Borya Gammerov, Zecher Tzaddik Livrocho!

I was reading an article titled Soviet Jewish doctors dissected Hitler. The article is a complete "kasha" but at the bottom there is this paragraph:

Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn tried to rise above the argument in his book about Jews in Russia, 200 Years Together. Although Russian liberals did not agree with everything that he wrote in the book, the part devoted to the war was met with general approval. "I saw Jews fight courageously at the front. Two fearless anti-tank soldiers deserve special mention: Lieutenant Emmanuil Mazin, who was a friend of mine, and a young soldier called Borya Gammerov. The latter was called up when he was still at student. Both were wounded."

I did not read the latest Solzhenitsyn book but there are twenty pages scattered around 4 volumes of Solzhenitsyn�s monumental The Gulag Archipelago dedicated to Borya Gammerov. He was actually my relative as my grandmother�s maiden name (see post about Druya) was Gamerov. In the 70s messengers from Solzhenitsyn came to my aunt in Moscow, who was closest to Borya, but she was so paralyzed with fear that she didn�t even talk to them.

As the world celebrates the victory in WWII I want to dedicate this post to the memory of the Tzaddik! All quotes are from Gulag Archipelago.

REMBRANDT, The Blinding of Samson 1636, Oil on canvas, St�delsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt

Solzhenitsyn writes: Notwithstanding his youth, Borya Gammerov had not only fought as a sergeant in an antitank unit with those antitank 45's the soldiers had christened "Farewell, Motherland!" He had also been wounded in the lungs and the wound had not yet healed, and because of this TB had set in. Gammerov was given a medical discharge from the army and enrolled in the biology department of Moscow University. And thus two strands intertwined in him: one from his life as a soldier and the other from the by no means foolish and by no means dead students' life at war's end. A circle formed of those who thought and reasoned about the future (even though no one had given them any instructions to do so), and the experienced eye of the Organs singled out three of them and pulled them in. (In 1937, Gammerov's father had been beaten in prison or shot, and his son was hurrying along the same path). During the interrogation he had read several of his own verses to the interrogator with feeling (s vyrazheniyem). And I deeply regret that I have not managed to remember even one of them, and there is nowhere to seek them out today. Otherwise I would have cited them here. For a number of months after that my path crossed those of all three codefendants.

In a Butyrki cell, a semihospital cell, I had just stepped into the aisle and had still not seen any empty place for myself�when, approaching in a way that hinted at a verbal dispute, even at an entreaty to enter into one, came a pale, yellowish youth, with a Jewish tenderness of face, wrapped, despite the summer, in a threadbare soldier's overcoat shot full of holes: he was chilled. His name was Boris Gammerov. He began to question me; the conversation rolled along: on one hand, our biographies, on the other, politics. I don't remember why, but I recalled one of the prayers of the late President Roosevelt, which had been published in our newspapers, and I expressed what seemed to me a self-evident evaluation of it: "Well, that's hypocrisy, of course." And suddenly the young man's yellowish brows trembled, his pale lips pursed, he seemed to draw himself up, and he asked me: "Why? Why do you not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God?"

And that is all that was said! But what a direction the attack had come from! To hear such words from someone born in 1923? ... and right then it dawned upon me that I had not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been implanted in me from outside. And because of this I was unable to reply to him, and I merely asked him: "Do you believe in God?" "Of course," he answered tranquilly.

Solzhenitsyn remembers the 9th of May 1945, Victory Salut in Moscow: Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of all the Moscow prisons, we, too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and crisscrossed by the beams of searchlights.

Boris Gammerov, a young antitank man, already demobilized because of wounds, with an incurable wound in his lung, having been arrested with a group of students, was in prison that evening in an overcrowded Butyrki cell, where half the inmates were former POW's and front-line soldiers. He described this last salute of the war in a terse eight-stanza poem, in the most ordinary language: how they were already lying down on their board bunks, covered with their overcoats; how they were awakened by the noise; how they raised their heads; squinted up at the muzzle� "Oh, it's just a salute"�and then lay down again: And once again covered themselves with their coats. With those same overcoats which had been in the clay of the trenches, and the ashes of bonfires, and been torn to tatters by German shell fragments. That victory was not for us. And that spring was not for us either.

Solzhenitsyn continues about his later sojourn with Gammerov in a labor camp: Boris was weaker than I; he could hardly wield his spade, which the sticky clay made heavier and heavier, and he could hardly throw each shovelful up to the edge of the truck. Nonetheless, on the second day he tried to keep us up to the heights of Vladimir Solovyev. He had outdistanced me there too! How much of Solovyev he had already read! And I had not read even one line because of my Bessel functions. He told me whatever he remembered, and I kept trying to remember it, but I really couldn't; I didn't have the head for it at that moment.

No, how can one preserve one's life and at the same time arrive at the truth? And why is it necessary to be dropped into the depths of camp in order to understand one's own squalor? He said: "Vladimir Solovyev taught that one must greet death with gladness. Worse than here ... it won't be."

Borya was coughing. There was still a fragment of German tank shell in his lungs. He was thin and yellow, and his nose, ears, and the bones of his face had grown deathly pointed. I looked at him closely, and I was not sure: would he make it through a winter in camp? We still tried to divert our minds and conquer our situation -with thought. But by then neither philosophy nor literature was there. Even our hands became heavy, like spades, and hung down.

Boris suggested: "No, to talk . . . takes much strength. Let's be silent and think to some purpose. For example, compose verses. In our heads." I shuddered. He could write verses here and now? The canopy of death hung over him, but the canopy of such a stubborn talent hung over his yellow forehead too.

That winter Boris Gammerov died in a hospital from exhaustion and tuberculosis. I revere in him a poet who was never even allowed to peep. His spiritual image was lofty, and his verses themselves seemed to me very powerful at the time. But I did not memorize even one of them, and I can find them nowhere now, so as to be able at least to make him a gravestone from those little stones.

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn