Mozart

The wheels gently touched the runway, and the plane came to a stop. I saw a cluster of airport buildings in the distance. And the big sign “Vienna”. I was in Austria. I was free.

The plane slowly approached the gate, and I noticed a number of men in unfamiliar military uniform with submachine guns over their shoulders. It was strange and unsettling – I had never seen guns in real life before.

The passengers that traveled with me on this flight from Moscow slowly left the plane. I was the last one. I couldn’t move. All three hours that we were in the air I felt numb. I couldn’t talk. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth I would start screaming.

In the painful slideshow of my mind images repeated: the face of my father ashen with grief, the small crowd of 20 or 30 brave friends and relatives who came to the airport to say goodbye to me forever, risking harassment, or worse, by KGB agents. Last hugs and kisses, last words of farewell, last glances, last tears… We knew we would never see each other again.

And now I was in Vienna.

I exited the plane and walked to passport control. I had no passport. I had no other documents. The Soviet authorities only allowed me to carry a single piece of paper stating that I was a refugee without any citizenship.

But the Austrian border guards were familiar with the situation. I was not the first to arrive like that. They let me in.

I had a vague plan of what to do next. I had to find a public phone to call HIAS (Hebrew International Aid Society) – a U.S.-based charity organization that helps refugees from all over the world (months later, when I finally arrived to New York, I was brought to the HIAS office in Union Square in Manhattan, and immediately felt like I was in the halls of the United Nations: there were refugees from Afghanistan, South East Asia, Africa, Central America, whole families, with children and elders, speaking dozens of languages, – all being welcomed and helped to start their lives in this “Land of the Free”).

I found a public phone in a corner of the arrival area and dialed “0”. An operator answered in German. “Could I please place a collect call to…” and in my broken English I gave her the number of the HIAS office in Vienna. I memorized that number back in Moscow, like all other important numbers, since I was forbidden by the Soviet authorities to bring with me any notes, notebooks or any other handwritten, typed or printed material. After a short pause a male voice answered: “HIAS”. “I am a refugee from the Soviet Union, just arrived in Vienna, could I meet with you?” “Please take a taxi to this address…We will meet you downstairs and will pay for the taxi”.

So, they knew that I had no money, even for a phone call, not to mention a taxi.

I found a taxi and gave the driver the address. I don’t remember how we got there, but soon I found myself in a front of a modest building on a quiet street, and a burly middle-aged man, who was waiting for my arrival, paid for my taxi ride. He led me upstairs to the office. After 2-3 hours of questioning me about my whole life, family, work, friends, the same man took me to a small apartment, not far from the city center, where I was to stay while waiting for the next transport to the refugee processing center in Rome, Italy.

He gave me a few Austrian schillings – the equivalent of $3 US, – and told me that tomorrow he would come again to give me more money and to talk about next steps.

I found myself in a small one-bedroom apartment with two other refugee families with children. I was to sleep on a cot in the kitchen. Since I was alone with very few possessions – just my old mountaineering backpack with a few items of clothing, and my beat-up guitar (it was allowed to leave the Soviet Union with me by some miracle), I didn’t mind at all. I dropped my stuff in a corner of the kitchen and went outside. I couldn’t wait to meet Vienna, the beautiful imperial city, the first city of my freedom.

Around the corner I saw a small store with some sausages in the window display. I stopped in a front of that window completely shell shocked. I had never seen anything like that in my life. I could not even imagine that so many beautiful sausages, ham hocks and other heavenly delicacies could exist in the world. I hadn’t eaten since the night before, but decided not to spend my few schillings on food, and rather save them for some museum or theater tickets, or to see Vienna’s famous Opera, or beautiful palaces and cathedrals – after all, finally this was my chance. I didn’t mind being hungry.

I tore myself away from that “meat heaven”, and kept walking. I didn’t have a map of Vienna, but intuitively knew where the center of the city was, and walked toward it.

Soon I came to a large square in a front of a beautiful cathedral. I had seen very little of Gothic architecture, just some in Riga and Tallinn in the Soviet Baltic republics. The magnificent grandeur of this cathedral in Vienna was beyond anything I had seen before. And suddenly I heard music. I looked around. It was coming from the opposite side of the square. I started walking toward the mesmerizing sound, and then saw where it was coming from.

In the corner of the square two teenaged girls were playing Mozart. Violin and cello. I was totally transfixed. I had never seen street musicians – as they were prohibited in the Soviet Union. And now these two girls. And Mozart.

The beautiful sound of eternal music was filling the air. It was a balmy Sunday evening. People were strolling, sitting in outdoor cafés, playing with children. And these girls were playing Mozart. And I was standing and listening, my heart filled with music, joy and tears.

I don’t know how much time passed. I wanted it never to end. All that terrible sadness, all that grief that I felt – were washed away by these girls with their Mozart. Suddenly I could glimpse through an open door into my new life. A life where people can play Mozart in the streets.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my few schillings. I placed them gently into the violin case in the front of the girls. The one with violin smiled to me and said “Danke”. It made me so happy. Soon they stopped playing and packed their instruments. It was dark and late.

I waved to them, turned around and started walking toward my kitchen.

My heart was singing, my steps were light. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was dancing. Free, I was dancing on the streets of Vienna to the music of Mozart.

Farewell To My Uncle.

July 1998

The tiny chapel was cool and damp.  It was a gentle sunny day outside, but inside the chapel the air was dark and sad.

