In 1912, in the small town of Kupel in Volhynia, a girl named Tova was born. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ukraine was home to many such towns, inhabited predominantly by Jews. The Nazi occupation wiped most of them off the map–along with their inhabitants. But in Tova’s memory, her native Kupel always remained alive and flourishing…

She grew up in a traditional Jewish family. Her grandfather was a cantor at the synagogue, a religious and conservative man who was resistant to any kind of change. Her father, a Zionist, had dreamed in his youth of settling in Eretz Israel, but over time his dream seemed to dissolve amid the concerns of everyday life.

Tova, however, was determined to make that dream a reality. In 1929, at the age of seventeen, she joined the underground Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair (“The Young Guard”). At first, they were reluctant to accept her because of her small stature–Tova looked younger than her age–but her persistence and determination eventually won over the movement’s senior members.

Hashomer Hatzair sought to build a new society in Palestine based on socialist principles. Members of the movement formed hachshara (training) groups, where young Jews engaged in sports and trained for physical labor, particularly agricultural work, in preparation for life in Eretz Israel.

The leadership center of the Soviet branch of Hashomer Hatzair was based in Moscow and was known as the Gdud (“Battalion”). Cells in cities and small towns sent their most dedicated and trustworthy members there. In 1932, the Kupel cell decided that Tova met these criteria and sent her to Moscow. She told her family that she was leaving to study.

Tova could hardly contain her happiness. The journey to Moscow seemed like an extraordinary adventure, and her heart swelled with pride at the trust placed in her. But the journey itself proved far from romantic. For the first time in her life, she saw a railway. The lines were overcrowded and there were not enough trains, so she spent a long time waiting at the small Voitovtsy station before she was finally able to board one. The noise and commotion, the crowds of people with bundles and suitcases literally storming the carriages and clinging to the footboards–all of it overwhelmed her. Along with other unfortunate travelers who had been unable to squeeze into a comfortable passenger carriage, she climbed onto the roof of a freight car loaded with coal. Tova arrived in Moscow black from head to toe, covered in coal dust. When she boarded a tram, the women recoiled from her: nails protruding from her battered old plywood suitcase threatened to tear their silk stockings. Tova did not notice their reaction–she herself was staring wide-eyed at those very stockings, an unimaginable luxury for a girl from a tiny town.

At the railway station, Tova was met by a member of the Hashomer Hatzair Central Committee who went by the name Yosef (Boris Ginzburg). For reasons of secrecy, he changed his name several times. He was a cheerful, high-spirited young man whom no one would ever have suspected of being an underground activist. He took her to the commune near Odintsovo station, where other shomrim (“guards”) lived.

Every member of the movement was expected to learn a skilled trade. Tova enrolled in a lathe operator training course at an aircraft factory. In the evenings, comrades from the movement’s central leadership would come to the commune. They gave lectures on Zionism and read aloud letters from Palestine, from members in exile, and from shomrim who had remained behind in the small towns.

One day, Yosef summoned Tova with urgent news. Her comrade Grisha Sigal had left a package in the luggage room at the railway station in her name. It contained important materials intended for their fellow activists in Ukraine. Tova was to go to the station and try to retrieve it. The risk was considerable, and Yosef warned her of this frankly. But Tova agreed.

When she went to collect the package, the station employees were surprisingly polite to her. A suspicion crept into her mind… Her sense of foreboding proved justified. Before long, two men appeared–plainclothes officers, sturdily built and stone-faced. They asked Tova to “come with them.” It was the first arrest of her life.

On the way to the Lubyanka, Tova kept glancing around anxiously. One of the guards joked grimly: “Don’t worry, no one has ever fallen out of this car.” She would remember those words in 1935, when she learned of the death of one of the witnesses in the Kirov case, who had “fallen” from a police car and been killed… For now, though, that sunny October day, which she would remember for the rest of her life, marked the beginning of an arduous journey that would span decades…

What Tova remembered most about the Lubyanka were the interrogations: they often dragged on well past midnight and seemed truly endless. Two interrogators tried to force her to reveal who the package belonged to. Tova repeated the same answer over and over: “My cousin Grisha Rubman sent it in my name, but I don’t know what was inside–you never let me collect it.”

