One year younger than Gelfand, Private Yakov Forzun, a machine gunner, suffered repeated severe wounds, spending more than a year in hospitals between his August 1942 conscription and his medical discharge in early 1945.55 During his final six-month hospital stay, in Furmanov, northeast of Moscow, he found himself mistaken for a Ukrainian and heard the usual talk about Jews not fighting. His response, told to an interviewer from the Commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences on the History of the Great Patriotic War (the so-called Mints Commission)56 around the time of his discharge, resembled Gelfand’s: 

While I was in the hospital, they told me that Jews were not visible at the front, that the Jews were hiding. I didn’t raise any objection to them, because … if you tell them anything, they’ll kill you in the first battle. So for that reason I decided not to tell them anything. In that respect it was very bad in the hospital. I spent a lot of time in hospitals, and the conversation there was all the same: the Jews don’t want to fight. The patients conducted themselves badly. They didn’t know my nationality, and they began to say that the Jews did not want to fight, only to hide in the rear. They talk[ed] and I remain[ed] silent; I ma[d]e no response.

Forzun was not a timid man; in combat he had distinguished himself for bravery. Indeed, his exploits on the battlefield eventually spoke for him in a manner available only to a few. At the time his final hospital stay began, he had been nominated for the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Accordingly, he explained, “I kept waiting for news of my award to arrive; then they would see whether Jews wanted to fight or not. After the order for my award was read out, everyone shut up. No one said anything any more.” Absent the prestigious decoration, however, he appears to have been intimidated by “the many criminals who had been released from prison,” who had “ended up at the front and later in the hospital.”57 

Forzun and Gelfand reacted similarly to similar situations, but their backgrounds were hardly similar at all. Gelfand, raised in Dnepropetrovsk, was in all respects a typical “new” Soviet Jew. Forzun, by contrast, was the product of a shtetl (Korostyshev, near Zhitomir). He described his upbringing as one of extreme poverty, exacerbated by the great Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, which, he told his interviewer, had left him and his sister swollen from hunger. He had studied only in Yiddish-language schools through the fourth grade, first in his native town, later in Stalino, where his father had moved in search of work. Although he eventually learned to read in Russian, he reported having had few books to read. In short, the opportunities for upward mobility that so many young Soviet Jews of his generation enjoyed appear to have passed him by.58 Yet for all of the differences between his early life and Gelfand’s, their respective brushes with prejudice did not move either man to a more assertive self-identification as a Jew. Gelfand, better educated and with future literary aspirations,59 expressed his aversion to such identification in an unmistakable internationalist idiom: “Why do nations exist at all?”60 Fozun was less articulate; he accepted his lot as is, without complaint. For him, the Red Army had offered a way out of a life that he described simply as “bad.” After the war he went to work as a plant foreman in Zhitomir, joining the Communist Party in 1961.61 

Other Jewish soldiers, though, looked askance at such a reaction. Sergeant Boris Komskii, an infantryman from Kiev, of the same age cohort as Gelfand and Forzun,62 kept a diary while fighting in some of the war’s bloodiest engagements, including the hellish Battle of Kursk in July and August 1943, in which virtually all of his comrades were killed.63 In early January 1945, in the small Polish village of Nowe Malinowo, just west of the September 1939 Boundary and Friendship Treaty line,64 he met a middle-aged former partisan who, recognizing Komskii as a fellow Jew, confided that “terrible antisemitism” (zhutkii antisemitizm) among his comrades-in-arms had induced him to hide his nationality. Komskii disapproved; the soldier’s effort, he admonished him, was useless: 

His name is Ilia Cherepakha, from Byelorussia. That’s where the Germans caught up with him. His entire family, 35 people, had perished. He himself had been shot twice,65 but he had remained alive and had crawled out from under the corpses at night. His wife was a Ukrainian. She [then] married a Vlasovite.66 The two of them went around pillaging; later they left for Germany. He himself had joined a partisan platoon: “We drank their blood. I avenged my family in full.…” [He said that] there was a lot of antisemitism among the partisans as well. A Jew who had held an officer’s rank wouldn’t be appointed to a [command] post. Only once the front got closer did the situation begin to change. He related many facts about his life in the partisans as well as about now, in the army, and I regretted telling him [that he was concealing his identity] in vain. 
What moral right do I have to lecture and to judge the actions of a person who has seen and experienced a thousand times more than I have? I cannot justify people who deny their own nationality. But still, “A person is given life only once.…”67 And he had lost it twice.68

Komskii had heard derogatory remarks about Jews earlier, including recently from his direct superior.69 Nevertheless, this Communist Party member, who as a schoolboy had written for a newspaper of the Party children’s organization, Pioneer, found “absolutely no reason” to hide that he was a Jew.70 After the war he remained in the army as a journalist, publishing widely on military and patriotic themes. After retiring with the rank of colonel, he became editor of a Russian-language Jewish newspaper in post-Soviet Ukrainian Lviv.71 Until his death in 2011 he bemoaned the demise of the USSR.72 Still other soldiers came through the war with feelings and observations that made them even more difficult to place on a Jewish-internationalist spectrum. In his diary entry for 19 November 1943, for example, twenty-one-year-old Sergeant Naum Rosenberg, a combat engineer from Pavlograd, near Dnepropetrovsk, who had fought on the southwestern, Don, and Stalingrad fronts,73 expressed concern over “how far this hatred and contemptuous attitude toward the Jews has eaten its way” into Soviet society.74 Over the next six months, as he proceeded westward with the advancing Soviet forces, he encountered disdain many times. “There is a widespread opinion among the people (narod) that all Jews are afraid of death, afraid to fight, in a word—cowards,” he wrote in early March 1944.75 Six weeks later, after taking part in driving German forces from Krzemieniec, where he found no Jews remaining out of the fifteen thousand who, he thought, had lived there before the war, he was even more emphatic: “Hatred and scorn for the Jews flows in the blood of the Russian people.”76 He did not report trying to conceal his own identity, but neither was he proudly defiant. Instead, he sought an explanation that would help him rebuff the prejudice he encountered and bear the insult he felt acutely, yet allow him to go on not only fighting but believing in the Soviet experiment: 

The mere fact that there are such [biased] opinions is painful. But it is even more painful to admit to myself that to a certain degree they are true. Deprived of a fatherland (otchizna) … , torn away from their maternal soil, not having to give their lives for their soil, for their Motherland (Rodina), for more than two thousand years, the large majority of Jews have ceased to be brave people. Having had to struggle for its existence within other nations for two thousand years, having withdrawn within itself, [having endured] the contempt and fear of other peoples, dislike and hatred toward them— these are the elements (far from all) that have formed the characters [sic] of the Jewish nation (natsiia). History shows that those Jews who found a homeland for themselves or who made transforming the state their goal in life—those Jews proved themselves worthy of their ancestors at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem Jerusalem and their dispersion across the globe. This cannot be denied.77