There were several marble boards on the walls, with the columns of names and the dates.  The dates starting from mid 1800s and ending in the late 1930s.

I was looking at these long lists of the Jewish names, trying to imagine what all these Leventhals, Rosenblums, Loebs were doing in Heidelberg, Germany.  Did they have good lives?  Did they consider themselves Germans?  Did they love their enlightened country and their beautiful quiet Heidelberg?  And the ones at the end of the list – did they see the Kristallnacht and everything after that coming?

And now my uncle was among them, dead, in Heidelberg.

The closed casket was draped in a black shroud.  I thought it was big, way too big for my uncle.  I imagined his body – small, cold, not needed anymore, quietly laying inside of that dark space.

He was a remarkable man, my Uncle Boris.  One of the most intelligent, bright, wise and caring human beings I have known in my life.  He was born in the small shtettle of Kupel, Ukraine. The family soon moved to Poltava – a district capital in the Eastern Ukraine.  That move saved their lives few years later.  All our relatives, who stayed in Kupel, were exterminated by the Germans.  But Poltava was further East, and my family had a chance to escape.

In 1940, a year before the war, Uncle Boris enrolled into the Faculty of Mathematics at Leningrad State University.  But the war erupted, and in 1941 he went to fight the German invaders.  He was wounded twice, the second time badly, and in 1943, after several months in a hospital, he was discharged from the Red Army.

He met his future wife Etya (Ethel) in 1941 in Poltava, a couple of weeks after the war broke out.  One day there was a knock on a door of my grandparents’ apartment.  My grandfather opened the door.  A girl and a boy with a small suitcase, covered in dust and mud, were standing in front of him.  “We are looking for Moishe and Rachel Rudyak.  We are from Basalia, our parents put us on a last train leaving Basalia before the Germans came.  They told us to go to Poltava and to find Rudyak family there.  You never met them, but they’ve heard that you were very nice people and would help us.”  And that’s how 18 year old Etya and 12 year old Grisha from a little Jewish village of Basalia instantly became the members of the family.  Moishe and Rachel, my grandparents, had four children: my mother, 19, the oldest, and my three uncles, the youngest one 8 years old.  Etya and Grisha never saw their own parents again.

Uncle Boris instantly fell in love with beautiful tall Etya with heavy black braids and deep and mysterious dark eyes…

Aunt Etya, now small and hunched, crushed by grief, seated next to the coffin, her forehead pressed against it.  Black scarf on her head.  A few thin gray hair coming loose.  The eyes dry and absent…

They had known each other for only a couple of days.  Then he went to the front lines.  She went with the rest of my family East, to Uzbekistan, escaping from the fast advancing Germans.

She wrote him letters to the front.  Back came folded triangles of paper with a stamp: “military field postal service” – his love letters.

They met again in the end of 1943.  He was discharged from the hospital, and after weeks of hopping trains, made his way to the town of Shahrizyabs, in Uzbekistan, where she was staying with my family.  He had a cane, limping, still learning to walk, recovering from his wounds.

The war was further and further away – the Germans were retreating .  In September of 1944 Poltava was liberated.  In late 1944 my family returned home. Uncle Boris was appointed Director of the Poltava District Museum of History.  And there was a lot of history there!  From the archeological artifacts of ancient Scythians and the Great Battle of Poltava of 1709, when Peter I “The Great” destroyed the army of Swedish King-Warrior Charles XII “The Great”, ending the Swedish Empire in Northern and Eastern Europe – to the latest history of the World War II.

The war was still roaring.  Poltava was being bombed by the Luftwaffe.  But life was slowly coming back to normal.  My uncle’s museum was thriving and he was growing more and more fascinated with history.

In 1945, when the war was over at last, he went to study history at the Moscow State University.  Etya went to Moscow with him and became a medical student and later a doctor.  They got married in 1946, and in 1948 my cousin Yuliy, the oldest of their 2 sons, was born.

They lived in a small one room place with no running water and a wood stove for heating.  After Uncle Boris graduated from the university, he was appointed Director of the Museum of M. I. Kalinin in Moscow (Kalinin was the first Chairman of the Supreme Soviet – the puppet legislative body in the Soviet system).

I suspect that then he developed the interest in the International Labor Movement, which eventually brought him to Karl Marx.

From the early 60’s he was completely emerged in the life of Karl Marx.  Soon he was appointed Deputy Director of the Museum of Marx and Engels.  That appointment made him eligible for some significant perks in the complicated system of soviet hierarchy.  He fast became one of the leading world experts in the life of Karl Marx.  He wrote several books and started to travel abroad.  England, France, Holland, Germany – wherever his expertise was needed by the Soviet authorities.  He was the only one I personally knew at that time who traveled outside of the Soviet Union.

He came back from his trips with carefully guarded stories.  He always knew how much he could tell without jeopardizing himself and people around him. Although Stalin’s era of mass purges was long over and people were not being arrested and thrown into jail for saying the wrong things anymore, my uncle was always very cautious.  His international fame grew.  His books were translated to other languages.

I often visited him in his beautiful apartment in one of the Moscow new high rises, a so called “central committee building”.  There were a lot of those around the city for the big and small “apparatchics”.

We were seating in his kitchen or, when the weather was nice, on one of his two balconies with a splendid view of the city.  We were drinking tea and discussing all kind of things – literature, history, music, art, philosophy.  I loved to talk with him.  He always had something new and interesting to tell me.  He knew everything about everything.   We called him “a walking encyclopedia”. We both cherished those delightful evenings.  Then one day it all came to an end.