One day, toward dawn, one of the secret police officers finally lost his patience and shouted: “You stubborn, stupid girl! To you, being arrested is nothing but a game. But understand this: it’s for life! The first time, you’ll be sent into exile; the second, you’ll be put in solitary confinement. Then it’ll be a labor camp, then exile again–and when you grow old, not a single citizen will let you into their home. Children in the street will throw stones at you and shout, ‘There goes that crazy old counterrevolutionary!’ And that’s how you’ll die, abandoned by the roadside.”

The courageous young woman merely burst out laughing in response: her whole life still lay ahead of her, and such a “prediction” seemed absurd. Tova was only nineteen, had only recently arrived in the big city, and even her arrest and interrogations inspired more curiosity than fear. At the time, she could never have imagined that the investigator’s words would prove almost prophetic…

At first, she was placed in a communal cell at Butyrka Prison, where she met ordinary criminals and even picked up prison slang. The thieves nicknamed her shukher (“mischief-maker”) because of her cheerful disposition. She was later transferred to a separate cell for political prisoners–with deathly silence, furniture bolted to the floor, and a guard peering through the peephole every fifteen minutes. The Special Board of the NKVD sentenced the young woman to three years of exile in Tashkent.

Tova was transported from Moscow under guard in Stolypin prison cars. The first stop was the city of Syzran. Typhus was rampant in the local transit prison. The bodies of those who had died lay alongside living prisoners in the communal cells–the authorities were concealing the epidemic. During the day, the presence of the dead was still somehow bearable, but at night, when the doors were locked and the cells plunged into darkness, the fear became overwhelming…

From Syzran, the prisoners were sent to Alma-Ata. They arrived there in late February 1933, freezing, hungry, and without a penny to their names. A kind-hearted attendant at a youth hostel took pity on Tova and her friend Manya ShterenShis and allowed them to spend the night. Exhausted beyond measure, the girls fell asleep right on the floor beside the stove. After the freezing prison cars and the horrors of the Syzran prison, the warm, clean room seemed like paradise. Alas, the attendant who took over the next shift was far less compassionate and drove them out without the slightest regret, as though they were stray dogs.

The following day, a Saturday, they went to the local synagogue, but found the building closed. Late that evening, an elderly Jewish man led them to the rabbi’s house. The rabbi opened the door, greeted them with the traditional “Bruchim haba’im!” (“Blessed are those who come!”), and welcomed them inside. By giving shelter to the “counterrevolutionaries,” he and his family were risking their own freedom. The girls were given whatever food the family could offer: boiled potatoes in their skins, tea, and bread.

In the spring of 1933, Tova finally reached her place of exile–Tashkent. There she lived communally with other exiled Zionists. Unemployment, meager food, exhausting work as an unskilled laborer on the construction site of an automobile tire factory… Tova received nine hundred grams of bread a day and worked barefoot–her shoes had fallen apart, and before long her feet were covered in sores from the cement and mortar.

Yet even amid the hardships of daily life, there were moments of joy. In Tashkent, Tova was reunited with friends and fellow activists. Among them were Avraham Halperin, who became their ideological mentor, and Yoel Ratner–“Yulik”–a gifted organizer, journalist, brilliant orator, and athlete. Largely through their efforts, a kind of Zionist club took shape. Its members gathered in the evenings to discuss Zionism, literature, and international affairs. Well-read and educated, the members of the “club” already suspected that sooner or later Hitler, who had come to power in Germany, would unleash a major war. No less alarming was Stalin’s dictatorship, which ruthlessly suppressed any form of dissent. Yet they seemed almost accustomed to the danger at home–most of them, after all, were already seasoned Zionist activists.

