Circassians saved dozens of Jewish children from the Nazis: what went wrong

Until recently, everyone in Circassia knew and repeated this story. About how local Muslims saved Jewish children doomed to death. The latter were taken from besieged Leningrad along the Road of Life in 1942. On the way, the Nazis searched for them and shot them.

The inhabitants of the mountain village of Beslenei, at the risk of their own lives, hid the little Jews and passed them off as their children. Dark, dark-skinned, similar. 32 people. From five to fourteen years.

The one-armed conscript who accompanied the blockade survivors wiped the sweat from his forehead. There were fierce battles beyond the pass. It was necessary to go further with the children, to Georgia. But not in time.

“Guys, be quiet, we are passing through an aul where Circassian thugs live, we are not asking them for anything,” the one-armed man warned, just in case. But residents were already pouring out into the street. They carried honey, sour milk, and unleavened cakes. They gave visitors small pieces so that they would not overeat. Two spoons for those exhausted by hunger is the limit, three is death.

“I remember well how they ate,” Abdul Kardanov, an old resident of those places, told me. “Some are already swollen from hunger. The strongest ones got off the cart on their own. Others lay and quietly looked at the sky. Their train was bombed in Armavir, almost everyone died, the survivors wandered for more than a month, they would still have died of hunger, even if they had not been shot. I was 17 years old, and my heart sank with compassion.”

— A neighbor came running and shouted: “They’re giving away boys on the street!” – Kara Adzinova, a resident of Besleney, later said. “Our grandfather was in the mountain pastures. I chose a small, puny one with narrow shoulders. It was recorded by Ramazan Adzinov.

– Will you be my son Moussa? – 80-year-old Kukra bent over the emaciated Marik with huge black eyes.

The three main people in Besleney held council all night: the elder, the chairman of the village council and the chairman of the collective farm. There was only one question on the agenda: how to save the little Leningrad Jews? It was decided to write everyone down in the household register as if they were born here, give them local names, local parents, and forget who they are and where they come from. Children were supposed to be silent and not communicate with each other.

The Germans were intensively searching for survivors from the Leningrad train. The house where little Marik settled was raided two weeks later.

“I have a son,” said old Kukra, looking down. “Here he is,” and quickly hid the boy behind her skirt.

“You’re lying,” the Hitlerite grinned and said in Russian, syllable by syllable. – What kind of Circassian is this? Where are you from, boy? I’ll give you a chocolate candy if you tell the truth…

“I looked at the fascist and was silent,” said Mussa Yakubovich.

“My son is a mountaineer, he doesn’t understand Russian,” the old woman’s heart was relieved. So the German left with nothing.

In order to save his adopted children, Elder Murzabek Okhtov hired himself as a headman to the Nazis. “When Okhtov walked along Beslenei, we teenagers hid – it seemed that he knew everything about us: who smokes, who hooligans,” said old resident of the village, grandfather Aslanbek. – Can you imagine what it was like for him to work for the Germans? If he had made even one mistake, the entire village would have been shot. It was Murzabek who, with his own hand, made entries in Besleney’s household book about the Jewish children and destroyed their original documents…”

While retreating, the Nazis burned the bridge across Bolshaya Zelenchuk – but none of the adopted children were harmed. 31 boys and one girl remained unharmed. Who knew what it cost their saviors. Victory has died down. Many children under the siege were found by relatives and taken home.

But there were those who remained.

“I am Circassian! — Vladimir Saidovich Tseev said with a strong Adyghe accent when meeting me. “And my wife, Lyalya, is Circassian, and my children are Circassian.” He was proud of his nationality and his past. And in his Circassian children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, it turns out that Jewish blood also flows? How to separate it?

“I washed my foster mother over the basin when she could no longer walk in her old age,” said Ramazan-Viktor Adzinov. – It was fading away, dear. One day, relatives came, and I changed her clothes and put her to bed. My nephew wanted to throw himself at my feet and kiss me. “Why,” I answer. “It’s an honor to wash the woman who saved my life.”

Over time, like the Caucasus mountains covered with snow, this almost biblical story became overgrown with legends. About the salvation of Jewish children by the Muslim people.

Many springs have passed since then in Besleney.

The elders died, one by one the former little Leningraders with foreign Islamic names left… There was no one left. At one time, I managed to meet the last of that convoy, already gray-haired old men.

When I wrote an article about Besleney in the mid-2000s, mentioning that in the neighboring Karachay village they did not want to accept Jewish children, an angry letter immediately flew from there: “Yes, as much as you can. We also saved blockade survivors. It’s just not as well known as the one about the much-hyped Besleney.”

Back then we proudly competed in mercy. Now, it turns out, in hatred?

Where does this misanthropy of recent years come from? Which spreads around the world like an evil virus, capturing and burning all new living spaces, leaving nothing behind.

It’s simple: if you throw love into the ground, you will reap love and sow hatred. — you will reap a harvest of hatred. So far the latter is winning. And it seems to me that this is not just about recent events in Dagestan. They, too, are only a consequence of general frenzy and dehumanization. There are no losers or winners, right or wrong.

Likewise, the descendants of Holocaust victims in Israel do not feel much pity for the “girls in the red coat” from the Gaza Strip. As if we ourselves had never experienced something like this… And there is no one to stop us.