Purim Gifts from Russian Neighbors: Prewar Identity Formation and Wartime Survival among Young Jews from Soviet Vitebsk

The Context of Identity and Belonging

Before the Russian Revolution, Jewish identity in western Imperial Russian cities like Vitebsk meant a range of individual and social affiliations and activities, with religious traditions forming the foundation even among those who had distanced themselves from belief. During the 1920s, the Bolsheviks sought to transform Jews from an oppressed minority under Imperial rule to equal status alongside other Soviet nationalities. Antisemitic acts were “anti-Soviet” since it led to ethnic discord and undermined the internationalist character of Soviet society. Yet, this had less to do with promotion of true equality than political manipulation of formerly dominant Slavic nationalities. Among Jews, the party sought to remake Jewish identity into a “nationality” by distancing it from religious traditions. Leading the political and cultural campaign in the 1920s was the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Communist Party, which dismantled Jewish communal institutions, seized synagogues, and promoted anti-religious propaganda. ⁴ Party-sponsored Yiddish-language theaters, publications, and school systems took their place to promote an officially constructed Jewish identity. Soviet Belarus held a central position in the promotion of this new Jewish identity, since it was the only Soviet republic to designate Yiddish as an official state language to stand alongside Belarusian, Russian, and Polish. ⁵ Each national group had their own schools, published literature, workers’ clubs, and the like.

The republic’s language policy blended with the Soviet Union’s official nationalities policies of the 1920s and early 1930s as guided by the principle of korenizatsiia (meaning indigenization or nativization), which sought to promote equality among Soviet peoples through the advancement of previously oppressed national cultures. ⁶ National languages clothed party polemic, qualities reflected by the often-repeated slogan “socialist according to content and national according to form.” Language, literature, and history were viewed through the lens of class struggle. Within Soviet Yiddish culture, Jewish traditions and rituals that could not be recoded as Bolshevik thought and practice were discarded or openly denounced.

Jews’ shifting fortunes in Soviet Belarus, with emancipation moving toward circumscribed equality, faced further constrictions with the imposition of Stalinism in the late 1920s. Joseph Stalin’s consolidation of power changed the dynamics of rule from the party as a collective voice to his personal and ever-changing will. The latter was manifest in the radical economic developments known as the Great Break of 1928–1929, the acceleration of industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. As historian Andrew Sloin argues in his research on the Jewish revolution of the 1920s in Soviet Belarus, the Great Break targeted speculators (so-called NEPmen), Zionists, Trotskyites, and Bundists, elements who either often were or perceived to be Jews. ⁷ These attacks appeared alongside the prosecution of a series of antisemitic incidents in Belarusian factories. One of these, which Sloin analyzes in detail, occurred at the “October” glassmaking factory in Svisloch some 200 kilometers south-southwest of Vitebsk. ⁸ Six young men were tried, convicted, and imprisoned for antisemitic verbal abuse and sexualized violence against a Jewish female worker. The case was widely reported in the republic’s press, including the Vitebsk newspapers. ⁹ As Sloin observes, the “October” factory incident delineated unacceptable forms of antisemitism, even while the Stalinist system moved to place further limits on what was acceptable “Jewish” participation. These shifts, which included disbanding the Yevsektsiya in 1929, were just the start. “Judaism, excessive Jewishness, and certainly nonconfessional secular Yiddish culture would have to go,” Sloin observes as the true consequence of Stalinism’s impact. ¹⁰ While these did not occur immediately, we see unfolding stages of this recession over the course of the 1930s.

Other recent historical literature, especially the work of Anna Shternshis and Elissa Bemporad, illuminate the complexities of Jews’ engagement with the unfolding dynamics of daily life under Stalinism and their construction of identity in the 1930s. ¹¹ The structures of Jewish life are the focus of Arkadi Zeltser’s research specifically on Vitebsk in the interwar decades. ¹² While building on these scholars’ findings, my research carries the timeline forward to understand how identity formation among young people before the war shaped responses under German occupation and during the Holocaust.

For her study of the effects of Soviet policies on their lives as Jews and their sense of Jewish identity, Shternshis conducted over 200 interviews with Jews born in the former Soviet Union between 1906 and 1930. A segment of these eyewitnesses originated in the western Soviet borderlands. Among her findings, Shternshis concluded that in the wake of World War II a “vague” sense of Jewish identity emerged, as measured against the generation predating the Russian Revolution. This ambiguity was the result of interwar antireligious campaigns, the mixture of shtetl and urban populations in cities under the rapid industrialization of the Five-Year Plans, Soviet Yiddish cultural and language policies (described more fully below), and the experience of the Holocaust. ¹³ We see examples of this in what follows, in which young Jews were exposed to and adopted a range of ethnic and cultural identities. My research, however, points to the development among young people of an ambiguous Jewish identity before the war and the Holocaust.

Bemporad’s Becoming Soviet Jews focuses on the acculturation of Belarusian Jews during the 1920s and 1930s in the republic’s capital of Minsk. Drawing upon archival sources in Minsk and Moscow, Bemporad examines how many embraced the opportunities available under the Soviet system, while others developed identities that integrated elements of Jewish traditions despite deep compromises in religious observance. Her work highlights the particular role that Jewish women in Minsk played in navigating the changes in social and political life, carrying the banner of Bolshevism while conflictingly maintaining religious traditions. ¹⁴ While my argument focuses on the younger generation in the smaller city of Vitebsk, Bemporad’s findings are reflected through recollections of their parents’ (and especially mothers’) activities.

