In late November 1947, a man arrived in the city of Ananyev, the district center in the north of the Odessa region. The man immediately headed to the Ananyev district military enlistment office to obtain a military ID, which was issued to him in exchange for a certificate. The certificate stated that its holder, Mendel Aronovich Beylin, had been released shortly before arriving in Ananyev from the Sevdvinlag and had the right to settle in the Odessa region.

Experienced bricklayer Mendel Beylin was able to find work at a local orphanage as a laborer just a few weeks after his arrival. After working there for a year, in December 1948, he became a cashier-accountant in the shoemaking workshop of the cooperative "Kultpobut".

Hardworking and very meticulous, he got along well with his colleagues and was highly regarded by the management. However, on May 9, 1949, he was arrested by the employees of the Odessa Regional Directorate of the MGB on suspicion of committing political crimes.

During interrogations, the man remained firm and dignified. It was evident that the routine of being an inmate in Odessa Prison No. 1 and the lamp on the investigator's desk were not new to him. MGB Investigator Senior Lieutenant Antonovsky was bored; there was no need to "crack" Mendel Beylin, as a "repeat offender". In such cases, the evidentiary basis was secondary. Across the country, former political prisoners were being rounded up, most of them receiving new sentences for old cases and being sent into exile. The same fate befell Beylin: using materials from old cases for which the man had already served time several times, Antonovsky decided to bring him to justice for membership in an anti-Soviet organization and counter-revolutionary agitation.

A special meeting under the Minister of State Security with the Odessa security officers agreed. At the hearing held on September 21, 1949, it was decided to send Mendel Beylin to settle in the North Kazakhstan region. For Mendel Aronovich Beylin, this was already his fourth sentence. And once again – for Zionism.

Mendel Beylin was born in May 1913 in the Ukrainian city of Nezhin in the northern Chernigov Governorate. Aron Zalmanovich and Zelda Mendelevna Gindina had five sons: Levi-Gershon, Shalom, Dov, Avraham, and the youngest, Menachem-Mendel Tzvi, or simply Mendel.

The hundred-year-old parental home of Mendel Beylin was located in the center of the Jewish quarter. Adjacent to it was a small shop, which served as the family's main source of income. The Beylins also earned small additional income by renting out part of the house.

Beylin Senior was an observant Hasidic Jew, so Mendel observed the Sabbath from an early age. However, in addition to the traditional Kiddush, his father's visits to the synagogue in special attire, and the Sabbath meal, the Beylins also sang Hebrew songs on the Sabbath. This custom was introduced by Mendel's brother Dov, who in his youth joined the Zionist movement. Soon, other brothers joined him. The youngest, Mendel, eagerly listened to their conversations with their parents.

In the Beylin household, not only the brothers but also religious Jews who visited them on holidays talked about Eretz-Israel. One of them, a "sofer stam," a scribe of sacred texts, particularly enthralled everyone with tales of his visit to Palestine. Little Mendel especially liked the story about the "golden apples" – oranges – which no one in Nezhin had ever seen. At the age of 12, secretly from his father, Mendel began reading the works of the historian Heinrich Graetz, the writings of Chaim Nachman Bialik and Abram Mapu, as well as those of one of the early Zionists, Perez Smolenskin.

When Mendel turned five, he started attending a cheder, where he studied with his peers under the melamed Mordechai Esh. After the October Revolution of 1917, when authorities banned the study of religious disciplines and the Hebrew language, Esh's students switched to underground classes. In 1923, Mendel's parents sent him to a private tutor. There, he was able to study not only religious subjects but also mathematics.

At the outset of the Civil War, after the atrocities committed by the "Whites," Mendel's older brother Levi-Gershon passed away. In 1918, bandits raided the house, taking away all valuables and food; miraculously, the family survived. On another occasion, a group of White officers, billeted in the house across the street, got drunk and started banging on doors, demanding that the girls who rented rooms from the Beylins be brought out for their pleasure. While a civilian patrol approached, attempting to calm the soldiers, Aron Zalmanovich, who was trying to reason with them, was brutally beaten.

