Living under Soviet oppression was hard enough; living in Leningrad in 1943, during the Nazi onslaught was horrific. A desperate mass flight from Leningrad was gathering momentum: anything, anywhere, was better than the horrors of a fate such as this. Anyone who was able to do so fled, men, women and children, young and old, the healthy and the ailing, shrunken civilians and soldiers in uniform.
Reb Baruch Shifrin z‑l and his family left Leningrad, in a train of seventy carriages that were packed cruelly beyond capacity. The stench was such that it was almost impossible to utter a word of Torah or of prayer, and every day he would try to clamber towards a corner so that he could put on tefillin and whisper shachris.
While he was thus standing one day in his talis and tefillin, he noticed a young stranger making his way towards him. He sat down nearby, and from that moment scrutinized him constantly. He completed his morning prayers as the train slowed down at some station, and took off his tefillin.
It was time for his meager breakfast. Suddenly, three burly officers of the NKVD burst into the carriage. Pointing at him triumphantly they screamed, ‘That’s him.’ It transpired that the young naive informer who had observed him so carefully had run out when they arrived at the station to report to the Secret Police what he had seen with his own eyes: a bearded Jew with clandestine transmission apparatus mounted on his head and under his left sleeve, into which he was muttering coded communications to the German enemy.
Branded a Real-Life Spy
At last: a real-life spy, caught redhanded! Pushing their way through the bewildered crowd towards him, they seized Baruch as if he were Russia’s most dangerous criminal, and wanted to know, ‘Where’s that thing you’ve hidden away?’
His children could not understand why their father was being manhandled in such a manner, and asked what had happened. ‘Your daddy’s a German spy!’ they were answered. They hustled him off the train, and began at once to cross-examine him as to the nature of his unconventional wireless equipment.
Explaining the Concept of Tefilin
He explained that this was a pair of tefillin, that the little black boxes housed tiny parchment scrolls which bore quotations from the Bible, and that Jews wore them every morning when at prayer.
They remained unconvinced, insisting firmly that he open up the tefillin boxes so that they could confirm his story. He, of course, refused. In the course of his bargaining, he recalled that he did have one official-looking piece of paper in his pocket - a note certifying that he had worked in Leningrad for eight years without any objections from officialdom. Why then should he now be suspected of being a spy for the Germans?
Threatened to Never See His Family Again
Finally, one officer said to his friends, ‘Only five kilometers from here lives a Jew who’ll be able to clear up this whole thing for us. In the meantime, we’ll let the train go on its way, and our obstinate friend here will never see his wife and children again.’
Again, they began their interrogation about the contents of his tefillin. Desperate, Baruch shouted from the bottom of his heart, and at the top of his voice: Shema Yisroel, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad! The officers gaped at him as if he was out of his mind. ‘What does that mean?’ they demanded.
Translated into Russian the Words of Shema Yisroel
So, he repeated the sentence in Russian - but again at the top of his voice, so that the message should not be lost on them. Seeing that he was not budging from his stance, they gave him up as a lost cause and let him climb back up to the train just in the nick of time.
His sole regret was that the only piece of paper that attested to his identity was no longer in his hands and he had to remain fixed to his exact place in the train, because without papers of any kind, he would be hounded at every step by uniformed criminals: ‘Who are you? What’s your name?’
Arriving in Khazakstan
After twenty days and nights without the most minimal human living conditions, without even clean air to breathe, locked in a carriage stoked with the anguish and stench of the ailing and starved, tossed about like a splintered ship on a turbulent ocean, the train finally arrived at Khazakstan in Asia Minor.
When they alighted at the last station, they were asked what their destination was. They simply did not know what to answer. The same prospect seemed to await them wherever they would choose to turn - famine, disease, unrest. For four years, they lived in a town called Alma-Ata, before finally escaping the Russian bear in 1946 and ascending to Zion, to the holy city of Jerusalem.