Profile of a Soviet Prisoner
DECTER, MOSHE
THE CASE OF BASYA REZNITSKY Profile of a Soviet Prisoner By Moshe Decter ON February 12, 1962, for the first time since the end of the Stalin era nine years before, a woman was condemned to...
...All the accused were described as having "underground" connections with gangs of Jewish speculators in other Soviet cities...
...So pervasive have these activities become that the authorities have found it necessary to institute the death penalty for economic crimes...
...each night he brought them food...
...Basya's staunch courage at the trial was impressive...
...Pravda itself has inadvertently suggested such a possibility...
...Basya had been closest to this sister, for the others had left home many years before the War...
...Aaron Reznitsky was sentenced to five years at hard labor, Basya to three years...
...It was also noted that the culprits "usually transacted their deals in the Vilnius synagogue...
...The lawyer defended them in much the same spirit...
...even the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940 did not disrupt their lives...
...F. also began to send her packages of clothing...
...There is no news...
...The idea was not only to punish individual offenders, but to deter the rest of the people...
...The case of Basya Reznitsky and the others in Vilnius is not an isolated one...
...Their hope was to get across into Poland, from where Jews were allowed to leave rather freely...
...Her ultimate fate is still uncertain...
...After Basya completed her term, she settled in Vilnius, where most of the Lithuanian Jewish survivors had clustered for sheer creature comfort...
...Basya soon learned the grisly fate of her mother and brother...
...Since May 1961, when the authorities passed the laws calling for capital punishment for economic crimes, thousands of Soviet citizens have been convicted of such offenses, many hundreds sentenced to lengthy prison terms and confiscation of property...
...Finally, and perhaps most ominously from a political point of view, the "alien-ness" of the Jewish victims was stressed: "These people stood apart from our life...
...Aktion" was the technical German name for the systematic collection of Jews for massacre or for deportation to the death camps...
...Behind this barbarous treatment of economic offenders stands the failure of the Communist system to provide enough of the goods of life to satisfy Russia's 210 million people...
...We cannot remain here, we cannot live here...
...When his period of service was over, he settled in that small town of 9,000 inhabitants, married Tamara Blachowitz and earned a meager living as a carpenter...
...Chaim had eight children, five daughters and three sons...
...The significance of this publicity is unmistakable...
...In 1932, in her mid-20s, Basya married Aaron Reznitsky, from the provincial Lithuanian town of Volkovitz...
...Since at least 76 of the 130 death sentences for economic crimes publicized in the Soviet press—nearly 60 per cent— have been meted out to Jews, the authorities' choice for the role seems clear...
...Basya's last letters to F„ dated two years ago, are permeated with an air of generalized despair...
...Basya's two brothers in Israel supplied documents attesting to the relationship and to their desire to have the Reznitskys join them...
...Toward the end of 1942, the Nazis carried out a "Kinderaktion" in the ghetto...
...Some years before World War I, Basya's father, Chaim Gratman, served as a soldier of the Tsarist Army in Mariampol, Lithuania...
...Two of his sons left in the 1930s for Palestine where they joined a collective farm settlement...
...Several small children were in the group...
...we can live only with them...
...In Shauli the Germans quickly set up a ghetto, into which the Reznitskys and their two daughters, together with thousands of others, were herded...
...Basya Reznitsky's personal story is a double tragedy, twice over...
...From the speeches, statements and articles by Soviet officials, including Premier Khrushchev himself, there emerges a portrait of a society shot through with corruption, bribery, swindles, pilfering of public property, embezzlement of state funds...
...Soon after the Nazis marched into Lithuania they rounded up the thousands of Jews in the Mariampol vicinity, including Basya Reznitsky's aged mother and her younger brother who had stayed at home, and buried them alive in three huge lime pits especially dug for the purpose...
...For this she and three men, including her husband Aaron, were given the death sentence...
...The Reznitskys brought the papers to the local office of the Interior Ministry and signed up for emigration...
...They lived quietly and decently in Shauli...
...When the judge asked them why they wished to leave Lithuania, they replied: "Because the earth here is soaked in Jewish blood, in the blood of our dearest ones...
...We have everything here, we lack for nothing...
