Victory Day: The Contribution of Jewish Soldiers in the Defeat of Nazism (Video)

Since 2017, Victory Day has been an official state holiday in Israel. Today, Israel and the entire Jewish people honor the memory of the heroes who fell during the Second World War. 

However, following the victory over Nazism, the role of Soviet Jews in wartime operations and defense developments, along with their sacrifices and heroism, was systematically marginalized. Efforts to counter this erasure were dismissed as “Jewish boasting” and strictly suppressed by the authorities. 

In 1946, the literary journal Znamya published Margarita Aliger’s poem “Your Victory,” which included a section dedicated to the Jews. While this chapter was subsequently banned by the state censors, it immediately began to circulate throughout the country in manuscript form. If this text, which came to be known as “We are Jews,” was discovered during searches—particularly during the state campaign against “cosmopolitanism”—it constituted sufficient grounds for arrest.

Margarita Aliger

“WE ARE JEWS”

And warming my hands in a stranger's domain,
I ventured to ask the old man to explain:
“Who are we, then?”
“We are Jews!” he replied,
“How did you dare push such knowledge aside?!”
Lorelei—the maiden of Rhine running deep,
Green, shimmering currents, half-sunken in sleep.
Where lies our offense, Heinrich Heine? Of what
Had Mendelssohn failed them, to merit their plot?
I would ask both of Marx and of Einstein, whose might
Of intellect cast such a towering light—
Perhaps to their sight did that secret unfold,
Of the guilt before time that we endlessly hold?
Levitan's canvas, so radiant and bright,
Sending those birches a delicate light;
Charlie Chaplin, who speaks from the screen far and wide—
Tell me, with which of your answers inside?
Have we not offered all that we owned,
Freely, without a demand to be loaned?
Why must the world heap on us all its blame,
Ehrenburg, Bagritsky, Svetlov, speak your name?
We lived with open hearts, holding nothing in store,
Giving our talents, our souls, and much more.
I will ask the physicians, musicians of state,
Workers of stature, both humble and great.
And the heirs of Maccabees, brave in their stance,
Sons of their fathers who stood to advance—
Thousands of Jewish men, fierce in the fight,
Leaders and soldiers in Russia’s own might:
Answer me now, for the honor and name
Of a tribe long paraded in exile and shame:
How many Jews lie in unmarked, cold ground,
Among those who fell where no glory is found?
Carrying ever that scent of disgrace,
Wailing of mothers and wives of our race:
In camps built for nothing but slaughter and dread,
Our people were shattered, shot down, and left dead!
Children crushed under the mass of a tank,
The “Jud” on the patch, and the slur used so frank.
Hardly a trace of us lingers alive,
Nothing remains that can help us survive…
We are Jews. Oh, how much in that single word lies
Of sorrow and years under turbulent skies.
If the voice of the blood is a myth of some head,
This much I know: that our blood is quite red…
With this very hue, the vile hordes of the past
Drenched the wide earth with a stain that will last,
And humanity's blood found its voice to proclaim,
In the hour of death, all its sorrow and name…