The trials he endured undermined his health. In 1928, Beylin Senior passed away. Soon after, Mendel's two older brothers, activists of the "HeHalutz" organization, were arrested and sent into exile to remote regions of the Soviet Union. Dov ended up in the Urals, while Avraham was sent to Kazakhstan. A year later, they were allowed to leave the country and repatriate to Eretz-Israel.

The responsibility of supporting his mother and managing the household fell on the shoulders of 15-year-old Mendel. After closing the family shop, burdened with exorbitant taxes, Mendel first went to work at a cucumber pickling enterprise, and then completed a course in training for construction workers. As a young Zionist, Beylin decided to purposefully go into construction: he believed that Jews should have useful skills to then build the state in Palestine with their own hands.

At the age of 17, Beylin moved to Moscow. He was invited there by a friend of Dov's, who shared the same fervent Zionist beliefs. After working as a porter at the railway station, Mendel found a job in the construction of the Moscow sewer system. Working eight-hour shifts in the cold, in the evenings the young man attended meetings with his new friends – activists of the underground Zionist organization "Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa'ir."

The first counselor of the young man was Esther Krasnogorskaya, his brother Avraham's girlfriend. The group "Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa'ir," to which Mendel Beylin belonged, was called "Snif." Each "Snif" cell consisted of four to five people. At the head of each cell stood an adult "counselor" who told his charges about the situation in Palestine and the entire Jewish world, about Jewish history and culture, decisions of the World Zionist Organization, and much more. In order to conceal their activities from the authorities and avoid leaks of information, members of one cell did not know who was in other cells and on which days their meetings took place.

Soon, Mendel Beylin was appointed as the leader of one of the cells. Beylin's Shomrim gathered once a month, each time in a different place. The leaders of the cells occasionally met separately. Representatives of the movement's center participated in these meetings, giving lectures and teaching counselors the methods of underground activity.

However, in the conditions of total denunciation and the infiltration of the youth environment by the GPU agents, all these precautionary measures turned out to be insufficient.

On January 16, 1931, Mendel Beylin, a member of the organization led by Nahum Fisher, Moshe Khoroshukhin, and Yakov Derbitsky, met in an underground apartment with Grisha Vysokyi, a member of the movement's center. Late in the evening, there was a loud knock on the door. Before Moshe Khoroshukhin could open it, GPU agents burst into the room and ordered everyone to stay where they were. All participants of the underground meeting found themselves in the Lubyanka prison.

During the search, Mendel's wallet was found in his pocket, containing a note describing Eretz-Israel and a sheet of carbon paper. After Lubyanka, he was transferred to Butyrka prison and placed in a cell with 96 people, where, in addition to Mendel, activists from the "HeHalutz" movement and a representative of the center of the Zionist movement in Moscow were held. Mendel spent about a month in the cell. It was especially difficult for him because he received no news from his mother. Later, it was revealed that his mother had come to Moscow almost immediately after his arrest and contacted "Politpom," an organization led by Ekaterina Peshkova, the first wife of the famous writer Maxim Gorky. They couldn't release the 17-year-old Zionist, but towards the end of his detention, he finally received a message and a small package from his mother.

On March 20, 1931, a Special Meeting found Mendel Beylin guilty of membership in an illegal Zionist organization and sentenced him to three years of exile in Eastern Siberia. The journey lasted four weeks. Upon arriving in Irkutsk with other prisoners, Mendel was transferred to the city prison for ten days, where political prisoners had to organize self-defense to protect themselves from criminals.

The final destination was the city of Yeniseisk. Political prisoners were allowed to move freely around the town and its surroundings, but once a week, they were required to report to the local branch of the OGPU. Living in a commune with Zionists Chaim Rudik and Shaya Glantz, Mendel initially worked at a sawmill, where logs from the surrounding forests were delivered. After several months of work, the friends organized a cooperative for house repairs.

