Chapter 4
At the end of August 1920, Bobruisk was occupied by a detachment of Polish cavalry under the command of General Galer. This happened after the unsuccessful attack of the Red Army on Warsaw. The Soviet government hoped to return Poland, which had declared its independence, to Russia, but the Polish army, led by Marshal Piłsudski, not only repulsed the onslaught but went on a counteroffensive and occupied parts of Ukraine and Belarus.
On the eve of the Poles’ entry into Bobruisk, Kashinsky secretly met with Pinya Zolotin, Elena Malysheva, and Joseph and informed them that the newly created underground Party committee had appointed them to lead the city Komsomol cell and would now direct their actions during the Belopolsk occupation. Zolotin, who was the oldest of the three, graduated from a gymnasium and knew Polish, was appointed the head of the three. Joseph was his deputy.
This assignment thrilled him deeply. Joseph was overwhelmed with gratitude and pride for the high trust placed in him by his senior Communist comrades. Danger? Joseph understood that it was inevitable, but at that moment he regarded it aloofly and lightly; it did not frighten him, but only stirred up his youthful fighting spirit and strengthened his enthusiastic readiness to the selfless fight for Soviet power, for which he was willing to sacrifice his life.
Looking at Pinya and Elena, Joseph sensed that they, too, were deeply moved by what they had heard. They were understandable, close, and dear to him as if they were his brother and sister. Pinya was a tall, thin brunette with a radiant look in his big brown eyes and a kind smile on his welcoming, handsome face. Always attentive and benevolent, looking for logic in events and actions, and in general a smart guy — kind, resolute, brave. Elena was a short, quiet girl with a resolute expression on her almost childlike face, a serious look in her gray eyes, and smoothly combed, neatly brushed blond hair. She had a firm, purposeful character, and always carried any task to completion, no matter how complicated and difficult it was.
These three young, honest and capable fellows, like thousands of others like them, could be engaged in exclusively good, interesting-to-them human affairs had they been born in a peaceful, enlightened, and free country. But by the will of fate, they were destined to be born and live in the Jewish “Pale of Settlement” of backward and dark Russia; to know poverty, humiliation, and powerlessness from childhood. That is why their mind, their will, all their aspirations, and hopes were bound to the idea of a world proletarian revolution, which they were convinced would bring justice, equality, fraternity, and prosperity to all mankind. For the sake of fanatical devotion to this fabulous dream, they were willing to sacrifice even their own young lives!
Today, almost a century later, one can only marvel at how monstrously their consciousness was distorted if they were ready to throw their only life, incomparable to anything, on the beautiful planet Earth like a log into the fire of political passion, around which the overbearing, cruel and insolent politicians warm their hands. But the young, ardent, naive Komsomol members of that time did not doubt for a second: giving one’s life for the sake of an idea was a natural act and a worthy example to follow. Such was the historical time, and they were its best representatives.
The arrival of the Poles also brought back all of the old rules that had been abolished by the Soviets. The working people, who had had time to appreciate the different conditions of life under the Soviets, grumbled discontentedly, hoping for their imminent return. Peasants at the market whispered that partisans appeared in the surrounding forests, threatening soon to show the Poles who was the master of the Belarussian land. The Polish political police distributed an announcement in which the population was warned that not only the perpetrators but also their families would be shot for attacking Polish soldiers, sabotaging them, and harboring partisans and communists; and that those who would assist the authorities, on the other hand, would be rewarded.
Time passed, but for some reason, the Komsomol members did not receive instructions from the underground headquarters. They decided that they had to act for themselves. By hand, they wrote several dozen leaflets with an appeal not to cooperate with the occupiers and to remain loyal to Soviet power, which would surely return soon.
But how to distribute these flyers? If they were put on the walls and fences at night, in the morning the police would tear them down and people wouldn’t find anything out. Then they came up with a more dangerous and daring way. Joseph ordered a batch of bagels from a baker he knew. Dressed warmly, Elena began selling the ruddy, fresh bagels in a busy place. Pinya and Joseph strolled nearby, and when they met a local man they knew well, they warned him, gave him the password, and directed him to Elena. When she heard the password, she handed out a flier along with the bagels, with a request to pass it on to another person. Within a few hours, all the flyers had been distributed.
But a few of them ended up in the hands of the police, and from them, they came to general Galer. Seeing the primitive handwritten papers, the general decided that it was the work of teenagers. He summoned a rabbi, a priest, school principals, and several well-known citizens of the city and ordered that discussions be carried out to reason with the youth and at the same time to warn them of possible repressive measures.
The Komsomol members soon received a dispatch from the underground committee approving their initiative and giving them the address where a manual printing press was hidden, with the help of which they were to continue producing leaflets. But the most important task they were charged with was to obtain information about the Polish command’s plans and pass it on to the partisans. In discussing it, the group decided that to carry it out, as soon as the right opportunity presented itself, it was necessary to get to know the Polish soldiers better. And the opportunity was not long in coming.
