watch the endless traffic across the Russo-Polish border in both directions, some Jews seeking the promised land in Bialystok and Russia, others yearning to return to their Polisn homeland. Ultimately, the Soviet authorities required all refu- gees in Soviet-occupied territory to obtain a Soviet passport and become citizens of Russia. Those who obeyed this regulation were permitted to travel to the Soviet interior. Those refusing were arrested and ban- ished to Siberia. Entire Jewish families were sent away to remote detention farms, while individuals were dis- patched to camps in various parts of the Soviet north, where disfavored Russians were also incarcerated. For the most part, many of the emigrants did not want to have passports because Soviet citizens were not permit- ted to live in border areas near Poland, a category into which Bialystok fell. At the end of April 1940, almost overnight, Rus- sian secret police surrounded all the places where the refugees hid, including the batei midrashim and commu- nal institutions. Most were arrested, taken to the rail- road in Bialystok and loaded into trains. They were transported to remote areas in Siberia and other bru- tally cold places in the Soviet Union. The same night several thousand native Bialystoker Jews were also apprehended, as well as non-Jews, and exiled. The rea- son for these forced transfers was that Jews in Bialystok had Soviet passports, were considered citizens and were not allowed to live in the city, which was a border area. Nonetheless, a number of Jewish refugees con- tinued to live in Bialystok illegally, despite the April banishments. But even this ended on June 19, 1941, shortly before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Local authorities in Bialystok, wishing once and for all to rid the city of ‘“‘unstable elements,’ conducted a lightning raid on Jews and non-Jews. Most of those arrested were leaders and activists of various Zionist and Bundist organizations, clergy, erstwhile rich people, manufacturers, homeowners, peasants and anyone else the authorities suspected. Most of the men arrested were sent to prison. Their wives and children were taken to the railroad station and exiled to the Russian interior. When the Nazis retook Bialystok, these impri- soned men were at first freed and then liquidated by Hitler’s henchmen. A Temporary Home for Jewish Writers and Artists A number of writers who came to Bialystok with the Jewish expatriates from Poland joined the staff of the new Soviet-controlled newspaper, Bialystoker Stern. This paper had an unmistakable Communist orienta- tion, because of its sponsorship and because most of its top staff were Jews from the Soviet Union. Later on, when it became known that the newly arrived Polish Jewish journalists had previously been Zionists and Bundists, they were unceremoniously fired. Jewish actors from Poland fared somewhat better. They 54 received many opportunities to appear as guest stars in Russian theaters. The Russian Jewish writers told their Polish Jewish counterparts that before the latter could expect to be accepted into their profession, they would have to learn about “Soviet reality.” : Because the Jewish writers from Poland lived in constant fear of arrest for their Zionist, Bundist or 1611 gious backgrounds, and because they were not hired for suitable work, most of them finally applied for travel to the Russian interior. Others managed to reach Wilno, from which they later escaped into the free world. Perhaps the most disturbing fact about the Bialy- stoker Stern is that it deliberately concealed the Nazi inhumanity against the Jews in Poland. Until 1941 the friendship treaty between Germany and_ Russia remained in effect. This meant that the Soviet Union stood silent and even acquiesced in the brutal treatment of the Jews by the Nazis. To be sure, the Bialystoker Jews knew what was going on through the grapevine, every morsel of news disseminated by whisper. But the Jewish newspaper dared not publish anything critical about Germany, much less expose how the Nazi |-זטמז‎ derers beat, tortured, robbed, humiliated and perse- cuted Polish Jewry. The famous Jewish writer, poet and playwright, Mojsze Broderzon of Lodz, who was one of the war refugees in Bialystok at the time, complained bitterly: ““A Jewish newspaper in a Jewish city, several kilometers from the German murder inferno, refuses to devote one line or even one word to the gruesome expe- riences of Jews on the other side of the border, in Poland where Jewish blood is being spilled with abandon.” | The Jewish writers from Warsaw, Lodz and other places who fled to Bialystok knew the true nature of “Soviet reality’ and the dim prospects for Jews within it. Only after the war, did many of them finally publish memoirs about the bitter environment in which exiled Jews found themselves in Russian-oecupied Bialystok. One poet, Josef Rubinsztejn, wrote a poem about Bia- lystok in the first weeks after the outbreak of World War II. The following are excerpts from the poem: Bialystok