"Zimma, forgive my asking, but are you Jewish?"
Zimma stared at him, incredulous. He was transported back immediately to an Embassy party in Stockholm. He had worn a suit he had bought that morning, he remembered, a dark rich blue that exactly matched the pattern on his tie. A silk tie made in Italy. There was a young Swede at the party who had been to Washington and told American stories in English. One of them had been about the millionaire who had lost all his money in the depression. His wife had left him, his children disowned him, his house and cars were taken away, and he had nothing. One day he stood in the bread line waiting for a handout. It was a bitter day in February and he had no overcoat, so to keep himself warm he, who had had millions, wrapped himself in old newspapers, picked up at random from trash cans, and one of them was the Jewish Chronicle. As he stood waiting, in line, a Cadillac drew up by the curb and its chauffeur opened the door to a Jewish lady, snug in chinchilla, secure in diamonds, who walked down the line and gave each man a quarter. When she got to the former millionaire she saw the Jewish Chronicle wrapped across his chest.
"Forgive me for asking," she said, "but are you Jewish?" "Jesus," the former millionaire said. "That's all I needed."
And Zimma had remembered, totally, completely, the party, his suit, his tie, the young Swede and his story, and he had laughed. It was the first time anybody had laughed in that coal mine, except a guard. It was a beginning.
At first it had been enough that there were two of them. They had begun by exchanging biographies, but from the start the nostalgia was carefully rationed. They had concentrated more on the fact of their Jewishness, and how much it had contributed to their being in the camp, even after the terrifying old madman had died in Moscow, convinced till the last that Jewish doctors were poisoning him. Then Avramov began to eat with them, and he too began to talk. Avramov had lectured on political science in Riga. It had been Zimma who brought in Moskowitz, and then Avramov reported that Daniel, who had lived in his hut, would like to join, but Daniel worked in the forest. He could not come and talk in the mine. Daniel was also the camp's millionaire. He had been a soldier and had risen to the rank of major. He was strong and ruthless and had somehow stored away a little hoard of gold. One day Avramov brought word that Daniel would donate some of his gold to hiring a meeting place. Moskowitz, a former lawyer, sought an interview with the commandant of his sector of the camp. The commandant had first beaten Moskowitz, who expected it. The commandant, an Uzbek, always beat prisoners who asked for interviews. But in the end he agreed. They could meet for an hour once a week. The place they were given was a tool shed, the entirely unofficial rent a hundred rubles a month. The limit of their membership was to be ten, a number Moskowitz accepted at once. It was the number of the minyan. But they said nothing of religion. Not then.
Daniel brought a young poet with him, and the poet, Asimov, suggested Kaplan, an agronomist. Zimma produced Goldfarb, another doctor, and then Klein the singer and Zhelkov the psychologist appeared. That closed the list. By then other Jews in the camp had heard about them, and begged to join, but they would accept no more. It was the other Jews who called them the minyan: the minimum number of Jewish men who must meet together before a service can be held. The ten.
At their first meetings they talked about communism. Avramov lectured, and the rest asked questions, dialecti-cally pure questions about the dangerous fallacy of Israel and the gratifying decline in Judaic religion; questions one could address to the hidden microphone that Gabrilovich found within minutes of entering the hut. After four weeks the microphone was withdrawn; the Uzbek had found the tapes both boring and pathetic. Obviously these men hoped to have their sentences reduced by proving how deserving of rehabilitation they were. But the Uzbek knew they would never be released.
So did they. When the microphone went they talked about the world as it should be, not as it was. Avramov told them how the world need never hunger, Zhelkov told them how the human mind could develop into an instrument beyond their comprehension, Kaplan how the desert in Israel could blossom, quite literally, like a rose. Asimov related stories, Klein sang. Without books or writing materials they created something new with their voices, part seminar, part magazine. Then Gabrilovich discussed survival, their own—how to hoard their food, their sleep, their strength, to give them the best possible chance to avoid the terror of the hospital and a slow but certain death. It was Daniel, always the bravest, who asked the questions: How many of us want to survive? To their surprise, their joy, they found they all did, so long as they could meet together, and that night Klein prayed. He alone was Orthodox, he alone knew the words, but that night when Klein prayed they all prayed with him and from him took lessons in their own religion.
Daniel let two more weeks go by before he talked of escape. He had never spoken before, and at first they did not want to hear him, but Daniel had two persuasive arguments: his gold rented their meeting place, now, inevitably, nicknamed the synagogue, and on escape he was the expert, and a rule of their society was always to listen to the expert. He disarmed them at once by saying that it was inevitable that most of them would fail, but even they would achieve the reward of a quick death. For the others, the successful ones, there would be a chance to get out of the country, and if they succeeded, they could tell of their suffering and contribute to the arrival of the world as it should be. That was a debt they would owe to God. Asimov agreed at once; he was by far the youngest, and the enormous odds frightened him least. With the others it took time, but in the end they all agreed, even Kaplan, who at fifty had no chance at all. Two things persuaded them: the fact that it was a moral—even a religious—duty, and the fact that if they failed, as most of them would, death was their only punishment, and death, so long as it came quickly, was the only release that would ease them once the minyan was disbanded.
Even so, the magnitude of their task, when they began to examine it, appalled them. The camp was at Volochanka, two hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle. In its bitter winter no human being could survive outside the camp, in summer the guards were doubled, dogs roamed the spaces between the huts all night, and searchlights played at random, without predictable patterns. There were, besides, two tangles of barbed wire and machine guns mounted at each corner of the camp's perimeter. The guards, armed with tommy guns and clubs, used skis in winter and Mongolian ponies in summer. And it was all waste, all display. Until the ten men began plotting together, none of the prisoners, even the crazy ones, had even thought of escaping. There was nowhere to escape to.
They began by nourishing and training their bodies. Daniel taught them how to exercise, Klein how to develop their breathing, Gabrilovich how to work their muscles to the utmost limit of their capacity. They pooled all their possessions except Daniel's gold—that would be needed after their escape—and used them to buy food. They were ruthless about this: when food could not be bought it was stolen, and to steal prisoners' food at Volochanka meant agonizing death at the hands of other prisoners, if they were caught. Here, too, the Mosaic law operated. A life for a life. To take a man's food was to take his life. But they succeeded, and grew strong. Goldfarb taught them hygiene, and they survived the wave of typhus that swept the camp in the spring. Chance alone had kept them alive as a group through the January influenza epidemic, and they thanked God for it. Asimov developed into a bold and cunning thief and stole worn-out tools, hinges, screws that Zimma patiently transformed into wire cutters and weapons. That winter a guard fell in love with Asimov, who submitted and brought his presents into the common pool to buy food. Kaplan found a suitable patch of ground and grew flowers in it and the camp thought he was crazy as the summer slowly waned, the nights grew shorter and almost disappeared.