DAYENU
Bacchante Camp, Butugychag, Kolyma Region, USSR
16th April, 1957 / Nisan 15, 5717
Once, Jews had wandered in the desert. Once, Jews had been slaves. Once, they had been without the Law. Once, they had not had their land of Israel.
And once again, the Jews wandered -- this time, in an archipelago of ice. Once again, they were far from Zion, a disparate band of uprooted cosmopolitans. There was no Goshen, only Kolyma; they mined bricks of minerals rather than crafting them of mud. They were thousands of miles away from Egypt -- now, the Red Tsar oppressed them as the White Tsars had, as enemies of the people and traitors to their state. And so they suffered. And just as one Joseph led his people into slavery, another Joseph had sent the children of Israel to die.
Butugychag was especially heinous. The local reindeer herdsmen called it the Valley of Death, for nature itself seemed to shy away from the place, poisoned and emaciated.
Only the Soviet authorities knew that what the doomed men of Butugychag mined was uranium. Radioactive, weapons-grade, highly valuable uranium. Few laborers made it beyond six months; none made it past a year.
Bacchante had once been the women’s camp, but as numbers dwindled and Stalin’s last, ethnic purge slowly burned itself out, it had become the main camp for most of Butugychag’s prisoners.
Tonight was different than other nights -- tonight, the Jews would commemorate their ancient exile, and try in vain to forget their current one.
Or, she mused as she strolled, the one before that. The blue numbers burned on her left arm, a constant brand of the camps that had come before, of the evil that Stalin had dispatched. She could still remember the cheering at Sobibor when the Red Army came.
The socialists among them mentioned Kaganovich and others, and extolled their precious revolution. Stalin was to be their new Moses, they said! And instead, he was a Dathan, leading them not into the promised land of socialist freedom but into the miserable slavery of Kolyma.
As she walked, voices rose over the crunching of the snow and the sounds of the distant mine. The constant refrain of this gulag echoed in the air.
Gam ki-elech begei tzalmavet, lo-’ira ra. As soon as people realized Butugychag’s accurate nickname, Psalm 23 had become a constant chant, a way to keep them cohesive and unified. She scoffed. She had always been an atheist; God certainly didn’t do them good against the Germans, and he wasn’t going to start helping them now.
She picked out a younger voice -- children were rare in Butugychag, given that they largely died before they ever reached the end of the archipelago. This was little Wolfovich, as they all called him. He was clad in the typical rags, pale and emaciated like everyone else.
His little voice was weak; the climate and the radiation had ravaged his eleven-year old body. As he walked ahead in the snow, he began to wobble, and sway. He coughed, and she saw little blood drops fall upon the snow.
And then, he fell with them. She didn’t even register death anymore, not after Sobibor and a winter spent in Butugychag. She tried not to think of her own health. The crowd looked back, and a few men rushed back. He’d join the other corpses in the forest. Wolfovich was lucky. His corpse wouldn’t last long enough to be food in the winter, when supplies inevitably failed to come in.
She kept trudging on. She didn’t want to go to ersatz seder, but food was food. The bread wasn’t matzah, they had terrible vodka instead of wine, and barely anything else, but it beat having to eat irradiated corpse-flesh. Hopefully the building held up; the wind was particularly bad tonight.
She passed some barracks; the new guards were beating someone up, from what she could hear. Moscow no longer sent willing guards, for they died from radiation as much as prisoners did. She heard German -- apparently Stalin was using Hitler’s leftovers. She saw Gunter, the former SS man, standing aloofly as they beat the man. He was the only good conversation she ever got in the damn place. He reminded her of Him.
The guards weren’t evil men, necessarily; she had no time for the sweeping moralism of the others, the weeping and the gnashing of teeth. They were prisoners too, and before that, average men, mere cogs in a machinery of death operated from above.
She finally approached the dining hall, drab and grey, barely holding up in the harsh Siberian weather. The wind was at a lull currently; otherwise, the doors and the windows would be rattling, cheap as they were. As she opened the door, she noticed a bloody, smeared handprint on the left side of the door. She tutted at the symbolism, and went inside.
She headed for the center of the room, for the third table from the right, and sat discretely in between some prisoners she didn’t know. She just wanted to eat and get out -- or, rather, get “seder” over as quickly as possible. She didn’t care for tradition, but the farce was even more annoying.
There was no wine for the Kaddish, only the Soviet Union’s worst vodka, like Butugychag in a bottle. Some grey substance passed for meat; a sign noted it was pork, venison, and veal, although she definitely doubted the latter. There were hard, black rolls, stale and crusty and quite possibly rotted, as was typical. There was horseradish, which surprised her -- Butugychag didn’t normally have food beyond the basics.
Oh, well. It was better than what they ate in the winter.
Emmanuel Goldstein, ersatz-rebbe, got up in front of the assembled Jews, and began the Seder. As his voice began to drone, she tuned out, and attempted to eat the food -- if it could be called that -- in front of her.
As everyone drank at the end of the Kaddish, so did she. The vodka tasted even more awful than normal, and she swore she felt her throat dissolving. Was she thirsty enough to keep drinking? Probably. And so, she drank her cups.
Her vision began to blur, and she tuned out much of the rest. She registered, barely, the plagues, pronounced with exaggeration as always by the inmates. She didn’t quite realize the “seder” was, in its ersatz way, completely out of order.
And as her vision darkened and the taste of bad vodka lingered on her tongue, a sudden bang brought her back to the rest of the world. The wind had finally bust open the door, just in time for people to start fighting over food.
“Who has the afikoman, the bread! Who’s been stealing food!”
“It was the Gypsies or the Tatars!”
“No, you idiot, they’ve been dead or gone for months! I bet it was you, Eli! Eli the weasel!”
Eli attempted to protest his own innocence. In fact, although no one realized it, there had never been bread. They had hallucinated the existence of bread, but any real bread had long since been apportioned to the guards. But hunger did not know the constraints of reason, and so they threw Eli to the ground and started beating him. Goldstein got knocked over, and hit his head on a bench rather hard.
Hannah did not stir -- she barely had the energy, in her weakened state. She swore she saw the guard Ilya Timurovich enter with Gunter to break up the fight, but in any case Eli was dead, ripped limb from limb. Just another fight in the gulag.
It was then that the crowd noticed Goldstein’s fall -- and the blood pooling around his skull. Ilya Timurovich was called back in, to go send the corpse to the crematorium. People murmured to themselves, and someone, drawing upon spirit no one had any right to have, struck up a song. No one seemed to care about the dead -- in this place of constant death, no one had time to be interrupted by such things.
For this night was, despite itself, different from all other nights. And tonight, the prisoners of Butugychag would sing a song of gratitude to God. Hannah hated these songs, much as she had learned to hate hope itself. 7 years she had lived in gulags, and she had never gotten used to the songs, particularly of this holiday. Singing of freedom from exile in the gulag -- pah!
She got up from the table, and stumbled out into the cold, the sounds echoing on the wind.
Ilu hotzianu mimitzrayim, v'lo asah bahem sh'fatim,
It had not been enough that God had sent them out of Egypt. It had not been enough that God had given them a Holy Land. It had not been enough that God had ended the Babylonian exile. It had not been enough that the oil of the lamp had lasted for eight nights.
Ilu harag et b'choreihem, v'lo natan lanu et mamonam,
It could not be enough -- for they had been slaves in Rome. It could not be enough, for they were exiled from the Rhine. It could not be enough, for Spain had expelled and converted them. It could not be enough, that the Tsar had ruled over them. It could not be enough, that the Tsar had fallen. It could not be enough, for Hitler had sent them all to die. It could not be enough, that Stalin defeated Hitler.
Ilu shika tzareinu b'tocho, v'lo sipeik tzorkeinu bamidbar arba'im shana,
It was not enough, for Stalin had declared them rootless cosmopolitans. It would never be enough, for they died unseen by the world, here in Butugychag. It would never be enough, for Israel had fallen at the hands of the Arabs. It could never be enough, for he had made the nation of Israel slaves unto the nations, and allowed the goyim to make a charnelhouse of their dwelling-places, and a Holocaust of their children.
And as Hannah darkly reflected upon the past, she stopped and collapsed against the side of a building. She was feeling rather tired tonight.
The wind was picking up -- her blood seemed to fly sideways as she coughed. Her vision blackened once again, and she saw she saw Camp Gurs in France, and her mother being led away onto a different train. And she saw Bergen-Belsen, and Sobibor, and the numbers on her arm burnt like the flames of the crematorium. And she saw the Red Army troops liberating the camps, and she saw the new trains, shipping her to Turkestan and Mongolia and finally Butugychag.
Ilu natan lanu et hatorah, v'lo hichnisanu l'eretz yisra'eil,
And then the world returned to her, for a moment, and she saw Gunter again. Except it was His face, returned to her. And she saw the world as it had been in her younger years, when she was in love, and he was not yet a Nazi.
And she cried out, weakly, “Martin! Martin!”, and slumped down. A smile returned to her face, for the first time in decades. Gunter grew closer, as she rested against the metal siding. She felt warmth again.
Tonight was different from all other nights, for tonight she was delivered from her suffering. For God had finally allowed her, at last, to die.
Dayenu.
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