Arkadi Zeltser’s analytical survey draws upon archival documents available in Vitebsk, Minsk, Moscow, and elsewhere to examine the modernization and Sovietization of Jews in Vitebsk and the surrounding raion. Of relevance to what follows is the tension in identity formation between Jewish national identity, Soviet internationalism, and declining traditions. Zeltser examines how religious and political affiliations were neither simple nor exclusive, with a spectrum of identities evident, especially among the younger urban generation of Jews. ¹⁵ My findings dovetail, even if the identities among the children discussed below were less fully formed than the young adults and older that Zeltser has documentation for.

In addition to examining the wartime experiences of young Jewish Holocaust survivors, ¹⁶ my research also examines the immediate prewar years, which includes the span from the Great Terror through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The period presents particular challenges since most Soviet institutional records produced after 1937 had not yet been deposited in local archives such as Vitebsk by the time war began in 1941. Indeed, this period is largely elided in the current literature. Yiddish-language newspapers and other publications from this period are also not always dependable since some were either shut down due to shifting nationalities policies or the arrest of their editors in the Great Terror. Even if publication continued, many issues are missing from archival collections, necessitating the consultation of libraries and archives outside the former Soviet Union for surviving copies. The most comprehensive primary source records, despite their limited number, are oral histories. Although these witnesses were still children to young adults in the period from 1938 to the outbreak of war, careful contextualization of their experiences reveals continuity in their development of an accommodating sense of identity.

Interethnic Vitebsk

Under the first Five-Year Plan, the population of Vitebsk swelled as newly arrived migrants from the rural and village population joined the urban natives. Although the total number of Jews by “nationality”—as Bolshevik nationalities policies categorized Jews—increased in Vitebsk, they comprised a smaller percentage of the general population than before the Revolution. In 1926, 37.5 percent (37,017) claimed Jewish nationality in the city, making it the largest ethnic or national group compared to Belarusians (29.5%) and Russians (26%). ¹⁷ The population statistics for Jews remained steady while the overall population continued to increase over the next decade. By 1939, the number of Jews by nationality remained about the same (37,095), while their percentage within the total Vitebsk population had dropped to 22.2. ¹⁸

Slavs and Jews crowded into communal housing throughout the city as construction of new worker flats failed to keep pace with demand. Besides the kommunalka (communal apartment), others such as the Markelis family shared a house. In recalling their childhood years, some Jewish Holocaust survivors from Vitebsk describe their living environments with spatial qualifiers, such as mention of “two rooms” or “a shared house.” Ordinary interpersonal conflicts between neighbors were inevitable when living in such close quarters. And indeed, ethnic animosities and antisemitism pervaded even if concealed.

In his research on eastern Belarus during the interwar years, Arkadi Zeltser had noted that “ethnic hostility, including antisemitism, did not disappear. It survived in latent form. Changes in the political sphere could revive it and lead to anti-Jewish manifestations.” ¹⁹ The incident at the “October” factory in Svisloch is one example. Jews were likewise warned against engaging in ethnic discord. Vitsebski praletarii reported on an incident at the “Banner of Industrialization” brush factory, where a Jewish worker used a fellow worker’s nationality as a pejorative when he screamed, “Oh, you Belarusian!” ²⁰

These incidents in the workplace occurred outside of the communal apartment and therefore younger Jews did not witness them firsthand. In contrast, fleeting instances of interethnic tolerance, even support, in the domesticity of the communal apartment surface in the memories of Jewish Holocaust survivors who were children during the 1930s. This was the era in which young Jews like Fivel Markelis received gifts from Russian neighbors on Jewish holidays. Perhaps also such recollections may have been tinged with childhood nostalgia, particularly given what followed was wartime genocidal violence of the Nazis and postwar antisemitism of their Soviet homeland.

When asked if there was any conflict between Jews and non-Jews growing up, Lev Fleish, born 1922, was emphatic: “There wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t . . .” Neither did he recall experiencing antisemitism. “We all used to live together, we were all friends, we all went to school and went in for sports and there was absolutely no antisemitism.” Lev, who as noted below grew up in a Jewish family that had largely abandoned its religious heritage, delineated the lack of ethnic tensions by speaking in Soviet terms: “We all used to live together, and we all went toward a certain aim by common efforts.” ²¹

A survey of Lev Fleish’s contemporaries reveals more nuanced observations. They also report a lack of overt antisemitism growing up, yet at the same time noting ethnic differences. The community in Vitebsk’s Polotskaya district, where Elena Choukmazova lived, was filled with Belarusians, Jews, Russians, and other ethnic groups. At School No. 5, relations between Jews and non-Jews were, in her description, “wonderful.” Elena (born 1930) remembered further, “You see, there was no hostility between the children as it appeared after the war.” ²² “We always played together,” Roza Sandler recalled of friendships between Russians, Belarusians, and Jews. Sandler, born 1932, also remembered how languages mixed in the street. There were cases when “even Russian and Belarusian children spoke Yiddish to you.” ²³ Stepan Zavgorodnev, born 1926, had Russian as well as Jewish friends. He recalled 1930s Vitebsk as a place where it was not important who was Jewish and who was not. ²⁴ Still, they retained an awareness of their playmates’ ethnic identities: Russians and Belarusians, while they themselves were Jews. Even in their memories of cooperation, Jews understood the boundaries of each community of belonging.

Deeper down in witnesses’ memories are signs of interethnic tension. Fivel Markelis remembered how this manifested among his playmates. “Sometimes there were fights, a kind of play,” he told an interviewer, oblique in his reference to the antisemitic nature of the conflict. “We beat them, they beat us. So, I think there was nothing special.” ²⁵ It is significant that Markelis recalled these fights as an unserious matter, perhaps compared to the far more lethal antisemitism he endured under the Germans during the war.