After a long and painful struggle, I decided to openly announce my decision to get out of the Soviet Union.

My family knew that I was determined to do it sooner or later.  They had a hope that it would never come true.  But it did.

In the end of 1978 I called a family meeting to announce that I was ready to do it.  The meeting was in Uncle Boris’s apartment in Moscow.  My mother passed away a few months before.  Uncle Boris was presiding over our small group: my grandfather Moisha, my father, my three uncles and myself.

I told them that I had everything in place and I was going to start my struggle in the next couple of months.  I knew that by doing so I put all my uncles in jeopardy.  Having the nephew who was “an enemy of the state” would automatically put their loyalty in question.  And that could cost them careers, jobs and could potentially ruin their lives.

I offered, in order to prevent anything like that from happening, to seize all direct contacts and communications with them.  Deep in my heart I had a hope that they would say “no” to my offer.  But I knew that it was the right thing to do.

They all agreed.  I saw pain in their faces and tears in their eyes.  We all knew that our lives would never be the same.

I stopped calling Uncle Boris, as well as my other two uncles.  My open struggle with the Soviet System had begun.  I became “an enemy of the state”.

The next time I saw my uncles 1 ½ years later, when my grandfather died.  It was a very sad and very precious moment.  I knew how much they missed me.  And I missed them a great deal.  Every one of them at some point during that year was questioned about me by the KGB.  And they all told that we were completely estranged and they did not know anything about me.

But that was not true.  We knew everything about each other through my father.  He was a secret link between us.

In June of 1982, after a long struggle, I finally was stripped of my soviet citizenship and all my possessions and was given permission to leave the country.

The day before I left, forever, Uncle Boris and Aunt Etya came to see me in my apartment.  I knew what it took for him to do that.  We said goodbye.  We knew that we would never see each other again.  He was crying.  He asked me to forgive him for not seeing me all those years.  But there was nothing for me to forgive.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed.  The Museum of Marx and Engels lost its status.  My uncle retired.  A year later my cousin Juliy, his older son, very gifted mathematician, was invited as a visiting professor to Heidelberg University in Germany.  Soon my Uncle Boris and my Aunt Etya went to visit Yuliy and his family in Heidelberg.  While there, Uncle Boris suffered a stroke.  He ended half paralyzed and unable to speak.  Later his speech partially recovered, but this brilliant man who could fluently speak several languages now could not make any sense.  He was not in any condition to travel back home to Moscow.  He and Etya became hostages in Heidelberg, Germany, with no friends, no possessions, no means of support.

Two years ago I came to Heidelberg to see Uncle Boris and Aunt Etya.  It was the 50^th anniversary of their wedding.  We went to a small Italian restaurant to celebrate. Aunt Etya was reciting by memory the poems they wrote to each other 55 years ago, when they were separated by the war.  The poems were beautifully innocent and filled with love.  Uncle Boris was listening with tears in his eyes…

Now it was his funeral.
My two cousins, standing around, looking lost.  A few more people, whom I never met, appeared.

The tall man in his late 30s – early 40s, dressed in the garb of an orthodox Jew, with a very intelligent face, came in.  He came up to my aunt and talked to her in German.  He turned out to be a president of the Heidelberg’s Jewish Community and he was in charge of the funeral.

The ceremony started.  Kadish in Hebrew.  A short and dry summary of Uncle Boris’s life in Russian.  And then the tall orthodox men, the president, spoke in German.  He spoke for a very long time.  I understood very little.  He was a good and a passionate orator.  He was probably saying very wise and wonderful things about life and death and about my uncle.  I was trying to understand, to connect the things he was saying.  But all I could hear was the harsh sound of German.

Why does this orthodox Jew so passionately speaks German?  Why did he come back?  Why did anyone come back?  They have been repelled by this land over and over again, the last time with almost complete annihilation.  What makes them come back to be tolerated again?  And for how long?  Why does my dear uncle have to be buried in this land?

How could it happen that my Uncle Boris died in Germany?  His last years and his death were completely disconnected from the rest of his life.  By all probable scenarios he had to die in Moscow, surrounded by countless friends and family, who loved, admired, adored him.  He touched so many lives.  He was the center of such a wonderful universe.  What happened to all of that?  What happened to all of those hundreds of people who were supposed to come to his funeral?  What happened to all those endless flowers, wreaths and cards?

Or was there some high irony in the fact that my uncle, who was so passionate about Karl Marx, that genius German Jew who turned the world up side down, came to die to Marx’s land?

He fought the Germans in WWII.  He was wounded by the Germans and never was able to run, dance or even walk well since.  Half of his family was exterminated by the Germans.  And he came to Germany to die.  What is the symbolism of all this?  And was he fighting AGAINST Germany or was he fighting FOR Germany against nazism?  Who can answer all these questions? Who will take care of his grave?

The service was over.  Four big German men in dark green uniforms came into the chapel.  A chill went down my spine.  They were SS.  They came to take us all away.  But they only took away my uncle in his coffin.

The sun was still out, and after the dark and cold chapel it was blinding and warm.  A small corner of the cemetery, reserved for the Jews, was melancholically peaceful.  The coffin was slowly lowered into the grave.  The painfully familiar sound of earth hitting the coffin.  Goodbye my uncle.  We have to go to live our lives without you.  Goodbye.

