The Reckoning

by Patrick Bishop

  But as Orenstein vainly attempted to point out, this was never going to happen. German hatred of the Jews precluded them from agreeing to any proposal, no matter how logical. Stern’s admirers would also try to justify his actions by explaining that at the time of these machinations, no one knew of the Final Solution to exterminate all Jews within Germany’s reach. It was true that the Wannsee Conference which formalized the murder programme did not take place until the end of January 1942, but it was already appallingly clear that German intentions towards the Jews were evil and that no accommodation was conceivable. The newspapers were full of dreadful stories. Stern had the evidence of his own family as to what the Jews of Europe could expect.

  The war arrived in Suwalki on 1 September 1939 when Luftwaffe aircraft bombed the barracks around the town. A few days later the Polish army and police fled. The town was briefly occupied by the Soviets before they ceded it to the German army, who marched in trailing the Gestapo in their wake. On Saturday, 21 October, the Jews of Suwalki were told they had a fortnight to clear out. The Lithuanian border, fifteen miles away, was closed. The Germans’ new friends, the Soviets, were also denying entry to Jews. Family groups trudged over the fields trying to find an unguarded spot. Some were caught and turned back; others were shot. Among the refugees were Mordechai and Liza Stern. ‘They took some money and some coats and they ran away to the forest, towards the Lithuanian border,’ said their grandson Yair. ‘It was as cold as hell. During the stay in the forest my grandfather got paralysed in half his body. My grandmother carried him – I don’t know how as she was a very small woman.’12

  Somehow she struggled across the frontier and paid a farmer to take Mordechai by horse and buggy to a hospital, where he died, apparently of a lung infection. About 3000 Jews from the Suwalki area made it to the temporary safety of Kaunas in Lithuania. The same number were left behind. On 2 December they were ordered not to leave their homes. The Jewish part of town was surrounded by SS troops and police and the inhabitants driven into the synagogue, jail and hospital. Everything of value was taken from them. Herded by vicious, snapping guard dogs, they were then marched to the railway station and loaded into sealed wagons for a two-day journey to Lublin. According to Dr Kasriel Eilender, a historian of the Jews of Suwalki, ‘most of them were shot in a forest near a locality called Łomazy’ (eastern Poland).13 Liza Stern stayed on in Kaunas where she managed to obtain a visa for Palestine from the British consul, who issued 700 certificates for Palestine in 1940 before the Soviets marched into Lithuania.14 She arrived via ship from Odessa sometime in the latter part of 1940.15

  Stern would have heard her story and hundreds like it, yet nothing it seemed would deter him from the notion that the Germans were open to reason or that the British – to whom he owed the deliverance of his mother – were the real enemy.

  When Yehoshua Yeivin, a Revisionist pioneer who had once declared an enthusiasm for fascism, told him, ‘they will say of you that you assisted Hitler … they will cover your memory with spittle and disgrace’, he simply replied: ‘I know that …’16

  With no outside help forthcoming, the group was effectively moribund. The Anglo-Palestine Bank robbery had been followed in December by the blowing up of the Mandate’s immigration office in Haifa. For most of the following year, though, operations were severely limited and the ‘anonymous soldiers’ mainly stayed indoors. It was not just the lack of resources that inhibited them. Their names were now all too well known to the police. Their relative inactivity did nothing to diminish the efforts of the CID to nail them.

  The Mandate’s intelligence agencies soon got to know about Lubentchik’s mission to Beirut from a ‘hundred per cent reliable’ source, though they believed he had gone to see the Italians rather than the Germans. For a while, there was nothing to suggest that these overtures had got very far or presented any real threat to Palestine. In the spring of 1941 came hard evidence that the Stern group presented a genuine menace to security. On 17 March, following a tip-off, the police raided the home of a Stern loyalist named Itamar Ben Haroch, who had slipped into Palestine illegally. According to the CID report ‘a search of his room produced a sketch indicating the position of Military camps in the Rehovoth area, including those at Jul-us, Qastina, Gadera and Nesa Taiyona and the aerodromes at Tel Nof and Aqir’.17 In addition, they found records of the movement of British forces between Palestine, Britain and Greece. Here, surely, was active treason.