Jewish Family Life

While most Soviet Jews still married other Jews, interethnic exchanges extended into family units through the relatively small, but increasing, number of intermarriages between Jews and Slavs. Around one in ten Jews in Belarus married outside their faith by the mid-1930s. ²⁶ Dora Drozdnik, Elena Choukmazova’s mother, was only sixteen years old when she married her first husband, an ethnic Russian. If there was anything problematic within her family about Dora marrying a non-Jew, Elena never heard about it. In addition to Jewish holidays, the family also celebrated Russian Orthodox festivals. “We painted eggs and baked small loaves at Eastertide,” she recalled. ²⁷ Choukmazova implied in her testimony that these traditions coexisted temporarily, ending after her parents divorced. She and her younger sister lived thereafter with their mother and followed only Jewish traditions.

Elizaveta Gurevich, who was nearly the same age as Dora Drozdnik, also married an ethnic Russian, an instructor at her school. Gurevich does not comment about how she felt about marrying outside of her faith, although she reports she had previously attended a Russian Orthodox church service with some Christian friends, just because she was curious. Gurevich’s father, however, objected to the union. Only the intervention of one of her older brothers convinced the elder Gurevich to yield. Even so, there was a long period of strained relations in her family. ²⁸

The objections raised by Elizaveta’s father, paired with and the acceptance of her brother, reflect the generational shifts that challenged traditional values. Indeed, recent scholarship has examined how children and young adult Jews raised in urban environments of the early Soviet Union developed new perspectives on traditional religious practices. Shternshis traces the duality that Jewish children faced, with antireligious propaganda in schools and religious observance at home. The result was not an either-or but the formation of a fusion of identities, the “Soviet and kosher” that forms the title of her monograph. ²⁹ Zeltser found greater adherence to religious traditions in provincial regions. Jews in urban Vitebsk exhibited a range of responses, with young people demonstrating greater acceptance of new Soviet values. ³⁰ Bemporad sees a different trajectory for some ambitious young adult Soviet Jews in 1920s and 1930s Minsk, since this group eschewed attendance at one of the diminishing number of synagogues in order to follow the new party-delineated (and antireligious) social norms. ³¹

With their intermarriage to local Slavs, Dora Drozdnik and Elizaveta Gurevich perhaps represent the fusion Shternshis describes. Still, most Jews married other Jews, and these families also needed to find a means to navigate life under Bolshevism and its attendant suppression of Jewish religious and communal life. This situation meant that religious observance was largely confined to the home. But even this expression of identity faced severe challenges. Mothers as well as fathers often worked outside the home to adequately support the family, making it difficult to maintain the laws of kashrut and other elements of traditional observance. In other instances, single mothers were the sole breadwinners. Often, grandparents filled in as caregivers as well as transmitters of religious heritage. Fivel Markelis’s grandmother, who looked after the boy while his mother, Sofia, worked in a factory, took him to “a kind of a house . . . a prayer house.” Few such worship spaces (likely a shtibl, a prayer house) still operated in Vitebsk, dropping from over fifty before the revolution to just nine by the end of 1936. ³² Grandmother Rosental also observed the Jewish holidays. “Jews usually gathered together, actually some families gathered together, and they baked matzah,” Markelis recalled, “Usually women baked matzah.” ³³ His mother Sofia Markelis, however, was not mentioned as being among these women, since by the late 1930s she labored in a brush factory to support the family.

In some families, mothers were able to maintain some continuity of Jewish religious life. Dora Drozdnik made matzah, challah, and other traditional foods. Her daughter, Elena Choukmazova, recalled that “at Passover everything was as it had to be.” ³⁴ Vera German, born 1927, remembered how her mother Leah also maintained Jewish traditions, keeping kosher when possible and preparing the table for Shabbes. ³⁵ Leah German’s commitment needs to be measured against the official restrictions on kosher slaughtering, making the adherence to the laws of kashrut all the more challenging. Although most witnesses discuss the role mothers played in religious traditions, fathers also appear in some recollections. Iosif Bogomol’nyi, born 1931, described his working-class father attending a synagogue until it closed in the late 1930s. Thereafter, the elder Bogomol’nyi gathered a minyan at their residence; Iosif’s elder brother Mikhail was just old enough to participate. The family loved Passover, which they observed with grandparents and other relatives. “We always celebrated [the holiday],” he remembered. “For a whole week there was no piece of [leavened] bread.” ³⁶

Many Vitebsk Jews lived enmeshed in revolutionary ideals, such as the examples cited by Bemporad, or simply secular in their attitudes from before the Russian Revolution and thus followed no religious observances. “You know, in my Vitebsk days we didn’t celebrate any holidays,” Lev Fleish recalled, but “older people celebrated them somehow illegally.” Practicing Judaism was clandestine or even criminal in his recollections, although strictly speaking this was not so. Perhaps with these statements Fleish sought to justify his family’s inconsistencies. For example, Lev was circumcised, while his brother, born a few years after Lev, was not. His vague explanation perhaps offers a hint of the shifting responses among Soviet Jews to official attitudes toward religion: “The times were different,” he reflected without further clarification. ³⁷

Young Jews’ recollections reveal other variances and contradictions of religious observance. Stepan Zavgorodnev’s grandparents were observant, but his mother and step-father were not, and his uncle Mikhail was a committed communist. In his own recollections, however, they were all Jews. ³⁸ Stepan fit somewhere in this spectrum, although his youth at the time meant it remained indeterminant. Vera German’s memories of Jewish holidays reveal the spiritual distance she traveled over the course of her life. Despite her mother’s efforts, German merely remembered Passover as the holiday when the family “sat down at the table, if it was the holiday when you were not allowed to eat, for instance, something like butter, or something else . . .” And in answer to a question about her family’s observance of Friday evening, the start of Shabbes, she said, “Yes, we did something, but I don’t remember what.” ³⁹ German gave these reflections sixty years after the event, when her life in the Soviet Union had taken her a thousand kilometers east into central Russia. Yet more than time and physical distance separated Vera from her mother’s domestic practices. Secularization was not always total or abrupt, as with Lev Fleish. Such processes could also be incremental. Zavgorodnev and German began that journey in the conflicted environment of Stalinist Vitebsk.