...One day in the summer of 1943, the Nazis surrounded the ghetto, having first arranged that only the smallest possible number of Jewish slave laborers be allowed to leave for work that day...
...Chaim Gratman died a few years before the outbreak of the War, in Mariampol...
...they were separated from their parents and placed in state orphanages...
...During the two years she had to wait for her husband to return from Siberia she worked as a cleaning woman, washing clothes and scrubbing floors...
...Perhaps to still her pain and heal her wounds, Basya decided to have another child...
...The trial will not soon be forgotten by the Jews of Vilnius...
...All 45 were arrested, brought to Vilnius, and tried for illegally attempting to cross the border...
...At the time of his marriage he was working in a travel agency in Shauli (Shavel), Lithuania, a town of some 22,000, and he and Basya settled there...
...At the trial, the group was defended by an elderly Jewish lawyer who was bold enough to come all the way from Moscow...
...The Reznitskys therefore thought it best to join a group of other Jews with the same idea—a total of 45 people—in a large covered truck which would ostensibly be traveling on business...
...In 1946, when the sister who had survived the German death camps revisited Mariampol, the townspeople told her that they had seen the earth over the mass graves shudder for days afterward...
...Although he came from an impoverished family, Aaron had systematically educated himself from childhood on...
...She lived and stood trial in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, one of the 15 republics of the USSR...
...This final blow was too much for the Reznitskys...
...That night, they made their way to the house of an isolated Lithuanian peasant...
...In one she wrote: ". . . Sometimes I am caught up in yearning, terrible painful yearning...
...They were not interested in how the Soviet people live...
...All the Jewish children—among them the two Reznitsky girls, then four and eight years old—were slaughtered...
...Only recently has it become known that she has been in prison ever since the end of the trial...
...their group worked from dawn to darkness at a leather factory outside the ghetto...
...Aaron was told of the identical fate of his closest relatives...
...But there was no news of Basya...
...Moshe Decter, former New Leader managing editor, has written for Foreign Affairs and Commentary...
...At the beginning of 1946, a baby girl was born—only to die a few days later...
...In the early 1950s, the Soviet Lithuanian authorities announced that those having close relatives abroad could apply for family reunion...
...But the truck was stopped and searched by Soviet border patrols...
...The circumstances of the trial were characteristic...
...a fourth somehow survived the War and the Nazi holocaust with her husband, and the couple came to America as displaced persons in 1946...
...After 45 years of Communist rule, the "new Soviet man" still engages in "capitalist"-type crimes...
...But Basya wrote: "I beg you, please don't send us any packages...
...Her alleged crime was currency speculation...
...They worked out their terms at Soviet slave labor camps in Siberia...
...So far as is known, Basya Reznitsky still "sits" incommunicado in a Soviet prison...
...And it is the bitter chronicle of one human being—and of an entire people...
...There are days when I fantasize that I am with you and talking with you...
...It was a show trial, in every sense of the phrase...
...So they lived for more than a year, until at the end of the summer of 1944 the Soviet Army liberated Lithuania...
...Don't worry about us, whatever we have is sufficient...
...Their forced labor terms and their application for emigration to Israel may well have served to make them prime suspects when the Soviet authorities began last year to crack down on alleged economic offenders...
...Two months later, on April 4, the Soviet press announced the execution of the three men...
...For them, as for all the Jews of Eastern Europe, the full impact of the disaster came in June 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR...
...and in case of disputes among them, they would appeal to the local rabbi, "who served as their arbiter...
...a third left just before the Germans arrived in 1941, lived in Cuba until after the War, then came here also...
...The press coverage of the Reznitsky trial had a particularly blatant anti-Jewish tenor...
...When the court asked her—with no bearing at all on the charges at trial—why she had sought to leave the country in 1946, she replied: "Because it was impossible for me to continue to live on ground upon which the murderers of my children walk about without judgment...
...There have been many such cases in cities all over the Soviet Union: in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa, Minsk, Riga, Tbilisi, Dniepropetrovsk, Tallin, Kutaisi, Benderi, Kharkov and others...
...The vast majority of the people simply try to "get by...