After some time, Mendel received a letter from his uncle Dov-Ber from Nezhin, his mother's brother. From it, he learned that his mother had received a certificate sent to her by her older sons and had gone to Palestine to be with them. In 1927, Shalom went there as a "replacement," followed by Dov and their mother. Of the entire family, Mendel Beylin was the only one left in the USSR.

Dreaming of rejoining his family, the political prisoner repeatedly submitted applications requesting his punishment to be replaced with exile to Palestine. However, by this time, such "replacements" were granted very rarely. Mendel's requests were denied.

In his free time during exile, he studied Russian and mathematics. Among the new exiles who arrived in Yeniseisk were Zionists who quickly became his closest friends: Hillel Kaplinsky and Shmuel-Yosef Lyabuk. In September 1932, the Yeniseisk branch of the GPU sent Mendel and Yosef to Yartsevo, a remote village 400 kilometers from Yeniseisk. There, fellow Zionists also lived, but there were serious problems with employment. Mendel, receiving no help from outside, learned to live on six rubles and fifteen kopecks per month – such money was issued to political exiles as unemployment benefits. Only after extensive searching did he manage to find work: loading logs onto rafts, which were floated down the river for 30 kilometers to the nearest port.

Life in Yartsevo was extremely difficult. The young Zionist couldn't bear to watch as the Chekists fed their dogs bread, while intelligent people, exiled there, were dying of hunger. Mendel himself was on the brink of death many times – he toiled away at backbreaking work in the bitter cold, and once he nearly drowned in icy water when a barge smashed his raft to pieces.

In April 1934, Mendel Beylin was released from exile and, after much struggle, settled in the Moscow region with his cousin Sima, the daughter of his uncle Dov-Ber from Nezhin. It took a long time to find work – everywhere he was rejected due to lack of a passport and permanent residency. He had to move to the city of Mozhaysk in the Smolensk region. However, he had nowhere to live. Realizing he had nothing more to lose, Mendel went straight to the OGPU and demanded a passport. The chief was astonished by his audacity and, likely out of respect for the young man, wrote a note to the local police station. He was given a passport, albeit with a prohibition on living within a 100-kilometer radius of Moscow.

In Mozhaysk, Beylin met his friend from exile, Chaim Baron, a Zionist who arrived from Eretz-Israel in 1926 but was exposed by the authorities and sent to Siberia. Together they found work as builders. Mendel started receiving letters and sometimes Palestinian liras from his mother and brothers. He was finally able to buy himself decent clothes and shoes. Occasionally, distant relatives living in Moscow helped him.

Mendel refrained from Zionist activities. The authorities intensified their persecution of Zionists, and the membership of organizations such as "HeHalutz" and "Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa'ir" gradually declined. Another reason was a request received by Beylin from his brothers. He filled out the application attached to the letter and submitted it to Intourist, the agency handling visa issuance. A year after applying, he received a rejection.


Learning of the grim news and losing his job at the construction site, Mendel decided to go to Kursk in June 1935 to visit his fellow exile, Hillel Kaplinsky. It was relatively easy to obtain registration and find work in Kursk, so many former exiles, including Zionists, arrived there. Mendel, Kaplinsky, and their friend, the son of a rabbi who had come from Siberia, Moshe Vinogradsky, began living together in a rented apartment. Together with Hillel, Mendel found employment at a construction site. He developed a romance with Hillel's younger sister, Sara Kaplinsky.

In March 1936, Mendel Beylin suddenly received a military draft notice. This was quite strange given his biography, but the document contained a clear demand: to report to the draft office. Taking leave from work to bid farewell to Sara, Mendel went to the draft office. The doctor who examined him flipped through his file and asked, "What were you exiled for?"—"For Zionism." The doctor merely shook his head, and after the medical examination, the military commissioner dryly stated, "You're free. If needed, you'll be called."