Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

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When Germany and the USSR jointly invaded Poland in September 1939, Israel was called upon to produce ideological verse celebrating the Soviet “liberation” of Eastern Ukrainians and Belarusians.

He complied. His public poems from 1940 were full of triumphant platitudes about unity, Slavic brotherhood, and historical justice. Privately, he was sickened. The Holocaust had not yet begun in full, but reports filtered in—pogroms in Lwów, disappearances in Brest.

His pen began to falter. He developed a tremor in his right hand.

===== Yakob had been unofficially banned from public performance since 1936, but he continued to compose, mostly for private performances or underground theater troupes. He flirted with using pseudonyms, but always returned to his name—Gyorgi—the Hungarian inflection a private nod to his “otherness.” =====

He began composing what would become his wartime masterpiece: Symphony No. 3, “For the Silence Beneath the Snow”, a massive, dissonant work for chamber orchestra, percussion ensemble, and tape-recorded machinery.

The piece was never performed during the war. Its score was hidden in a ceiling panel of the apartment he shared with Franka.

===== When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Great Patriotic War began. Artur, now mid-level in the NKVD and deeply trusted, was given sensitive internal tasks: =====
* Monitoring morale in besieged cities.
* Tracking wartime collaborators.
* Overseeing population transfers from the western oblasts—including Jewish deportees.

He knew what was happening in German-occupied Poland. He read intercepted German reports from the Einsatzgruppen, knew the names of mass grave sites like Babi Yar and Ponary before they became public knowledge.

He told no one.

When Franka confronted him about rumors of mass shootings of Jews in Ukraine, Artur said only:

: 

===== When the Germans reached Leningrad, Franka and Yakob were in Moscow, evacuated only days before the front line reached the outskirts. She joined a cultural brigade that toured factories and military hospitals, performing morale-boosting ballet adapted for tiny stages and ice-cold barracks. =====

In 1942, she slipped during a performance for Red Army troops recovering near Kalinin and broke two toes. She danced the next day anyway. The applause was muted, but one soldier wept.

She kept the tear-streaked flower he handed her, pressed in a book of Yakob’s piano miniatures.