units will be?’ And he replied: ‘Uniquely effective. The Jewish soldiers have only one choice: to kill the enemy or perish.’ ” 121 A year later, a first lieutenant teaching at the Penza Artillery Academy wrote to Mikhoels asking for help in getting transferred to the front. “I, too, am a Jew, and I have a personal score to settle with Hitler’s gang. The German thugs massacred my relatives who were living in Odessa and destroyed our happy, quiet life. And I want to take revenge for it. Revenge, revenge, and more revenge, in every place and at every moment.” 122 As the Soviet Army rolled westward, the demands for a specifically Jewish answer to the specifically Jewish suffering became one “insistent, subterranean call.” Soviet Jews were writing to the Anti-Fascist Committee asking for help in burying and commemorating the dead, chronicling Jewish martyrdom and heroism, regaining access to prewar homes, and combating growing anti- Semitism. But more than anything else, they were writing about the insistent, subterranean call itself. As one war veteran put it in a letter to Mikhoels, “Let us not be ashamed of our blood. And what is more, in our country we Jews are not poor relations. I have grown convinced that Israel lived, lives, and will go on living forever and ever. My eyes are full of tears. They are not tears of grief, but of joy.” 123 Another one, a lieutenant of the guards and a “senior engineer,” addressed the entire committee: I make this appeal to you as a member of the younger generation of adult Jews. We see in you the representatives of a Great Nation—a nation of genius and martyrdom. Through you we express our hope for a distinctive statehood and national-cultural autonomy. We cannot allow the disappearance of a wonderful nation that gave the world some of its brightest luminaries and has preserved, through centuries of persecution, death, and suffering, the banner of humanism and internationalism, an unparalleled thirst for creativity, exploration, and invention, the dream of a happily reunited mankind, and a faith in progress. You are the only headquarters of that wonderful nation in the USSR. Only you can assure the preservation of our Great Nation of prophets, innovators, and martyrs. 124 Some members of the committee were wary of usurping the Party’s role. (As one Old Bolshevik and experienced Party and state official, M. I. Gubelman, put