PURELY - MMENTARY

Challenge From The North

Continued from Page 2

the development of the university's li-
brary pertaining to the Holocaust ...
Your financial support for the develop-
ment of this collection is extremely
generous and welcome."
While much is hereby added to the
glory of the notable services rendered by
the Cohodas family to this nation, the
state of Michigan and to Jewry, with
many gifts made by them to Northern
Michigan University, the establishment
of the Holocaust Information Center is,
as indicated, a call to action by all their
fellow citizens. Hopefully, the other uni-
versities Bill Cohodas contacted will fol-
low the NMU example.
Michigan Jews now have an obliga-
tion to encourage the NMU example and
the Cohodas pioneering tasks.
The Cohodas-inaugurated movement
earns commendation and gratitude from
all of us. It especially demands fullest
support.

Another Act Of Horror
Exposed: The USSR 'Ditch
Of Humans' Conscience

There is no end to the exposures of
the crimes of the last war: the guilt of
the Germans, the conscience of mankind.
The Cohodases of Marquette, Mich., and
the exposers of guilt everywhere have
much more to reveal; there is much more
to account for.
The latest of the revelations comes
from Moscow, the USSR. The story is
about the poet Andrei Voznesensky who

has published an article commemorating
the sufferings of Soviet Jews during
World War II. The subject was long sup-
pressed by the authorities.
The revelation is in an article in the
New York Times, Oct. 20, in which the
Moscow correspondent, Philip Taubman,
states that the poet, publishing the ac-
count of horror in Yunost, a youth maga-
zine, took advantage of the telling of "in-
creased artistic freedom under Mikhail
S. Gorbachev."
Voznesensky's article was entitled
"The Ditch: A Spiritual Trial," dealing
with the 1941 massacre of 12,000 Soviet
citizens in the Crimea, the Black Sea
peninsula. Revealed in the article is "the
recent plundering of their mass graves"
by Soviet citizens. Most of the victims,
the author asserts, were Jews.
The article "reflects at length on the
long-forgotten massacre and the callous
behavior of the grave robbers and the
authorities who tolerated their crime."
The expose emphasizes that most of
the victims in the massacre were Jews
and "without stating so explicity,
suggests that the looting was tolerated
for that reason."
Such is the indictment of Russian of-
ficialdom's recollection of the war,
"which treats the killing of Soviet Jews
as a minor chapter and discounts the
anti-Semitic character of Nazi at-
rocities." That's how Philip Taubman re-
fers to the Voznesensky's expressed out-
rage of this forgotten occurrence in the
last war.
The "forgetfulness" serves as a re-

minder of the manlier in which the mass
murder of 140,000 Jews who were buried
alive at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev,
the Ukrainian capital, was ignored, and
the facts are also being revealed be-
latedly.
The horror-creating report in the
NYTimes by Philip Taubman is so
able as a documentary, bringing to
an ignored but most important chapter
of the Holocaust that is too significant to
be treated lightly. Taubman states in his
report:

Mr. Voznesensky describes
his horror at finding the looted
grave earlier this year. Sur-
rounded by the unearthed
detritus of the dead, including
blackened skulls, clothing and
hair.
The grave is located outside
Simferopol, the Crimean capital.
"Tired from the sun, we
walked slowly away from the
highway," he wrote in an open-
ing section he called the after-
word.
And suddenly, what is this?
On the path through the green
field, there is a black rectangle of
a freshly dug well. The earth is
still damp. Beyond it is another.
Around them are heaps of
smoke-blackened bones, rotten
clothing."
Mr. Voznesensky said in an
interview that he had received
hundreds of letters from readers

Maxim Gorky As Libertarian

Continued from Page 2

self of vital significance, editor Schap-
pes added to it an important valuation
of Gorky and another excerpt from his
speech. "Maxim Gorky, March. 14,
1868-June 18, 1986," written by Max
Rosenfeld, merits consideration. Its full
text is as effective and impressive as
the reproduced public address by
Gorky. Rosenfeld wrote:
Maximovitch
Alex ei
Peshkov — who gave himself
the nom de plume Maxim Gorky
(bitter, as in "bitter fate") —
was born into a poor Russian
peasant family in Nizhni-
Novgorod. When he died he was
one of the most popular writers
in the world, considered so im-
portant in the Soviet Union that
Joseph Stalin was one of his
pallbearers. Worker and vag-
abond in his youth, self-
educated, he had fought for the
Revolution and had been ar-
rested, had become a close
friend of Lenin's and yet made
Soviet officialdom almost as
nervous as he had the Tsarist
authorities.
He wrote stories defending
Jews ("Pogrom," "Cain and Ar-
temis") and in 1901 helped raise
funds for Jewish famine vic-
tims. After the Kishinev pogrom
in 1903, Gorky was among the
first to condemn it publicly. In
his play Zhid (never performed)
the protagonist is a Zionist. In
1906, on a tour of the U.S. to
raise money for the anti-Tsarist
cause, he addressed the mass
meeting at which he made the
speech printed in this issue. In
1916 he coedited Th,e Sh,ield, an