Soviet life also weakened traditional Jewish familial ties. In the context of social radicalism that emerged in the decade after the revolution, liberally granted divorce and so-called “free unions” (essentially common-law marriages) led to a spate of fathers abandoning their families. The Communist Party refocused family policies on traditional structures in light of falling birthrates during the 1930s. Abortion was banned in 1936 and a series of measures made divorce more difficult to obtain. ⁴⁰ Stepan Zavgorodnev’s experiences reflect the social freedom of the 1920s. His mother, Maria Yeines, gave birth to Stepan in 1926 when she was medical student in Minsk. He remembered nothing of his birth father, so perhaps Maria had divorced this man when her son was an infant or had never been married. In any case, she raised Stepan as a single mother while finishing her studies. Mother and son moved to Vitebsk in 1931, and soon thereafter Maria married ethnic Russian Mikhail Zavgorodnev, a student and Red Army veteran. Young Stepan formed a close bond with his stepfather, who legally adopted the boy. He loved to sit with Mikhail in the evenings and listen to stories about the army. Stepan’s Russian-speaking family was rounded out by his maternal Jewish grandparents. His mother’s brother, also named Mikhail, lived nearby. ⁴¹

Many other Jewish women in Vitebsk shared Maria Yeines’s initial struggles as a single mother. Elena Choukmazova’s mother, Dora Drozdnik, went to work after her divorce from her first husband. Since Soviet mothers of the period seldom received child support from their ex-husbands, ⁴² Dora took double shifts at her restaurant job to support Elena and her younger sister. Dora’s situation was eased by the marriage to her second husband, Isaak Heinson, who worked in a factory. Dora gave birth to a son in 1940. But death haunted Elena’s family. Her younger sister died in 1939, and her stepfather in early 1941. ⁴³ The death of Dora’s second husband reveals another path that placed women in the position of single and, like Fivel Markelis’s mother, who lost her husband in 1937, left them as sole breadwinner.

Other Vitebsk Jews, by contrast, remembered their early years as less troubled by want. Vera German had a carefree childhood making paper dolls, wearing fancy homemade dresses, and dancing amidst the overstuffed furniture in the family’s living room. ⁴⁴ Such trappings held a stronger place in her recollections than the family’s religious observances. Like German, Dmitri Khvat, born 1928, grew up in a family of relative privilege. His father Girsh Khvat, a medical doctor, moved his family to Soviet Vitebsk in 1930 from Białystok to escape the antisemitism that restricted his career opportunities in the Second Polish Republic. Girsh obtained a position at Kalinina Hospital, while his wife, Etna, took care of the apartment on Petrovskaya Street. But their comparative affluence could not compensate for the endemic shortages of Soviet life. Girsh’s parents managed to send parcels from Białystok to help the family out. ⁴⁵

The diversity of Jewish family life in Vitebsk was also marked by language. The families of Fivel Markelis and Lev Fleish spoke Yiddish. By the turn of the twentieth century, some Jewish families acculturated linguistically by speaking Russian instead of Yiddish in the home. Each of Dmitri Khvat’s émigré parents knew several languages, but they wanted their children to learn Russian, not Yiddish, and speak it in the home. ⁴⁶ Indeed, Russian was the language spoken by many Jewish families in Vitebsk, including Vera German’s. Iosif Bogomol’nyi’s religiously observant family enjoyed the Yiddish theater on offer in the city even though the family generally spoke Russian at home. Iosif’s parents knew Yiddish fluently and his elder siblings were educated in the language; Iosif knew just enough to understand the productions. The Bogomol’nyi family’s linguistic reach is further measured by their attendance at shows put on at the Belarusian-language theater named after the writer Yakub Kolas. ⁴⁷

Russian and Belarusian were gaining on Yiddish as the primary language among the city’s Jews during the 1930s. In terms of numbers, 84.1 percent of Jews (by “nationality”) in the city declared Yiddish as their native tongue on the 1926 Soviet census; by 1939 that figure had dropped to 51 percent. ⁴⁸ This decline occurred despite strong Soviet support for the language at least through the early 1930s. Not even the influx of Yiddish-speaking shtetl Jews during the rapid industrialization of the Five-Year Plans halted this process. Several factors drove the wane of Yiddish. For young Jews, these developments were centered on the Soviet schoolroom.

The Soviet Schoolroom

Young Jews came face-to-face with Soviet policies in the schoolroom. Ethnic policies of korenizatsiia produced a multi-lingual school system that served as the primary means to indoctrinate the Soviet youth. The declaration of Belarusian, Russian, Yiddish, and Polish as official languages in Soviet Belarus augmented the task of korenizatsiia, since each ethnic group in the republic was assigned to schools in their own language. “Every child with a school in his mother-tongue” was the most important task of “Leninist nationalities politics,” declared the local newspaper Vitsebski praletarii in 1933. ⁴⁹ In that same year, a new director took the helm of the Jewish Pedagogical Tekhnikum in Vitebsk. Zalman Moishevich Babitski declared in an editorial in Vitsebski praletarii of the pedagogic necessity to impart polemical and political education. Educators needed to mobilize students in the effort to unmask class enemies. ⁵⁰