PAMIR MOUNTAINS, CENTRAL ASIA, 1976

By Slava Gaufberg

The wound was horrible. From the depth of flesh, ripped apart by a falling rock, two round white pieces of crashed femoral bone were looking at me, like two blind eyes.

I felt dizzy. My vision was blurry. I could not catch my breath.  Here, at 18,000 feet, the air was cold and thin. I had just climbed this damn mountain, pushing myself far beyond any of my limits.  I had to save their lives. But for one of them it was too late.  His body was still up on the wall.

I took off my backpack and pulled out the intravenous line.  My hands were shaking from exhaustion, but I got the vein.  Igor was in shock.  Weak pulses, beads of cold sweat, confused.  I pushed fentanyl,  very powerful pain killer, in the vein, stopped the bleeding, cleaned and closed the wound, immobilized the leg. I had only 2 liters of saline with me.  Almost nothing. It was pouring into his vein wide open.  I had more in the base camp, but…

From this spot on the wall of the South Peak, the view was breathtaking.  Five thousand feet below me was one of the most spectacular places on Earth – Kulikolon plateau, with it’s beautiful crystal clear, bright green, blue and violet lakes.  It was surrounded by the vertical walls of rock and ice, roaming up to 20,000 feet.  Down there, between the lakes I could see the tents of our base camp.

Radio came on. Bad news – there will be no helicopter – severe weather below. We will have to carry him down by hand.  I am on my own. For how long?  Will I be able to pull him through?

I looked up the wall.  My rescue teammates were lowering the other one on the ropes.  He was wrapped in a sleeping bag.  He lived for 3 hours after a rock struck him in the head, breaking through his helmet.  He died about 20 minutes before we reached the base of the wall.  Could I have climbed faster?  Could I have saved him, if I had reached him earlier?  I knew that the answers were “no” and “no”, but that did not matter. He was 24 years old.  His name was Viktor Kolesnik.  He was from Kiev.  I saw him only a couple of times before.  Now, many years later, I still remember his face and his smile.

It took us five hours to reach the base camp.  I got more saline, more morphine and fentanyl.  Igor’s pulse was stronger, he looked a little more comfortable.  But we had a long way to go.  We had to carry him down to our stationary base, about 6 more hours down.  From there he could be taken by 4WD truck to a hospital in Samarkand, about 8 hours away.

It got dark and started raining.  The usually easy descend from Kulikolon plateau became very dangerous at night and in the rain, especially when carrying the wounded and the dead.  But we were lucky, and at 3am we safely reached the base.  More luck – the truck was there!

By 6 am Igor was comfortably sleeping in the truck.  His pulse and blood pressure were back to normal.  Next to him was traveling the body of his climbing mate.  With the first sunlight they left for Samarkand.

I was exhausted and devastated.  I felt guilty.  I felt helpless. Little did I know that only 10 days later I would be up for more.

I was still playing in my mind all the possible and impossible outcomes of what happened on South Peak, when another tragedy struck.

Sasha Pushkina, a 26 year old climber from Moscow, lost her footing and fell while descending across a glacier’s moraine.  Falling, she dislodged a huge boulder, which rolled over her.

When I reached her , she was being carried down by her teammates.  She was conscious, but badly injured and in shock.  Her strikingly beautiful face was very pale.  She was in terrible pain.  It was hard for her to breathe.  She could not speak.  Her eyes were dry, staring at me, asking.  I had no answer.

Both her arms were broken.  She had multiple fractured ribs.  Her pelvis was shattered.  She was bleeding internally.  And there was no hope for helicopter evacuation – bad weather down below!  I had no answer.

There, between the rocks and ice, I had to place a central venous line in her neck, because her extremities were such a mess, that no vein could be found there.  Two hours later, while we were carrying her down, she became unconscious, her pulse getting weaker and weaker.  Her breathing began to slow and became shallow.  I was losing her.  We stopped and put her down on the ground.  I pulled out my resuscitation kit and intubated her, placing a breathing tube into her lungs.  I did not have an Ambu bag for pushing air into her lungs through the tube, and I didn’t have oxygen.  For the next several hours, while carrying her down, we all took turns breathing into the tube to support her life.

Finally, after midnight, we reached our stationary base.  The truck was gone.  I had no way to get her to the hospital.

That was one of the worst nights in my life.  I was trying to fight Death – and I was losing.  I knew exactly what to do – and I could do nothing.  I had no instruments to open her belly and to stop her internal bleeding, I did not have blood to give her.  I felt that all my knowledge and training were useless.  And without my tools, my hospital, my colleagues – I was worthless.  And now she was dying on me.

About 11am the truck arrived.  Sasha was still alive, but for how long?  We loaded her in.  We suspended her stretcher on the belts, and four of us supported it with our hands to protect her from the bumpy road.

By the evening, our hands and shoulders completely numb, we reached the hospital in Samarkand.  I could not understand how, but she was still alive.  They took her to the OR.  There was nothing else for me to do.

Early the next morning before I left Samarkand to go back to the camp, I visited her in the ICU.  She was sleeping.  I did not wake her up.

Three weeks later I finished my climbing season in Pamir and came back to Samarkand on my way home to Moscow.  With a huge backpack on my shoulders, covered with mountain dust, with face dark and peeling from the sun and wind, I showed up in the hospital, were I knew Igor and Sasha were recovering.