...The summer is ending, quickly gone, hardly here...
...Her name is Basya Reznitsky...
...THE CASE OF BASYA REZNITSKY Profile of a Soviet Prisoner By Moshe Decter ON February 12, 1962, for the first time since the end of the Stalin era nine years before, a woman was condemned to death in the Soviet Union...
...Eyewitnesses recall that when he heard the defendants' stories, he wept...
...He took them into a wood on his property, dug a shelter well hidden by a dip in the ground, and covered it with leaves and branches...
...Everybody does it, and has been doing it for years...
...Soviet citizens know that the secret police, under the supervision of a newly created Party-State control committee, is probably in charge of the campaign against economic offenders...
...She immediately wrote to F., who replied at once...
...It is a tale of pain and fortitude under both the Nazis and the Communists...
...When Aaron was released, he too came to Vilnius and they continued to live a difficult existence...
...The Reznitskys had two daughters—Judith, born in 1934, and Rebecca, born in 1938...
...These stories inform the conditioned Soviet readers, who know how to read between the lines, that the tiny community of Jews—constituting little more than 1 per cent of the population— is responsible, in the opinion of the Party and Government, for nearly two-thirds of the death sentences for economic crimes...
...Though the Soviet border was not yet then as heavily guarded as it was to become later, it was still difficult for individuals to hazard a border crossing...
...Some experts estimate that as much as one-third of the country's domestic commerce is carried on by illegal and quasi-legal means...
...The entire population was mobilized to attend, and the daily press reports, full of vicious sarcasm and stereotyping, egged them on...
...Eyewitnesses who were in Vilnius during and immediately after the trial report that the nonJewish populace actually called it "the Jewish Show Trial...
...The image of the "Golden Calf" and of the "gold piece as their idol" was repeatedly conjured up to convey to an anti-Semitic audience the ancient stereotype of money-worshipping Jews...
...they decided to try to leave Lithuania and join Basya's two brothers in Palestine...
...Why not let them leave the country, then, and join relatives who do want them...
...This was the preliminary to the final Aktion in Shauli—rounding up all the Jews for deportation to the death camps...
...On January 26, in an editorial blast at Attorney General Robert Kennedy who, a few days earlier, had pointed up the tragedy of this and other such cases, the Government newspaper contemptuously stated that economic offenders are "unwanted" in Soviet society...
...At the time that she returned from Siberia, Basya received a letter from her brothers in Israel informing her that their youngest sister, F., together with her husband and two children, were in the United States...
...Transportation authorities made trucks and other vehicles available to bring out the audience...
...Every one of the adults was found guilty and given varying prison terms...
...alas, it is only a dream...
...Basya and Aaron, along with all other adult Jews, were then drafted for slave labor in the Shauli vicinity...
...Basya and Aaron returned to Shauli and found their old community completely devastated...
...Thousands of miles away, her brothers in Israel and her sisters in America also wait, in the hope that some day they will have the opportunity to provide her with a new life in one of their homes...
...Two of his daughters left Mariampol while they were still young girls and came to the United States...
...Her miraculous escape from the Nazis is ending with her awaiting the outcome of a death sentence at the hands of Soviet "justice...
...To avoid arousing the resentment of the bulk of the population against such Draconic means, however, the authorities had to find a scapegoat...
...The Reznitskys were lucky enough to be working outside, and when they heard the ghetto had been sealed off, they managed to break away from their group and escape into a nearby forest...
...But, possibly because they had once served time for trying to leave—no reasons are ever given —their applications were rejected and they had to remain in Vilnius...
...In the name of the court, large batches of admission tickets were sent daily to the workers' councils and trade unions of the factories in the entire Vilnius area...
...They also know that the Soviet press, which rarely publishes crime stories, is operating under orders to feature articles about economic crimes and trials...
...And, according to Soviet press reports, 130 have been condemned to death (as of March 1963...
...On several occasions, it was brought out that Basya has brothers in Israel and sisters in the United States, both of which countries are considered arch-imperialistic...
...It was not held in a court room, but in a spacious social hall where a greater number of people could be accommodated...
...Our desire is to rejoin the handful of remaining members of our oncelarge families...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 7