Despite the provision for schools in each of the republic’s official languages, Belarusian schools predominated. In mid-1935, Soviet Belarus had 891,986 students attending 7,020 schools. While 90.2 percent of pupils went to Belarusian-language schools, 221 Yiddish-language schools, 180 Russian-language schools, and 135 Polish-language schools also functioned in the Soviet republic. ⁵¹ Another report gave a slightly different total, noting 216 Yiddish-language schools in Belarus serving 32,738 students: 90 four-year elementary schools (4,413 students), 107 seven-year (“not-full”) middle schools (23,126 students), and 10 ten-year (“full”) high schools (5,099 students). ⁵² Such figures represented only a portion of the schools serving Jewish students. Although party rhetoric tried to “sell” the public on the advantages of the multi-lingual Soviet education system, enrollments at Yiddish schools declined over the course of the 1930s. At the start of the 1933–1934 academic year, for example, it had dropped by nearly 10 percent from the year before. ⁵³ Enrollment continued to fall in the ensuing years in both city and shtetl, leading some schools to terminate their lower-class levels. ⁵⁴

The decline occurred while the republic reassessed and reallocated its educations resources to focus initially on Belarusian-language education. Numerous documents from the Vitebsk Jewish Pedagogical Tekhnikum for the years 1932 through 1937 (when the institute was closed) reveal a gradual recession of resources. In addition, parents appear to have been a significant force in declining enrollments. Yiddish speakers were supposed to go to Yiddish-language schools; however, some Jewish parents like the Khvats wanted their children to use Russian at home to allow them entry in schools using that language. Russian, or even Belarusian, could bring tangible results through upward mobility in Soviet society. Yiddish literary scholar Elias Schulman observed the advancement of Russian in families during a visit to Slutsk during the summer of 1936. His uncles and cousins explained to Schulman that “if we speak to them in Yiddish, the children will be sent, by local school authorities, to Yiddish-language schools.” By using Russian in the home, Schulman’s relatives could claim that their native language was Russian: “There is more takhles [results] in a Russian than a Yiddish school, and it is more practical.” ⁵⁵ Despite the alleged equal opportunities available to minorities under korenizatsiia, Russian in particular carved the path to the best higher education, employment, and ultimate success.

The pressure to learn in a Slavic language prompted changes in the curriculum of the Vitebsk Jewish Pedagogical Tekhnikum. Despite its primary function as a Soviet Jewish institution, the Tekhnikum had served as a reluctant champion of the Belarusian language from its inception. Yiddish language and literature vied with like courses in Belarusian for classroom time. In 1932, the Natskamiciya (Nationalities Commission) in Minsk reminded the school director of the need for “Belarusianization in your institution.” ⁵⁶ Russian joined the language battle in 1933. Language study in Russian became mandatory at the Minsk Jewish Pedagogical Tekhnikum during the 1933–34 school year. ⁵⁷ An administrative order from 1935 in Vitebsk noted the “large percentage of ‘unsatisfactory’ [proficiency] in Russian and Belorussian language” among the entering students. ⁵⁸ Increasing Russian and Belorussian classroom time affected the Tekhnikum’s Yiddish studies, and curtailed instruction time in history, mathematics, and the sciences. ⁵⁹

Indeed, many Jewish parents recognized that Yiddish-language schools were inferior to their Russian- and Belarusian-language counterparts in mathematics and the sciences. ⁶⁰ This mattered because technical subjects were especially important for advancement during the rapid industrialization of the Five-Year Plans. Furthermore, the republic’s education system faced problems provisioning the multi-language education system. Importing educational materials from outside the Soviet Union was impossible, as these were “tainted” with capitalist and imperialist ideology. The deficit of teaching materials resulted not only from inadequate allocations of paper, but also the time needed to prepare new textbooks or translate Russian and Belarusian into Yiddish, a procedure repeated when the original author(s) fell from favor with the party. In Vitebsk, for example, Yiddish school number 23–24 reported it fell short in the number of necessary textbooks for the 1933–1934 academic year. ⁶¹ Added to all this was the expense of maintaining separate training institutes, teaching faculties, and school facilities with associated maintenance staff. These factors also prompted many Jewish parents to send their children to Belarusian- or Russian-language schools in Vitebsk. Dmitri Khvat attended the Russian-language School No. 27, where the director was Jewish. ⁶² Stepan Zavgorodnev was about two years ahead of Dmitri in the same school; he remembered being devoted to mathematics, but could not find Africa on a map. ⁶³

Others, however, attended Yiddish schools, including Fivel Markelis and Vera German, the latter despite the use of Russian by her family at home. Why this was so is not clear from her Shoah Foundation testimony; perhaps it was due to her father’s loyalty to party discipline, since he was a white-collar bureaucrat in an unspecified, and possibly party-related, office. This situation illustrates further complexities in German’s upbringing.

Even those who attended Yiddish schools did not learn much about Jewish traditions. The Belarusian Commissariat of Enlightenment, the republic’s school system administrator, surveilled schoolrooms and their curricula. Instructors could not freely acknowledge Jewish traditions unless reinterpreted according to the antireligion campaigns of the Bolsheviks. Fivel Markelis could recall no mention of Jewish holidays, although Vera German remembered learning something about Rosh Hashanah. ⁶⁴ Yet not all pedagogues agreed with purging Jewish history from school curricula. History instructor Kusiel Beravich Hadashevich of the Vitebsk Jewish Pedagogical Tekhnikum lamented in the pages of Minsk’s Yiddish newspaper Oktyabr about the lack of Jewish history in elementary schools. “A true empty place for us,” he wrote, due to “no programs, no textbooks.” ⁶⁵