I found them both in the hospital’s garden.  Igor was walking with a cane and a slight limp, the horrible open fracture of his femur almost completely healed.  Sasha was also out of her casts, looking like nothing happened to her, the wonderful smile back on her face.  Her doctor told me that her recovery was nothing short of a miracle.

But I already knew that.

Often when I start telling my stories I loose the track of time, my mind disconnects from reality, it flies free, leaving behind the heavy weight of daily life, to those wonderful places that exist now only in my memory.  I know if I went there today, many years later, I would not find them, or I would not recognize them, and I would be saddened and confused by the changes I’d found.

But it is not important to me.  They all live in my heart, and I love and cherish them the way I remember.

Our wooden boat with outboard motor on a long pole, for which it got local name a “longtail boat”, was swiftly cutting through the turquoise waters around Phi Phi Island – the most beautiful island on earth.  I was seating on the tall long bow, and the wind, filled with the fragrances of the island trees and flowers, was washing over my face. My boatman, his dark and lean body barely covered with a loincloth, was singing endless local songs in joyful high voice, steering our boat along the steep cavernous cliffs.  Next to me was my beautiful friend, who I met in my travel and who accompanied me in my adventures.

The bow of the boat was covered with flowers, and I thought that if somebody not familiar with the local customs to decorate the boats saw us, they would think that we were a wedding party.  And we were happy, like a wedding party, laughing, kissing, radiating joy, feeling every moment of this beautiful life.

My diving gear was laying on the bottom of the boat.  When the boat jumped the waves the heavy air tank was rolling all over, and sometimes I thought that it would make a huge hole in the boat and we’d sink.  That thought made me laugh.  I imagined our boat going under water, the flowers and all, and three of us in the water, still looking happy, laughing and singing.

“We are there, boss” the voice of my boatman brought me back.  The boat slowed down, and the motor went silent.

Then I heard the splash of an anchor.

I looked around. We were under the huge cliff, coming straight up from the sea.  The side of the cliff was covered with the small bushes, flowers and vines. 

“It’s down there, boss”.  I looked down.  The water was so clean, that I could see the bottom 60 feet below.  I thought that I saw the entrance to the cave half way down under water. 

I started putting my buoyancy vest on.  My friend lifted the tank to help me to get it on my back.  She always amazed me with her strength – she was very petite and slim, but she lifted the heavy tank like a little plastic toy.

I put my mask on and checked regulator.  She kissed me on regulator, we laughed, and a seconds later I was in the water, adjusting my gears, ready to go down.  She was waving over board, smiling to me.  I kept looking up as more and more water above my head separated us.  Her face was getting further away, braking and blurry in the surface waves.

I was slowly descending along the wall. My depth meter showed 35 feet.  I could now clearly see the entrance to the cave about 10 feet below.  Finally I was in front of it. 

I turned on my torch.  I didn’t know what was awaiting for me there, in that dark and mysterious cave.

I went in.

How I Decided to Become a Doctor

I was 13, straight “A” student, tough kid, growing in Ukrainian city Poltava. By that time, I had already trained myself to stay up without sleep, sometimes for several nights in a row. There were so many wonderful things in life to do, to explore, to read, to think.  Nothing was going on in sleep, except for some silly dreams.  I concluded that sleep was a total waste of my valuable time. And nights became my private precious hours, when I could discover the endless worlds of adventure, wonder, thoughts and magic.

One of those sleepless nights, with a flashlight under my blanket, I devoured “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne ou Dix ans plus tard” by Alexander Dumas. I was totally immersed in a merciless world of intrigue of the court of Louis XIV, when I heard the voice of my dad, interrupting a passionate monologue of Count de la Fère: “Get up, sonny, time to go to school”.

The reality was sudden and cruel.

What school?  I couldn’t go to school. I had to save France! How could I leave poor Philippe in Bastille! I had to do something!

“Daddy, I am not feeling well.  My stomach hurts”

I turned off the flashlight, and, hiding the book under the blanket, poked my head out.

My father was standing next to my bed.

“Show me, where does it hurt?”

I pulled down the blanket and pointed to some uncertain part of my stomach.

My dad always felt that he was almost a doctor.  In 1939, two years before WWII started in the Soviet Union, he entered the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad.  On July 1, 1941, one week after the war started and less than two years into studying medicine, he was sent to the front line, and for the rest of the war he was a commander of a medical platoon.  He was wounded several times, but survived, and ended the war in Berlin.

Dad sat on the edge of my bed and poked my stomach. I said “ouch” several times. I had to be convincing if I wanted to get back to XVII Century France.I saw some worry in his face.

“I am not sure, but it could be something serious.  We need to go to see Dr. Tarshitz”.  Dr. Tarshitz was the Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Children’s Hospital, and a family friend.I quickly estimated that a visit to a doctor would be shorter than a whole day at school.  I could go for that. France could wait for a couple of hours.

Dr. Tarshitz put me on a examiming table, poked my stomach, and after my few well acted “ouches” said to my father: “I am not sure what he has, but there is a chance of appendicitis.  Why don’t we keep him in the hospital for observation?”  The prospect of being in a hospital made me very happy: instead of going to school I could read as much as I wanted.

My father agreed with the plan, and soon I joined 3 other kids in a hospital room, all in different stages of post-surgical recovery.  

Father went back home and brought me my books.  I was in reading heaven.  Except for an occasional nurse sticking her head in the room, there was no interruption of my reading. 