One morning, while buying milk at the market, Pinya was raided. Polish soldiers, after checking his papers, led him to a stable with more than a dozen horses and ordered him to clean the place. Pinya, annoyed because his wife was worried, waiting for his return from the market, loudly objected in Polish to the supervising soldier. Suddenly the soldier, with his carbine behind his back, also picked up the shovel and began to help Pinуa shovel out the manure and bedding.
They got to know each other. Janek – that was the soldier’s name – turned out to be a locksmith from Bialystok, a nonpartisan supporter of the Communists. He served as a servant for one of the staff officers and often bought food for him at the local market. There Janek began to meet Pinуа, they became friends, and soon Janek agreed to report anything important that he could hear.
It was a good fortune: Janek could often learn from officers’ conversations about the upcoming actions of the Polish units while performing his daily duties. Having set up and mastered a printing press, the Komsomol members produced several hundred leaflets calling on Polish soldiers to turn their weapons against their oppressors: the bourgeoisie, the officers, and thus to bring the world proletarian revolution closer.
With Janek’s help, some of the leaflets ended up in the soldiers’ barracks and even in the corridor of the headquarters. General Galer, swearing angrily and banging his fist furiously on the table, demanded that the gendarmerie and counterintelligence find and destroy the underground printing office and arrest all those who had anything to do with it.
It was decided to conduct a big night raid in the city. On the eve of the raid, Janek managed to warn Pinya about it. The printing press, which was usually moved from one place to another just in case, for security reasons, that day was in the basement of the house where Elena and her aunt lived. It was no longer possible to hide it. Then Elena suggested a bold and witty way out. The machine was disassembled, its parts were stuffed with junk and garbage in various places in the basement, and the font was stuffed under the mattress of the bed where Elena was lying, pretending to be sick. A flier was hung on the door of the room with the words, “Beware! Contagious! Typhus!”
The ruse worked without fail. When the gendarmes began knocking, demanding that the door be opened, Elena’s aunt came out and tearfully begged them to take the typhoid patient from her home to the hospital, as she was very afraid for her children. The gendarmes preferred to quickly go away, under the pretext that they had no time for the sick.
However, the raid did not end without tragic consequences. In a barn near the house of the Kagan family, a wounded partisan from Levkov’s detachment, the Communist Handel, a distant relative of the Kagans, was hiding. Some snitch from the locals reported him.
As the officer and soldiers burst into the barn, Handel opened fire on them with a revolver. The officer and a soldier died on the spot, and two other soldiers were wounded. The gendarmes first set fire to the barn where Handel still was, and then the Kagans’ house. They took the whole family of five people, including the elderly mother and two children, Fanya, 5 years old, and three-year-old Liza, to the slaughter-house and brutally murdered them.
Several people were arrested, and among them was Galperin, a Komsomol member. He was a physically and spiritually weak young man who, after being beaten during interrogations, agreed to become a police agent. He was given the opportunity to escape together with the other arrested, so no one from his acquaintances suspected that he had become a provocateur.
After a while, Pinya was given the assignment of securing a meeting between one of the underground leaders and the local railroad workers. Pinya, Elena, and Joseph examined several possible locations and decided that the safest of them would be the homestead literally next door to the defensive. Here, in a large house, lived a lawyer, an active supporter of Soviet power, from whom a Polish gendarme officer rented an apartment. And in the large garden behind the house, there was a cellar, where stocks of vegetables, pickles, and jams were usually kept. The cellar was large, accommodating ten people easily, and it was easy to get to the back door without being seen. The landlord gave Pinya the key to the cellar and promised to have a noisy party with the guest and his friends to draw attention away and to send his son in case of danger.
At the scheduled time, reliable Komsomol members (Galperin was one of them) met the right people at the agreed-upon places and escorted them to the cellar. Joseph was assigned to meet the leader. It turned out to be Kashinsky, who had arrived in town to coordinate the details of the forthcoming attack on the railroad station. Joseph brought Kashinsky to the meeting place and then learned that one of the important participants in the meeting was missing. He was to have been met in a nearby street. Perhaps he did not show up for some reason. Joseph headed there without delay.
At the agreed-upon place he saw two people talking peacefully, just the people he wanted to find. It turned out that they had been followed by a spy, who was sitting on a bench not far away and was looking in their direction from behind a newspaper. The spy had to be gotten rid of somehow.
People were passing by with brooms and bags, on their way to the bathhouse on the same street. It dawned on Joseph, “Let’s all go to the bathhouse together!” he suggested to his comrades. They bought tickets, went into the anteroom, and began to slowly undress. Soon the spy appeared here, too. He pretended to wait for the locker to become free while he watched all three of them undress and enter the soap room. After a few minutes the spy left, the boys got dressed, came out, and, making sure there was no “tail” behind them, headed for the cellar.
