As the train pulled into the Iraqi border police station, the lanky Jewish boy at the window became more and more nervous. The bulging package under his robes felt heavy like lead.
In the history of the Holocaust, the Sobibor death camp in Eastern Poland has remained something of a footnote, a place where 260,000 Jews were murdered, as opposed to at least 1.1 million in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Having operated for just 18 months and closed long before the Allied victory in May 1945, Sobibor, like its victims, disappeared almost without a trace.
With the demise of the former Soviet Union and the fall of communism in the early \’90s, the story of Soviet Jewry\’s battle for survival appears to be ancient history. Yet one of the truly remarkable books of our time is the autobiography of one of the famous refuseniks, Yosef Mendelevitch, who struggled valiantly for his right to be Jewish in Communist Russia. Mendelevitch titled his autobiography \”Mevzah Hatunah,\” which translates from Hebrew as \”Operation Wedding.\”
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