By the next morning I was done with France and was wondering in Africa, near the snows of Kilimanjaro with Ernest Hemmingway, and later that day in ancient Judea and Rome with Flavius Josephus.

When Dr. Tarshitz came to see me on morning rounds, I told him that I still had pain.  I wanted to stay in the hospital and read books for as long as I could, so I decided to milk my fictional stomach pain to the end.  He poked me again, I “ouched” again, and he said that the chance of me having appendicitis was real, and he wanted to talk to my parents about surgery.  Wow!  I knew that if I had surgery I probably would be in the hospital for at least another 2 weeks, reading!  What a great chance!  I only prayed that my parents would agree to that surgery.

I didn’t know anything about the surgery itself and didn’t think much about it.  Later in the day, when my parents came, looking very worried, mom crying, I decided to learn more.

When Dr. Tarshitz came in the room, I asked him about the operation.  What I heard from him was unbelievably intriguing and fascinating.  He told me that he was going to cut my belly open, find a small part of my intestine, called the appendix, cut it out and stitch me back together.  I immediately imagined myself lying on operating table, my belly cut wide open, guts spilled out in a puddle of blood, and me looking inside of my own belly.  But then he disappointed me, saying that I shouldn’t worry, I would be asleep for the whole procedure.  But I didn’t worry at all.  Instead, I was totally fascinated by the whole thing. 

“Is there any way for me not to sleep and to watch what you will be doing inside of my belly?”. 

He looked at me, and in his eyes I could read: “Are you crazy?”.  Then I noticed a spark of curiosity there. 

“Do you really want to watch it?”

“Yes, please, very much so!”

“It is going to hurt. But if you really want to do that, we could do the surgery under local anesthesia, and you could watch it in a mirror that is mounted for the students above the operating table.  Are you sure you want to do that?”.  I was absolutely sure.  I wanted to see it all.  The idea of somebody cutting me open, doing something inside of my body, and then stitching it back together to heal – was beyond anything I’d ever imagined. 

The surgery was scheduled for 9 o’clock the next morning. I couldn’t sleep the whole night.  My excitement was spilling over the top.  I couldn’t even read.  I was imagining, over and over again, the picture of my open body on the operating table from different angles.

About 7:30 am Dr. Tarshitz walked into the room, asked me if I still had the pain (“Yes! Yes!”), quickly poked my belly, and asked me if I still wanted to be awake to see the surgery.  My enthusiastic “yes” followed, he gave me a wry smile and walked out of the room, telling me that we’d see each other soon.

Soon after a young pretty girl – a nursing student – walked into my room and waved to me to follow her. I did.  She brought me to a huge bathroom with several shower stalls and a large marble bench by the wall.  She asked me to undress.  I took off my hospital pajamas, and stood there in my underwear, embarrassed and confused.  And then she asked me to take off my underwear. It was devastating!  To be naked in front of this young pretty girl?  I couldn’t, I was 13, I was a man! But she insisted, and I had to listen – she was an authority, even though she was only 2-3 years older than me. I took my underwear off and laid on my back, as she directed me, on a cold marble bench.  The girl spread shaving cream around my pubic area and started shaving my newly grown pubic hair.  I was embarrassed to death; I was devastated and humiliated.  And I was in heaven.  I wanted it to stop immediately and to last forever…

In the operating room the surgical team was ready for me.  I was laid on the table.  Dr. Tarshitz, already scrubbed and dressed in full surgical gear, asked me again if I didn’t want to be put to sleep.  And I reaffirmed my desire to stay awake. “OK” he said, “let’s start”.

I felt my belly being washed with some cold liquid stuff.  Dr. Tarshitz was in a good mood, telling jokes.  I decided to tell jokes too.  I knew a lot of them.  I was very excited, and the jokes were pouring out of me, like waterfall.  Everybody in the room was laughing.  I felt a prick and burning pain in my belly, but didn’t pay much attention, and kept telling jokes.  The strange feeling of numbness was spreading around my belly.  In the mirror on the ceiling above the table I could see doctors sticking needles into my flesh one after another.  I felt pain, at the time pretty severe, but I bravely kept telling jokes.  I saw Dr Tarshitz took his shiny knife and cut me, but I strangely did not feel it. He kept asking me again and again how I was doing.  I kept joking.  Now I could see my belly laying open, and doctors sticking all kinds of funny looking, shiny instruments inside.  Suddenly I felt a terrible, excruciating pain. I stopped talking. My vision started getting dark.  I looked at the small outside window under the ceiling.  The bright blue spring sky was filling it up. 

“Goodbye beautiful sky, goodbye beautiful world”…  I was saying goodbye to life, I thought I was going to die from that unbearable pain.

I don’t know how long it lasted.  But suddenly it started getting better, and soon it was almost gone.  The slight nagging in my belly still persisted.  But I could breath, see, talk again. 

“We just removed your appendix” I heard Dr. Tarshitz voice.  “It was very large, and it was attached to a lot of guts, we had quite a bit of trouble getting it out.  You might have felt some pain”. 

I didn’t say anything. 

The surgery lasted almost 1½ hours.  I was tired.  I wanted to go back to my room and sleep.  My parents were told that my appendix was very inflamed and considering the adhesions it had to other intestines, had probably been inflamed for a long time. 

It has been a mystery to me why I never felt any pain from that inflamed appendix.