The meeting passed smoothly, and the participants began to leave one by one. And no one noticed how Galperin secretly followed Kashinsky.
Before dawn, a detachment of gendarmes surrounded the house of the seriously ill Communist Bobrova, where Kashinsky and his escort Petrov had spent the night. All three were arrested and escorted to prison.
The news of Kashinsky’s arrest shocked Joseph. The man had been an old friend, a mentor, an example in everything. Pinya was also very worried. He was heated, coming up with various options for the release of his arrested comrades.
First of all, they decided to report what had happened to the partisan detachment in the hope that the partisans would attack the prison. Janek, at Pinуа’s request, told Kashinsky through a friend who served in the prison guard that the guerrillas knew of their arrest and would do everything possible to free them. Kashinsky’s answer struck everyone like a bolt of lightning in a clear blue sky. Galperin, who was considered a reliable comrade and a staunch Komsomol member, turned out to be a provocateur. At the confrontations, he identified all the arrested and told in detail everything he knew about each member.
Kashinsky insisted that the Komsomol activists, especially the leaders of the movement, immediately leave the city, hide in villages not occupied by the Poles, or go to the partisans. However, the Komsomol members decided to risk staying in the city for a few more days, believing that they could be useful in freeing Kashinsky and his comrades.
Now Pinya, Elena, and Joseph were hiding in the basement of the orphanage, jokingly calling themselves the real underground. Joseph knew the headmistress and educator from childhood and trusted them completely. They told them the news and provided them with food and water.
A few days later it became known that all three Communists had been shot by order of the court-martial.
After the liberation of Bobruisk from the Belarusian Poles, a farmer who happened to witness this execution said that he saw two men under escort walking from the road to a shallow ravine in the morning fog, supporting a woman under their arms, and singing the Internationale. Standing at the precipice, Kashinsky gathered his strength and shouted to the soldiers that they were being tricked into killing workers like them who were fighting for a better life for all peoples. It was noticeable that the carbines in the soldiers’ hands trembled, and when they fired at the officer’s command, not a single bullet hit its target. Then the officer, trembling with anger and agitation, shot the Communists himself at point-blank range with his pistol…
The printing press was in the underground with the Komsomol members. When they found out that Kashinsky and his comrades were dead, they issued a batch of leaflets threatening revenge on the executioners and Galer himself, urging the people to armed resistance and active assistance to the partisans. At great risk, they managed to distribute these flyers around the city.
A new wave of raids and arrests followed. Gendarmes and soldiers searched house after house, from attics to basements, and at any moment could rush into the orphanage. Pinya ordered Joseph and Elena to take a boat across the Berezina River in the evening and make their way to the partisans in the forest. He himself decided to leave with his wife and child. But there was an ambush waiting for him at home, and it was not the first day of them being there. Pinya was captured, brutally beaten in front of his wife and child, and then taken to a prison cell where the previously arrested Komsomol members Blumenthal and Goldstein were already in custody.
The reprisal was not long in coming. Two days later, in the warden’s office, a closed military field court presided over by general Galer handed down the death sentence on all three Komsomol members in a quarter of an hour.
Before his death, Pinya wrote a note to his wife, Dweira, which Janek passed on to her after Pinya’s death. Janek said that Pinya had bravely and steadfastly behaved to the very end. His last words were, “I’m dying for the world revolution!”
Joseph and Elena managed to get to a partisan detachment, they participated in combat operations and together with the Red Army liberated Belarus. The period of the Belarusian Poles’ occupation of the Belarusian lands ended in March 1921, after the conclusion of the Soviet-Polish peace treaty.
When Joseph returned to Bobruisk, he visited Dweira, and she showed him Pinуа’s note. On a rough scrap of gray paper was scrawled in crooked letters: “Sweet, dear Dweira! I die honestly for the idea of socialism, and you should raise our child well. When the girl grows up, tell her that her father was a victim of the capitalist system. Calm mother down, and give my regards to all my friends. I die in peace, and you live long and be well! Pinya Zolotin.”
Rereading this message, full of the tragic last minutes of Pinуа’s life, Joseph was deeply and inconsolably moved by the death of his friend and at the same time proud and full of admiration for his indomitable strength of spirit and unwavering devotion to the cause of the revolution. He understood and felt close to the motives of Pinуа, a selfless fighter for the liberation of the Jewish people from oppression, lawlessness, and for the desire for the creation of a just socialist state in Russia, in which the Jews, along with other peoples, would get their rightful share. A few years later, in memory of his friend, Joseph wrote a short story for children, “Komsomolets Pinka”. It was published in Minsk in 1935.
Joshka Gershon (center second row) with a group of Komsomol members. Bobruisk, 1919.
These young men and women sincerely believed that as soldiers of the revolution they were fighting for Soviet power in order to build a society of freedom, equality, and fraternity for all people. Many of them were later bitterly disappointed in these naïve hopes.