Maxim Gorky

anthology of statements from Rus-
sian literature defending Jewish
rights. He was a great admirer of
the Hebrew poet Haim Nachman
Bialik and the Yiddish writers
Sholem Aleichem and Sholem
Asch.
In 1919 the Soviet republic
was being attacked by internal
enemies who used anti-Semitism as
one of their weapons. At that criti-
cal juncture Maxim Gorky again
raised his voice in defense of both
the Jews and Soviet power. Yet his
blunt declaration (of which there
was a mass printing) has not been
included in his 32-volume Col-
lected Works. The Soviet Yiddish

20_ Friday, November 14, 1986 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

writer A. Priblude, coming
across a reference to it, finally
tracked it down in two pam-
phlets published in 1920. Gorky
challenged his Russian
brothers: "You will say I was
`bought off.' Yes, in my youth I
was 'bought off by that small,
ancient Jewish people, bought
off by its steadfast struggle for
life ... And in the struggle for
Russia's freedom the Jewish in-
telligentsia has spilled its blood
no less than we have ...
Brothers, I am being sharp with
you because we need to cleanse
the Russian soul of dirt and lies.
You need to understand that the
Jewish people is divided into
classes, just as you are ...
Naturally, not all • Jews are
saints. But who are you to talk
about justice and honor and
conscience — you who sullied
yourself during the Revolution
with thievery and bribery? On
your banners you write
`Brotherhood of Peoples' but
you can't even be brotherly to
yourselves!
"Comrades and citizens:
Come to your senses! Don't
blame your troubles on your
neighbors, but on yourselves ...
Be fair and honest, then people
will believe you, will support
you, and you will be victorious!"
Maxim Gorky already rates proper
inclusion in all Jewish encyclopedic an-
thologies. The reproduced texts of his
speeches surely add to the appreciation
of an eminent Russian's liberalism. He
is not and surely should not be forgot-
ten.

since the work appeared in the
July issue of Yunost, a youth
magazine.
"A year ago, it would have
been impossible to publish this
work," Mr. Voznesensky said.
Twenty-five years ago an-
other Russian poet, Yevgeny Yev-
tushenko, created a stir when he
published a poem about the Nazi
slaughter of more than 140,000
Soviet citizens, most of them
Jews, at Babi Yar, a ravine near
Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.
The 1961 poem, called "Babi
Yar," was sharply criticized by
the authorities for depicting the
massacre as primarily directed
against Jews, even though
Mr.Yevtushenko, in the version
of the poem published here, in-
cluded non-Jews among the vic-
tims.
Official Soviet histories of
Babi Yar, and the war in general,
often gloss over the anti-Semitic
nature of many Nazi activities.
Mr. Voznesensky said in the
interview that he first learned
about the massacre and looting
of the grave when he heard ear-
lier this year about the unpub-
licized trial and conviction of
several grave robbers in Sim-
feropol in 1984.
Based on what he heard, he
said, he wrote a poem called
"Greed."
Then this April, during a visit
to the region, he asked a taxi
driver to take him to the grave
site. There he discovered that the
plundering of graves was con-
tinuing.
Because the massacre took
place over two nights in De-
cember 1941, the Nazi troops did
- not have time to strip the bodies
of jewelry and gold teeth, Mr.
Voznesensky said.
Checking the trial records,
Mr. Voznesensky said he found
that the grave robbers, including
a Moscow physician, worked at
night by the light of car head-
lights.
He wrote: "On the first day of
the trial, the courtroom was said
to be full of curious individuals,
attentive to the location of the
grave. On the second day it was
empty — they had rushed off to
utilize the information."
In the Simferopol archives he
found only a brief mention of the
massacre.
He quotes the archival record
in the article: "Nazi-fascist oc-
cupants, on the 10th kilometer,
killed peaceful people, most of
Jewish nationality."
It is the only mention of Jews
in the long article, but Russians
said that in a culture accustomed
to finding great meaning in small
phrases, the reference was suffi-
cient to signal Mr. Voznesensky's
purpose.
Mr. Voznesensky wrote that
he found the grave, a tank ditch
at the time of the massacre, was
marked by a "squalid" monu-
ment that noted the area was
occupied by German forces in
1941 and 1942 and that thousands
of citizens had been killed.
The monument, in disrepair,
"suggests of oblivion much more
than remembrance," he wrote.
"There was no mention that
most victims were Jews," he said