What We Need to Remember

At the age of five, Anatoly Sharansky experienced his first miracle. Joseph Stalin, busily fanning the flames of the “Jewish doctors plot” conspiracy and planning a mass deportation of Soviet Jews, was suddenly struck by a stroke and died days later. Young Anatoly’s father, a journalist who knew much that Soviet state propaganda would never reveal, secretly informed his son of the significance of what had occurred:

Dad took me aside, made sure that no one was around (we then lived in a communal apartment), and said that a miracle had happened. The miracle that saved the Jews from the destruction that was being prepared…. But he asked us, me and my older brother, who was then 7 years old, to behave like everyone else. And I remember that then in the kindergarten I cried with everyone and sang along with all the songs about Stalin’s beloved. And I did not know who cries sincerely, and who cries like me. This was the beginning of my double life of a Soviet man.

Only years later, following his own Jewish journey, did Sharansky understand what his father had meant, in that officially atheist society, by quietly referring to Stalin’s death as a “miracle.” The stroke occurred on the holiday of Purim in the year 1953, and just as in the Book of Esther, the anti-Semitic intentions of a modern-day Haman were suddenly undone.