51^st Anniversary - 08.12.2003

 

The Night of the Murdered Poets

Tuesday, August 12, marks the 51^st anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Poets. Last year, NCSJ hosted a ceremony to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the incident, and republished a booklet that had been written for the 20th anniversary, when the results of the original event were still in force. The booklet contains reprints of the poems and brief  biographies of the murdered writers.

In 1952, as part of a campaign to rid the Soviet Union of Jewish culture, 13 Soviet Jews were framed for treason and espionage due to their involvement in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a group that Stalin himself had used to rally the support of American Jews. All were jailed, tried, convicted and subsequently put to death at Moscow's Lubyanka Prison on August 12. This incident is now referred to as the “Night of the Murdered Poets.” The 13 slain intellectuals were prominent writers and poets of the time, all of whom supported the evolving communist state.  August 12 would come to mark the end of independent Jewish culture in the Soviet Union for nearly four decades. 
 
I don't know whether I'm at home

or homeless.

I'm running, my shirt

unbuttoned, no bounds, nobody

holds me, no beginning,

no end

my body is foam

smelling of wind

Now

is my name.

– Excerpt from an untitled poem written by Peretz Markish, one of the Soviet Jews murdered on August 12, 1952