Jewish Identity and the Great Terror

The last half of the 1930s were an era of surging political terror in the Soviet Union and a hallmark of Stalinism. Beginning in 1935 and 1936 with the show trials of expelled communist officials, the period later referred to as the “Great Terror” swept through the ranks of the Red Army, Communist Party, intelligentsia, bureaucracy, and industrial management sector. ⁶⁶ NKVD documents discovered in the early 1990s reveal the ever enlarging scope of the purges. The “mass operations” were conceived to eliminate perceived anti-Soviet and counterrevolutionary elements, including “kulaks,” former members of long-defunct opposition parties, religious leaders, former speculators (NEPmen), and other “social outcasts” as defined under Stalinist ideals. The Great Terror also encompassed purges of ethnic minorities residing in the Soviet borderlands, suspected because of alleged cross-border ties. Termed the “national operations,” these hit Poles, Germans, Latvians, Koreans, and others. And while Jews-by-nationality numbered among the purged in all categories, they were not specifically a named target in the national operations, likely to avoid the appearance of antisemitism. Instead, Jews swept up in the national operations, such as prominent Yiddish writers in Soviet Belarus, stood accused of ties with Polish, German, or other foreign elements.

Every Soviet citizen knew of someone targeted during the Great Terror of 1937–1938: a family member, a neighbor, a teacher, a competent supervisor or employee, a favorite writer. All would come to know in the years following the impact of losing untold and unknown thousands, such as the army officers who helped keep the nation secure from attack. Belarusian Jews also experienced the suppression of their “national” language. The Great Terror gave cover to the closing of Yiddish-language schools in Belarus, something that did not yet occur in Soviet Ukraine. The switch from Yiddish to Belarusian in schools rounded out the interethnic immersion experienced by some of the young Vitebsk Jews discussed here.

According to one list of political arrests in Vitebsk, likely far from complete, nearly 3,100 such cases occurred from the late 1920s through the early 1950s; 1,355 persons were executed. ⁶⁷ The greatest concentration of victims occurred during the years 1936 to 1938. About ten percent were Jews, meaning about half of their proportion within the city’s population. ⁶⁸ As noted, foreign contacts were often a factor that attracted suspicion of security officials, and even small infractions merited investigation. Fivel Markelis’s grandmother had a brother in America who sent her money and parcels to help the family through the Soviet shortages of the 1930s. Once she took some of the money to buy flour, and a neighbor in their communal dwelling denounced her. The police came and confiscated not only the flour, but all of the family’s valuables, including the kitchenware. No one was arrested, however. Later, when his grandmother came across one of her favorite cooking pots in a shop, she paid to get it back. ⁶⁹

Grandmother Rosental’s troubles seem minor compared to what happened to Stepan Zavgorodnev’s maternal uncle, Mikhail Yeines. He “loved all things political,” Zavgorodnev remembered, also recalling the heated discussions within the family over matters of Soviet policy. “Their attitude was pretty loyal,” he affirmed. But apprehension spread with the terror. The NKVD arrested first one neighbor in the middle of the night, then another. “A car comes,” Stepan recalled, “and everyone was listening attentively and wondering whether or not it would come for us.” At one point the Zavgorodnev family fled Vitebsk for Konstantinovka in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. All the same, NVKD agents found them there, and a search of Mikhail Yeines’s books revealed two or three that provoked his arrest. As Mikhail was taken away, one agent turned to the rest of the family and asked harshly, “‘And who are you?’ ‘We’re just visiting,’ one of the adults replied. ‘You must leave in 24 hours,’ the agent declared. I remember my grandmother escorted us,” Stepan remembered. “We were sitting in a train station. And she was whispering and praying all the time. We left. We were okay.” ⁷⁰ It would be years before the Zavgorodnev family knew the fate of Mikhail Yeines, who survived his eight-year prison sentence and returned after the war.

In the summer of 1938 at the height of the Great Terror, the party leadership in Minsk undertook the closure of the remaining Yiddish-language state schools. A decree dated July 3, 1938, by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus ordered their conversion to Belarusian-language institutions, with reorganization to be completed by September 1, 1938. The impetus for closure allegedly came from “the Jewish population, from parents and pupils in Jewish schools.” ⁷¹ Historians Viacheslav Selimenev and Arkadi Zeltser have shown that personal ambition served as a leading factor. The new First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Belarusian Communist Party, Panteleimon Ponomarenko, appointed on June 18, 1938, likely saw the closure of Yiddish schools as just the proactive measure he needed to prove his ruthlessness to Moscow. ⁷²

When Fivel Markelis returned for the fourth grade in September 1938, his Yiddish-language school had become a Belarusian-language institution. Two years later, the language of instruction changed to Russian, part of the increasing Russification of education occurring in the Soviet republics. ⁷³ Vera German had the same school experience—Yiddish to Belarusian to Russian. This broadened her contacts with non-Jews, since only Jews had attended her Yiddish-language school. Now she was surrounded by ethnic Russian and Belarusian students. ⁷⁴ While such mixing further immersed Jewish children in Slavic languages, it did little to build strong interethnic ties and may have even heightened awareness of difference. Iosif Bogomol’nyi only reached school age after the changeover occurred. Iosif’s class of approximately 20 students came from different ethnic backgrounds, and the children teased each other over the differences in their names. ⁷⁵

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its Aftermath

The war in Europe filtered down to influence identity constructions among young Jews in Soviet Vitebsk. After the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, secret clauses in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact led to the Soviet occupation and subsequent annexation of the eastern borderlands of the Second Polish Republic. Even before the Red Army entered Poland on September 17, refugees from western Poland began their trek east. As the Nazis imposed harsh measures against Jews in German-occupied Poland, refugee flows became a torrent. Of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who crossed the new German-Soviet border before the end of the year, a few thousand were permitted to cross the internal border formerly separating Poland from Soviet Belarus to settle in cities like Vitebsk. One figure from December 1939 placed the number of the registered refugees at 4,363 for the entire Vitebsk oblast. ⁷⁶