  Stern and his men had moved to the top of the CID’s target list. In a letter written on 18 June 1941 to a veteran officer called Raymond Cafferata ordering the arrest of two suspects, Giles Bey described the group as a ‘collection of Jewish Quislings’. They were ‘a danger to the war effort in this country … accordingly we must not be squeamish in combatting them’.18 In later reports they are referred to as a ‘Fifth Column’ whose object was ‘to build up a vast organisation so that in the event of an enemy attack on this country they can assist that enemy by destroying communications, bridges, railways and any other object that will disorganise the internal security of this country’.19

  The tone was set for a vigorous campaign. Police operations in Palestine were almost always conducted with an eye on the political implications of the action. Stern and his men, though, had crossed a line and the toughest measures were now considered justified. Giles Bey’s letter stressed ‘the group is dangerous and we cannot afford to take chances’.

  The CID were already getting some important results. On 21 May, detectives led by Tom Wilkin swooped on a flat in a house at 48 Keren Kayemet Boulevard in Tel Aviv. It was the home of a teacher called Moshe Svorai and his wife Tova. They had a lodger, none other than Yaacov Polani, the boy from the Herzliya orange groves who had received military training in Poland. On the night of the raid two other men were present – Yehoshua Zettler, ‘the Farmer’, who had led the Anglo-Palestine Bank robbery, and Yaacov Orenstein. A search turned up more documents ‘which again proved the activities of the Group in the collection of information of a military character’20 and which Wilkin believed provided sufficient proof to charge them all under the Official Secrets Ordinance and the Defence Regulations. They were taken to the Northern Police Station in Tel Aviv. Security seems to have been extraordinarily lax. Polani and Zettler, the latter of whom had given the police a false name and whose true identity remained undiscovered, decided to try to escape. ‘In the morning,’ Polani told the police some months later, ‘when the door of the Station opened we dashed out and jumped over a fence.’21 Both got clean away.

  By this time Polani had all but ceased his underground activities. Svorai, however, was a significant catch. He was a teacher from a village near Haifa, an Irgun man from the outset who had done six months behind the wire. He had been persuaded by Stern to give up his job and move to Tel Aviv as the group’s intelligence chief. Moshe and Tova were among Stern’s most dedicated disciples and would remain so for the rest of their long lives. ‘Yair was a special person, completely different from all around him,’ Svorai said not long before his death in 2011.22 His conversion to Yair’s world view was a testament to Stern’s remarkable eloquence. Moshe Svorai might be expected to have been repelled by Stern’s overtures to the Axis. After all, one of his first acts as a young activist had been to tear down the swastika flag flying over the German diplomatic mission in Jerusalem, a feat that won him the heart of Tova. Stern’s words dissolved all doubt. Svorai later described how Yair talked ‘in a monotone, without pathos, as if he was speaking in a straight line. There was something hypnotic in the way he looked at you – it was penetrating, unique and it was hard to look back at him if he caught your eye. His eyes were steel grey. They flashed with lightning. His face was full of nobility and impressively delicate.’23

  Polani, too, bore witness to Stern’s mesmerizing persuasiveness: ‘As a speaker [he] held us all in a trance. His clever, deep set eyes, his even manner of speech, his ability to express himself in short, clear sentences – all captivated us.�
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  CID records show the raid on the Svorai’s flat had been based on information from a source in the seaside town of Netanya, just up the coast from Tel Aviv. The informant was referred to in Giles Bey’s letter to Cafferata: ‘So far what has come to us has been from one source only, but a source which has proved most reliable.’25

  This source might possibly be the same person who, in the autumn of 1940, had supplied the head of the CID’s political department, District Deputy Superintendent Roderick Musgrave, with precise details about the Stern organization. A document in Hebrew in the Haganah files lists the names, functions, addresses, workplaces and meeting points of all key members of the group from Stern down, and singles out those responsible for the Anglo-Palestine Bank job. The informant reveals that his name is among those on the list. In the event of his arrest, he would identify himself as ‘Mr Levine’ so that the police would then be able to return the favour and let him go.26 Though clearly intended primarily as an insurance policy, the approach might well have led to a more regular arrangement. The continuing references in police reports to solid inside information suggest there was at least one energetic traitor in Stern’s inner circle at the time.