That day I decided that I wanted to be a doctor, to be able to look inside human bodies, to see how they work. To save lives.  To make sick people well again.  The very thought of that was infinitely elating and fascinating for me. And that feeling has never left me.

Four years later I became a medical student.    

How I decided to leave the USSR

June 1967. The Middle East War, later known as the “Six Day War”, is at its height. I am a first year medical student, buying every possible newspaper and magazine, listening to all available and unavailable radio stations, trying to understand what is going on there. Reading between the lines, and listening through the jamming, I slowly realize, to my complete amazement, that something unbelievable and miraculous is happening in the Middle East. A tiny Jewish state defending itself, fighting for survival, is demolishing into dust the mighty armies of the loyal Soviet vassals Egypt and Syria, and their ally Jordan. On the sixth day it is all over. The Arab armies are completely annihilated, dispersed in the sands of Sinai and on the Syrian plateaus. Burnt carcasses of Arab aircrafts and tanks smolder in the desert. Victorious Jewish fighters line the banks of the Suez Canal.

My whole being is filled with a pride unbeknownst to me: pride for my Jewish country and for my people.

I first learned that I was a Jew when I was about three, in my little courtyard in a city of Poltava in the Ukraine where I was growing up, when one of the neighbor boys suddenly started dancing around me, singing: “Kike, kike jump down from a dike”. I didn’t know what the word “kike” meant, but it seemed very offensive to me, and I punched this boy in the nose. Blood poured from his nose, he cried as he ran home. And I went home too, to find out from my parents and grandparents what the word “kike” meant. They very carefully explained to me who the Jews were: an ancient, proud and accomplished people, people of the kings, sages and heroes, people of great writers, scientists and musicians. They recited the endless list of great and famous Jews, from King Solomon, Jesus and Spinoza to Karl Marx, Mendelssohn, Heine and Einstein. It started to become clear in my little mind that almost all great people in the history of human kind have been Jews, like us. But then my parents and grandparents also explained to me that Jews for the past two thousand years had no country of their own, and had been forced to leave among other people. And those people often dislike Jews and persecute them, out of jealousy and mistrust. They told me about pogroms and The Final Solution. They told me about half of our family perishing in Holocaust. They told me that in order to get anywhere in life as a Jew, I would have to be ten times better than everyone else. That was my first lesson in my Jewishness.

The other lessons were soon to follow.

One evening when I was about four, my grandfather Moishe didn’t come home from work for dinner. It had never happened before. After a while my grandmother started to really worry, pacing the two little rooms of our tiny apartment. She didn’t know what to do, and was waiting for my father to come home from work and to go looking for my grandpa. There were no phones in people’s apartments back then, and she wouldn’t know whom to call anyway. My father finally came home, and, skipping dinner, immediately went to look for Moishe. At the workplace he was told that Moishe left work around six o’clock to go home. Now it was ten. None of Moishe’s friends had seen him either. My father was going from house to house, asking people, but nobody knew anything. The year was 1952. The only place where my grandpa could disappear without any trace was KGB.

My dad had a friend with whom he shared a passion for all kind of radio-electronic gadgets. His name was Lyonya Tkachenko. Lyonya was a burly Ukrainian man with a soft spot for my dad and for moonshine, whose father was a well-known Nazi collaborator during German occupation of Poltava. Lyonya was in charge of fixing all KGB radio equipment.

Around midnight my father knocked on Lyonya’s door. Sleepy and half drunk Lyonya opened the door.

“I need your help” pleaded my dad, “My father in law is gone, the only place I think he might be is KGB”.

Without a word Lyonya disappeared into his house, and a few minutes later came back all dressed in his KGB uniform. My father in taw, they briskly walked across the city to the regional KGB headquarters.

I still remember that building, the most beautiful building in the city that before The Great October Revolution housed the Governor of Poltava.

They came to the building and Lyonya rang the bell. He told my father to wait and disappeared inside. Endless minutes started ticking. My dad was pacing empty streets, smoking one cigarette after another. He didn’t know how much time was gone – an hour, two? Suddenly the door opened and out came Lyonya. Behind him, barely standing, was my grandfather. His hands were wrapped in some bloody cloth. My dad knew better not to ask anything. He shook Lyonya’s hand, put Moishe on his back and carried him across the city to our home.

Later I learned that my grandpa was arrested on a street as he was walking home from work. He was brought to a small room in KGB headquarters. After a while an officer came into the room. He put in front of Moishe a piece of paper with a long list of Jewish names on it. Most of the people on the list grandpa knew well.

“We want you to sign a paper that you know that these people were collecting money for the State of Israel” officer said.

“But I don’t know that”, answered Moishe, “I’ve never heard of it”.

“You have to do it, otherwise…” He didn’t have to finish the phrase. My grandfather knew well about “otherwise”. He also knew that by signing such document he would send all these people to labor camps for many years.

He refused to sign.

Another officer came into the room, then another one. After many hours of verbal intimidation and abuse, one of the officers pulled out his handgun, put it to my grandpa’s head and said that if he doesn’t sign he would be shot on a spot. Grandpa refused again. Then they asked him to put his hands on the desk. One of them grabbed his wrists, while another one struck his knuckles with a butt of a handgun. Again and again, until grandpa lost consciousness.

If not for my dad’s friend Lyonya Tkachenko, a burly-drunken-Ukrainian-son-of-Nazi-collaborator we probably would never see our grandpa again.

His hands eventually healed, and his grip was again as strong as ever.

