to be the crucial push that set the movement to ‘Let my People Go’ in motion. Rubin, Joseph Khrul, Joseph Schneider and Asher Blank were all enlisted by NATIV to act as its advisors. As will be recalled, in the camps, Anatoly had felt a deeply and painful sense of alone-ness and despair at the lack of outside support. He never forgot the activists’ plea to him that Israel not remain silent, but rather do all in its power to help them get out. Deep inside him there burned the fired of determination, to rally worldwide support and break down the wall of silence.
He had also begun teaching physical education in Israel, at first in schools and them at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem. The link between physical fitness and national pride, which had accompanied him for so many years, continued to drive him. In addition, he devoted a lot of time to educating Israel’s youth to develop pride in their Jewish Heritage and in Zionism.
Anatoly was determined that his experiences in the Shoah and the Gulags of the Soviet Union should not be forgotten, and would serve to instruct future generations. This led him to write his memoirs. He wrote them first in Russian, a work for which he shared first prize in a nation-wide competition, ‘My Path to the Land of Israel,’ which he was awarded in 1975, by the Israeli President, Ephraim Katzir. The book was then translated into Hebrew and published in 1977 by Dvir Publishing, under the name Brown Boots, Red Boots—from the Minsk Ghetto to the Siberian Labour Camps. After his death in 2017 the famed Israeli author Galilah Ron Feder Amit reworked the translation of his book. This version of his book will be published soon. Galilah Ron Feder Amit was already very familiar with Rubin’s life. In 2004, she had written and immortalized Anatoly in the 26th volume of the Time Tunnel series ‘Prisoner of Zion, a Journey to the USSR of the Early Sixties and Prisoner of Zion Anatoly Rubin’.
Above all, Anatoly continued his work. In 1989, he was sent by NATIV to the USSR, and in particular to Minsk, to encourage Aliyah. Over the next two years many Minsk Jews followed him to Israel. In 2012, he was one honoured to light one of the six memorial torches at the National Observance of Holocaust Memorial Day at Yad VaShem in Jerusalem.
Family[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
In 1972, Rubin married Karny Jabotinsky, the granddaughter of the man whose writings had so inspired him, Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky . They had two children, Eri and Tamar (and later three grandchildren, Yoav, Maya-Shai and Itamar). For the rest of his life, Anatoly Rubin continued to inculcate in the younger generations, including his own children and grandchildren, his principles of national pride and mutual solidarity.
Anatoly Rubin died on January 16, 2017, and was buried in the Kiryat Anavim cemetery, near Jerusalem, surrounded by his family and friends. (10)