נאָר פֿון אַלע סאָסנעס שװימט אַרױס אַ בת-קול

About halfway through my time in Belarus, Diana and Michael Lazarus, a charming British couple, showed up to continue their ongoing project of putting up small memorials to local victims of the Holocaust in cities and shtetlekh across the country. Their visit completely captivated the Jewish community as apparently it does about twice every year, when the Lazaruses make their way to Minsk. It is then that Belarus’ Jews, often fiercely loyal to their individual organizations, put differences aside and come together to reflect on a most tragic period of their shared past.

Seeing this incredible unity, I wanted to design an elaborate project that could channel that energy, but knowing that my time in Belarus was limited for such plans, I still felt the desire to participate at least in some small way. Many people had commented that the ceremonies on the first day of the Lazarus’ trip had been meaningful, but lacked some vital element that showed that it was not only these victims’ deaths we remembered, but also the lives they led. In the end, it was decided that as per my suggestion, my fellow JSC volunteer Erica Fishbein and I would sing the Jewish Partisan anthem Zog nit keynmol (Never Say…) at the next unveiling.

The drive to the designated spot, deep in the Belarusian backwoods, was long and Erica and I took the opportunity to rehearse. Zog nit keynmol, I explained to Mrs. Lazarus, was a Yiddish song written during the Second World War, which does not lament the destruction of the Jewish people, but rather details their courage and resolve in their bloody fight against the Germans in the forests across Eastern Europe. The memorial, as it turned out, was inaccessible by car and so we trudged through the mud made viscous by the freshly melted snow until we happened upon a small, highly polished orange-burgundy stone, the same color as the pines which surrounded it.

The ceremony itself was short; several speeches from various groups detailing the tragedy and bravery of eleven people, eleven Jews who met an untimely end. Erica and I approached the grave after kaddish, shaking both from cold and emotion. Anyone who has spent time in the forests of Lithuania or Belarus knows how the trees seem impossibly tall and almost infinite in number. Sounds are somehow simultaneously hushed and magnified as eyes strain upward trying to absorb the scene. And so as we sang I imagined the words flying upward like atoms of language, lacing through the trees, colliding with old Yiddish words, those last conversations, those final I-love-you’s of these eleven people, which had silently floated for some sixty years.

There is a line towards the end of the song that I had sung numerous times before, but until this occasion it had failed to strike me so powerfully: un vu gefaln iz a shprits fun undzer blut/ shprotsn vet dort undzer gvure, undzer mut, or in English, and where a spurt of our blood fell upon the earth/ there our courage and our spirit have rebirth. And yet, though I was standing on the spot where a drop of our blood had indeed fallen, it was the song’s final refrain which truly moved those present. “Mir zaynen do!” we cried out. “We are here!” — at once a booming echo and muted whisper throughout the pines.