A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [167]
Yuri Sokolov was a teenager when he escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and found his way to Jewish partisans operating in White Russia, east of Warsaw. At the time the war ended, he was twenty-two and in command of four companies, and a whispered legend.
Yuri knew about the liquidation of the ghettos, the massive slave-labor camps, and, later, of the genocide. As a surviving Zionist, his mission changed to finding remnants of his group and starting them on the perilous journey across Europe, then running the British blockade into Palestine.
Marina Geller was not yet twenty when she met the fabled Yuri. She had survived the war more easily. She had been taken in by an aunt in Minsk who had married a Christian and converted.
Marina had also come from Zionist stock. At the instant of peace, she set off to find her parents and brothers and sister. After a futile search, she realized her family was just another tiny blip among the millions of murdered Jews.
Marina threw herself into working with the small Zionist units who were now desperately engaged in getting the survivors out of the graveyards of Russia and Poland.
She established a safe house near the Polish border, at Bialystok. They came in twos and threes at first, mostly Zionists who had fought the Germans as partisans.
Now and again the trickle included an orphaned child or one too ill to continue the hellish journey. She turned part of the house into an orphanage, giving a cover to the emigrant-running operation. Marina was able to cull food and medicine as a “legal” orphanage. Soon she had twenty children.
Yuri and Marina were married in a partisan wedding, and even before their passion was spent, they went back to their bitter work.
They vowed, as couples vow, that if Yuri was ever captured by the Soviets, she would make a run to Palestine and wait for him.
It happened in quick order, by the hatred of an informer. Yuri was captured, taken to Moscow, and charged with Zionism. It was a good day for the Soviets, for Yuri Sokolov’s name was known far and wide. He would serve as an example to the Jews that they had to conform with the regime and not attempt to establish Jewish contact on the outside.
Although viciously tortured, Yuri refused to stand down. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in a labor camp in the Gulag Archipelago, a frozen waste on the White Sea. He was swallowed up, vanished, and all contact broken.
The time came to close the orphanage in Bialystok. An illegal emigration agent, a Palestinian Jew named Shalom Katz, set up a daring plan to evacuate Marina, her two helpers, and twenty children.
They rode out of Poland in a closed passenger car ostensibly holding high-ranking German prisoners. By the time they had reached the Czech border, the ruse was discovered, but they dashed into Czechoslovakia.
The Soviets demanded the return of the train to Poland. The British demanded the escapees be taken to refugee camps. The Czech president, Jan Masaryk, son of the father of his country, refused and granted safe passage through his country.
Marina arrived in Palestine by refugee boat just as the Palestine Jews declared independence and were attacked by the Arab nations.
Marina was a rarity, the wife of a great Jewish hero, a hero in her own right. Ben-Gurion himself and Golda Myerson believed she would best serve in America, to wake up that nation’s Jews.
Marina traveled the American landscape endlessly to spread the message of the Holocaust and to plead for help in getting survivors to Israel.
Her husband, Yuri, had disappeared in the tundra of the north. Only the occasional rumor surfaced, but no direct word.
Traveling in America on the low side in 1948, she had the same mildewed hotel room, seemed to meet the same welcoming committee, speak to the same small but earnest audience, eat the same homemade meal, fly in the same jerky little airplane, until it all looked like a blur. San Francisco blurred to Oakland blurred to Los Angeles blurred to Phoenix.