Most refugees from Poland crossed the internal border to fulfill education or labor commitments. While Soviet locals had lived twenty years under Bolshevism, they now had the opportunity to meet rare and intriguing representatives of life outside the Soviet Union, and vice versa. Neither population were completely unfamiliar with each other; after all, their parents had lived under Imperial Russian rule. Yet each carried distorted views of their counterparts, with reports of Soviet life infrequent in the Jewish press in Poland compared with tales built around capitalist repression in the Soviet press. One newly arrived observer was seventeen-year-old Alexander Dimant, a refugee from Warsaw who pursued training as a metalworker in Vitebsk. When the school’s director, a man named Rabkin, invited his Jewish refugee students to a Passover Seder, Dimant observed that it was “not [a] hundred percent like in our case.” Religious traditions had deteriorated under Bolshevism, Dimant observed. ⁷⁷

Some Vitebsk natives took refugees into their homes. Vera German’s parents sheltered a refugee family in a spare room of their apartment. The mother and father, caring for a daughter and an infant son, also received financial support from Vera’s parents. ⁷⁸ For some, the refugees’ arrival reshaped their world view and personal sense of identity. Eight-year-old Raisa Gendelev from Leningrad spent the summers of 1940 and 1941 with her paternal grandparents in Vitebsk. “Vitebsk started to be crowded with some strange people,” Raisa remembered decades later, “and when I started to ask my grandparents, they told me [these were] Polish people who are running from Germany.” ⁷⁹ The refugees, many of whom were Jews, ⁸⁰ raised her awareness of her co-religionists living outside the Soviet Union, noting that many held values and attitudes quite different compared to her secular parents or even her religious grandparents. It also alerted her to dangers outside of the Soviet Union. “At the age of eight, I did recognize that something is not right in the world,” she told an interviewer decades later, “and it can be dangerous.” ⁸¹

Chance and Survival

The German invasion on 22 June, 1941 shattered this newly changing world. Some families, like Vera German’s, tried to flee Vitebsk in the period leading up to the Wehrmacht’s capture of the city on 11 July. Many became separated in the chaos. Most were unable to outpace the invading forces and fell under German occupation further east. In Vitebsk, Wehrmacht occupation forces decreed the formation of a ghetto, eventually sited on a square block of bombed-out ruins, wholly inadequate shelter for the approximately 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children confined there. As summer turned into autumn, at least half the ghetto population died of exposure, malnutrition, or disease before the “final liquidation” in October 1941.

To find adequate nourishment, some young Jews slipped out of the ghetto to forage or beg in the city. Fivel Markelis polished German soldiers’ boots at the train station in exchange for food. With such activity, Markelis began to modify his identity. After taking off the yellow patches that Jews were required to wear on their outer clothing, he squeezed through the perimeter fence to reach the city outside the ghetto. ⁸² It was a small step, made from desperation for sustenance to keep himself, his mother, and grandmother alive another day. Yet it demonstrated to him that he had to conceal his Jewish identity if he wanted to stay alive, and that he was able to pass as a non-Jew.

Over the course of a few days in early October 1941 a detachment of the Einsatzgruppen shot the remaining Vitebsk Jews in the Ilovsky ravine flanking the Vitba River east of the city. Markelis survived because his mother pushed him behind her an instant before the shooting began, blocking the hail of bullets. After darkness fell, he crawled out from the mass grave covered in blood but uninjured. He washed himself in the Vitba and found some discarded clothes in a nearby pile. Markelis sought shelter at the house of one of his “aunts,” perhaps a Russian or Belarusian neighbor, but she was only willing to hide him for a few days. During his flight from Vitebsk and over the next several weeks, he developed the persona of Valery Domnin; Markelis never explained how he came to adopt this name. He inhabited the role so effectively that he maintained the cover at his arrest late in 1941 by the German Order Police 400 kilometers to the southeast of Vitebsk, and for years afterwards confined to a series of German POW and concentration camps. To the Germans and to nearly all of his fellow prisoners, he was a Belarusian. He spoke Belarusian without any trace of an accent. He knew Belarusian songs and customs.

Markelis was not alone in skillfully harnessing internalized knowledge and skills to adjust his projected identity. Some took on another persona for only a few days or weeks while others did so for years. One of these was Lev Fleish, who escaped the Vitebsk ghetto and was urged to flee by an ethnic Russian friend. “You don’t look like a Jew,” his friend declared. “Go away from here if you want to be alive.” Lev developed the identity of an ethnic Tatar named Leonid. He elaborated this cover story, which he based on an acquaintance from his school days, to say that Leonid had been orphaned since the age of four, and therefore, Leonid knew few Tatar words or customs. Being Tatar would also explain why he was circumcised. Later, Lev/Leonid was arrested in German-occupied Ukraine and deported to Germany as an Ostarbeiter, a foreign forced laborer. Like Fivel Markelis, he fooled the Germans until his liberation by the Red Army. ⁸³ Elena Choukmazova followed a similar path as Lev Fleish. In her case, she posed as a Russian after escaping from the Smolensk ghetto. Elena also was caught in a German roundup and deported to Germany to become an Ostarbeiter. ⁸⁴ Elizaveta Gurevich, who went by her husband’s last name Pototskaia, fell under Romanian occupation in Odessa. Her marriage to an ethnic Russian could not protect her, since the Germans typically ignored the “protection” that marriage to an “Aryan” provided in Central and Western Europe. Therefore, Elizaveta obtained false papers to replace the Soviet passport documenting her Jewish heritage. ⁸⁵