Another big lesson came about a year later. My father was than a Director of Regional Civil Defense School. His status as a World War II hero secured that position for him. One evening he came home almost in tears. Earlier that day he was called into Regional Communist Party Headquarters and was told that he was relieved from his post. No official explanations offered. The Party secretary, who delivered the news and who knew and respected my dad very well, finally took a pity on him and revealed a “secret”. He showed him a memo that came from The Party’s Central Committee in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, which ordered to “replace all persons of Jewish nationality in leadership position by the local cadre” . It was 1953, and the Soviet Government in Moscow was preparing deportation of all Jews from European part of the country to the Far East. Sudden death of Stalin prevented that plan from being executed.

And that how it was. We were strangers in our Great Motherland.

Through my whole childhood I felt both proud and ashamed of me belonging to these strange people. I wanted to be like everyone else: Russian, Ukrainian, or at least Georgian or Armenian. I wanted to dissolve into thin air from shame and humiliation when my grandparents spoke Yiddish on the street. My Jewishness was my deep, shameful, yet known-to-everyone secret. I protected it with the passionate vigilance of my fists. Whenever I heard the word “kike” my fists flew into the face of the offender with lightening speed, before I realized what was going on. My punches mainly landed on noses – and blood flowed like a river! By the age of six I developed a pretty effective punch. At the age of seven I was arrested by the police for “cruel physical assault” on a boy of my age in front of his grandmother, who unsuccessfully tried to pull me away from him until his face became a bloody mess. I never heard the word “kike” from him again. At the age of twelve I was expelled from school for two weeks for beating up a boy in our classroom, in front of the whole class and our teacher, for calling me a kike.

And so, on a warm June night in 1967, I was seated on a park bench waiting for my girlfriend. A disheveled drunken man landed on a bench next to me. He looked at me very attentively, and then he said in his slurred and trembling voice: “You fucking kikes are great warriors. I didn’t know you could fight like that. You really fucked up those dirty stinky Arabs”.

And then, for the first time in my life, the word “kike” didn’t make me jump, blood didn’t boil in my veins and my fists did not fly into his face in fury. I felt good and easy. I patted the drunk on the shoulder and said: “Yes, you are right, we, kikes, are like that”.

From that moment on I never again was ashamed of being a Jew. And I felt with my whole soul that my place was not in that fake and rotten proletarian paradise called USSR, but with my proud and glorious people. Israel became my dream. I dreamt of myself with a rifle in my hands, defending MY country. I became certain that sooner or later I would break away to freedom, whatever it would take: I would fly, would run, would swim, would crawl…

Many years passed before I was able to do that. But that is another story.

From the old black and white photograph, the faces of the children peer at me in surprise. The faces are all different: very young and little older, with fair  curls, black locks, in caps and without. I do not see fear in their eyes, only surprise and longing. Longing for something – I do not know for what. Maybe for simple human warmth, maybe for hope, maybe for a little happiness, maybe just for food … I don’t know much about these children, except for the fact that all of them were from the small Jewish shtetl of Dzhurin in the Ukraine, the shtetl where my grandfather was born and raised. And I also know that all the children in the photo were orphans; orphans of the Jewish pogrom in Dzhurin, launched by the Ukrainian Army of Symon Petlyura and  White Volunteer Army of General Denikin in December and February 1919-20. In front of these children, their mothers were raped and their pregnant bellies  torn open, the heads of their fathers were smashed with rifle butts, their homes were burned…

But these children survived, and why their eyes were not filled with horror and void,  I could not understand.

My uncle sits next to me as I examine the photo.. He, like these children, was born and raised in Dzhurin. And he, like these children, lived his own horror. When he was two years old, he and his family were sent to Dzhurin’s ghetto. Like the children in the photo he also survived. But this is a separate story.

Exhausted by a terrible disease, my uncle sits next to me now and we are leafing through an album in which the history of the Jewish shtetl of Dzhurin is written in hundreds of photographs. We wander together through the dusty narrow streets, between the miserable wooden shacks of the Jewish poor, sunk up to the windows into mud. I peer into the faces of people who lived before and after the war, who survived in the ghetto, who grew up and became handsome teenagers, friends and girlfriends of my uncle and his two older brothers. I look at these photos and the thought of those children, orphans of the pogrom, does not let me go. What happened to them? Surely some of them died in the battles of the war, others in the massacres or gas chambers of the Holocaust, or maybe some survived.How much horror and grief can one human life bear? My uncle does not know much about those orphans and their fate. He tells me about the fate of others, about which he knows. And he knows a lot. He himself is an epoch. A child of the ghetto, he became a film director, a scholar, a collector of rare books, paintings, archives, and just an incredibly interesting human being. Sitting in his house in Chicago, filled to the brim with these priceless treasures, his beautiful emaciated face, like an old Russian icon or Rembrandt’s portrait, his eyes burning with excitement, telling his endless stories about the shtetl, about the great people whom he met  and befriended in his life journey, about destiny, about life, about time…

Buried under his endless treasures, I find an old guitar, and we sing songs from the past, from the repertoire of Utesov, Bernes … And we look at these photos. And I cannot get rid of the thought: what now? Who will sing these songs after us? Who will read these books? Who will look at these photos? Who will tell others about this? Who will remember these people, these infinite worlds gone forever?

Will all this disappear into nowhere, sink into the endless river of time, dissolve into oblivion? I ask myself again and again.

And I can not find the answer.

Only hope: maybe someone will?