At the end of 1935, when her term of exile in Tashkent came to an end, Tova returned to Ukraine. She initially settled in Proskurov (now Khmelnytskyi), where Manya ShterenShis’s parents lived. She was forbidden from returning to her hometown of Kupel, as the authorities considered her politically unreliable. Tova found work as a bookkeeper–first in Kursk and later in Belgorod.

In both cities, she found fellow members of the Zionist movement. In Kursk, Tova lived for a time with Malka Esrig and her husband, Nukhim (Nusik) Berger. There she also met Hillel Kaplinsky and his friend Mendel (Menik) Beilin–members of the right wing of Hashomer Hatzair and former activists of the organization’s Moscow leadership. Belgorod’s Zionist “circle” included Aaron Shapira (who endured every circle of hell in the Soviet system of “re-education”: three years in a political isolation prison, followed by many years of exile in the city of Frunze and elsewhere), Fanya Sokolovskaya, Shmuel Mann, Sarra Tiborovskaya-Morozova, and Nahum (Nema) Stock. All of them had ended up there after arrests and exile, refused to accept Soviet rule, and dreamed of one day reaching Eretz Israel…

Outwardly, Tova’s life seemed to be getting back on track: she worked while also studying at a workers’ faculty. But the merciless machinery of repression did not let go of its victims so easily…

At this time, Stalin embarked on a course of intensifying the Terror. An atmosphere of fear and suspicion was deliberately cultivated throughout the country, as the authorities searched everywhere for “wreckers” and “enemies of the people.” It became clear that the regime would not forget the Zionists it had failed to finish off in the 1920s either. In December 1936, Tova was arrested at her workplace. The arrest was followed by searches–both at her home and at work. And once again, the endless interrogations began…

This time, the charges were more serious. She was accused under Articles 58-10 and 58-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR–“anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” and “participation in a counterrevolutionary organization.” In her cell, Tova went on hunger strike–but to no avail. The Special Board of the NKVD handed down its sentence: five years in a corrective labor camp in Kolyma.

The journey there was grueling: first came a month by rail, along the Kursk–Moscow–Vladivostok route. The prisoners traveled in cramped, overcrowded cars, without adequate food or clean water. Then came a week in the hold of the steamship Dzhurma, bound for Kolyma across the Sea of Okhotsk. There, thirst, hunger, overcrowding, and stifling air were compounded by seasickness. Some of Tova’s fellow prisoners did not survive the journey…

Upon arriving in Kolyma, Tova was assigned to logging–one of the most arduous forms of labor. Prisoners felled trees in permafrost and extreme cold, without clothing suitable for the harsh climate and often with barely enough to eat. Tova suffered severe frostbite to her feet and became gravely ill. It seemed that she could endure no more…

Her salvation came when she was transferred to the camp stables. Working as a cart driver was less exhausting, and she was able to regain at least some of her strength. She was assigned a small, unprepossessing horse named Artyomka. The other workers did not want him, and some even mistreated him, hitting and shoving him around. As a result, Artyomka initially seemed ill-tempered and would not let her come near him. But Tova treated him with kindness and patience, and gradually he warmed to her.

Before long, they became true friends, and Artyomka understood her almost without words. Tova sewed him a horse blanket to protect him from insects, which made him look even more comical. “There was something similar in our fates: we were both small, people thought us weak and often treated us with contempt,” Tova recalled. But appearances were deceptive: both horse and handler possessed remarkable endurance, stubbornness, and a powerful love of life.

In the barracks for “counterrevolutionaries,” Tova became close to the prominent Socialist Revolutionary Ekaterina Olitskaya. Olitskaya was much older and more experienced, having endured arrests and exile even before the Revolution. Her support and wise advice helped Tova remain unbroken and preserve her human dignity under truly inhuman conditions.