A significant variable of these survival experiences was the tacit agreement by actual Belarusians, Ukrainians, or Russians to keep secret the identities of persons they suspected to be Jews. The individuals discussed here all mention fleeting incidents where fellow Soviet citizens aided their subterfuge. Yet much of this assistance was unspoken, as demonstrated by Stepan Zavgorodnev’s account. He also fled the Vitebsk ghetto. His wanderings took him to central Ukraine, where a Red Army unit liberated him during the winter offensive in January 1942. During the interval, however, his interactions with other Soviet citizens were confined to a need-to-know basis. “They didn’t ask—I didn’t tell,” he later remembered of those who aided him. ⁸⁶

The other young Jews cited above experienced very brief episodes passing as Slavs or never faced an opportunity to do so. Among the latter were Roza Sandler and Raisa Gendelev, who fled Vitebsk with their respective families and were caught by the Germans in Usviaty, Russia, seventy-five kilometers to the northeast. They endured several months of hunger and disease in the Usviaty ghetto until the Red Army liberated them in January 1942. Both girls spent the rest of the war with surviving family members in evacuation far behind the front lines. ⁸⁷ The Soviets liberated the Khvat family as well in January 1942. They had been held in the Il’ino ghetto fifty kilometers farther east from Usviaty. ⁸⁸ For others, their moments of passing as Slavs were transitory. Iosif Bogolmol’nyi tried, unsuccessfully, to pass as a Russian or Belarusian before an unknown person gave away his cover. He, too, was confined to the Il’ino ghetto. ⁸⁹ Vera German and her mother Leya were caught by the German advance in Liozno, 40 kilometers east of Vitebsk. They escaped during the Liozno ghetto liquidation in February 1942 and fled east, heading toward the front lines. During their journey, the Russian-speaking pair appealed to peasants for food in the name of Christian charity. They successfully crossed the front lines and were evacuated to Kazakhstan. Vera’s father, who had been recruited after the invasion for labor gang duties to support Red Army operations, later joined his wife and daughter. ⁹⁰

Impersonation during the war left unusual imprints on some survivors of genocide. Liberated by the Red Army at Königsberg, Fivel Markelis was deported to Tula in western Russia, where he was put into a punishment battalion in a coal mine awaiting review of his case. The NKGB officer who finally interviewed him didn’t believe he was a Jew. “Why are you still alive?” he was asked suspiciously. It was this officer who redubbed Fivel with the familiia (family name) “Markelis-Domnin,” fusing his prewar and wartime identities but capped with a new imia (first name), “Efim.” There was no such Jewish name as “Fivel,” the officer told him. As Efim Davidovich Markelis-Domnin, he was released in 1947. He returned to Vitebsk to find the city still in ruins. Following service in the peacetime Red Army, Fivel/Efim married and settled in Tallinn, Estonia. ⁹¹

Initially, Lev Fleish experienced less severe persecution after liberation. He was examined by an NKGB commission in Soviet-occupied Cottbus, Germany following his liberation and subsequently was drafted into the Red Army. Fleish was discharged late in 1946, whereupon he returned to Vitebsk as well. Former forced laborers for the Germans like Lev had trouble finding work as authorities often suspected them of treason. “I had a ‘dirty’ biography,’” he recalled. Only after Stalin’s death did his situation improve somewhat. ⁹²

Conclusion

In Stalinist Vitebsk of the 1930s, young Jews grew up with a complex and often fluid Jewish identity. Communist Party policies had suppressed most elements of communal Jewish life. Many young Vitebsk Jews were born into families with varying degrees of religious observance, but even among observant families this became solely a domestic matter. Perhaps significant is how some from families with a measure of religious observance, like Stepan Zavgorodnev or Vera German, would grow up to be relatively distant from their spiritual heritage. The war, the Holocaust, and postwar Soviet life accelerated this trajectory of disengagement. Although difficult to ascertain from fragmentary memories voiced decades later, it would seem from their lack of engagement with religious life during the 1930s that this process began before the war. While they frequently kept company with other Jews, both in communal housing and in public, they also interacted with Belarusians, Ukrainians, or Russians on a regular basis. They acquired firsthand knowledge of the language and customs of their Slavic neighbors and classmates. These contacts intensified as some of the children grew up as the child of a “mixed” marriage.

Many, but not all, Jewish children in Vitebsk attended Yiddish-language schools. Some parents, however, looked to send them instead to a Russian- or Belarusian-language school as a means to expand their opportunities. By the end of the decade, the Yiddish schools in Soviet Belarus no longer existed. Although Yiddish cultural life in the republic continued up to the German invasion in 1941, it had been dealt a mortal blow. Belarusian- and Russian-language education and culture filled the vacuum.

The German invasion in June 1941 stunned ordinary Soviet citizens, but even worse was the Red Army’s failure to stem the Wehrmacht’s advance. After Vitebsk fell, Jews trapped in the city faced escalating stages of persecution leading to their annihilation. To survive meant to flee and abandon their Jewish identity, even if briefly. Luck was a crucial factor in the survival of any Jew during the Holocaust. For Soviet Jews, in the controlled chaos of German occupation zones, random chance often created opportunities to hide in the open by posing as a Slav. Another significant variable of any survival experience was the tacit agreement by actual Belarusians, Ukrainians, or Russians to keep secret the identities of persons they suspected to be Jews. Yet underlying the actions of Jews raised in the western borderlands of the Soviet Union was how the boundaries of ethnic uniqueness became increasingly blurred during the 1930s. Throughout their young lives, they were exposed daily to the language and culture of their neighbors. During the Holocaust, this cohort of Soviet Jews responded the best way they knew how by harnessing their prewar acculturation and immersing themselves in another identity.