  The list provided a solid foundation of fact on which the CID could build up a clear intelligence picture. The arrests that followed from it also gave opportunities for broadening their range of sources. One of the men whom Giles Bey wanted Cafferata to arrest was Arieh Menachem, a labourer of Yugoslav origin from Netanya. Two months after the request he was finally picked up. Menachem was questioned by Assistant Superintendent Barham, who was based at Tulkarm police station. Barham did not have to lean very hard on Menachem to win his cooperation. He seems to have told the superintendent what he wanted to hear, confirming Stern’s status as a fifth columnist. He later provided more information, claiming that Germany and Italy had ‘promised him full help in arms and money and the formation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine’.27 In return they ‘asked for maps and plans of military strategic points in Palestine’.

  At some point Menachem decided to atone for his earlier allegiance. In a letter written in Croatian to an unnamed policeman he describes how he decided to turn against his former comrades: ‘I came to the conclusion that if I continued in this way I should never become a man, and besides this Stern’s fight is against England and this is the greatest crime a Jew can commit.’ He was now willing to work against the group in Tel Aviv. ‘It only depends on you,’ he concluded. ‘If you will give me the chance to become a man.’ Menachem was given his chance. His success, if any, was short-lived. A few months later Stern’s men discovered he was a British spy and shot him dead in Netanya in the early hours of 6 September 1941.

  The British penetration deepened the atmosphere of fear and distrust inside the organization. When Moshe Svorai was arrested, Stern was living with a friendly family but moved out as soon as he heard the news. In June, Roni managed to find a room for him in a house in Balfour Street, belonging to an elderly couple. It had a separate entrance so comings and goings were less easy to monitor. By now Stern rarely appeared in daylight hours, only slipping out when darkness fell to see friends. Lily Strassman was in town. The war had smashed her gilded world to pieces. She had managed to reach Palestine in June 1940 via Italy. Her husband, Henryk, who had been an officer in the military reserve, was dead, murdered not by the Germans but by the Soviets in Katyn Forest, in one of the massacres of the elite that followed their invasion of Poland. At nostalgic evenings at Lily’s Tel Aviv house Polish émigrés gathered to remember the old days.

  Stern’s contacts with those nearest to him were tenuous. He lived alone in the new flat. Roni would visit on Shabbat and they would stay closeted together, seeing no one. He rarely met his mother. He had no money to support her and Liza was reduced to working as a live-in nurse and au pair to an elderly invalid in Tel Aviv.

  His most constant companions were Avraham Amper and Zelig Zak, both of whom acted as his bodyguards. One of Amper’s duties was to keep an eye on legal immigrants disembarking at the ports and identify potential recruits. There were few takers. One who did join the ranks was Israel Eldad, a right-wing former philosophy student. Eldad shared Stern’s intensely ideological mindset. When Stern revealed his latest strategic blueprint, a statement of eighteen ‘principles’ for the rebirth of Israel, Eldad responded with a commentary that covered forty-six pages of a notebook.28

  At least someone was taking his ideas seriously. Outside the claustrophobic world of the group the Yishuv was backing Britain. In May the ‘National Institutions’ had urged all men aged between twenty and thirty to join the services. By then 8000 Jewish Palestinians were already serving.29 Their attitude was summed up in a police report, written by one of Geoffrey Morton’s men, Sergeant Alec Stuart, describing an incident he had witnessed in a Tel Aviv café when a party of about fifteen Jewish soldiers marched in. ‘One of this press gang took over the microphone whilst the remainder “sorted out” the patrons, two of whom were finally ejected in a quiet but forceful manner.’ The man at the mic ‘made an impassioned speech in Hebrew’ stating that the best way of combating ‘the Nazi atrocities [against] their brethren is to enlist in HM Forces and finally come to grips with the hated enemy and the persecutors of their race …’ The speech was ‘received quite enthusiastically by members of the audience’.30

  David Raziel had himself put on British uniform. Relations between the official Irgun and the authorities had improved to the point where plans were hatched to use Irgun men in special operations in the area. In the early summer of 1941, Palestine’s situation was looking increasingly precarious. British forces had been driven out of Greece and then humiliated in Crete. In the Western Desert, Rommel had arrived to halt an Italian collapse and was now pushing Wavell’s army back to the frontiers of Egypt. In Iraq, the April coup engineered by the Germans had installed a pro-Nazi junta in power in Baghdad with General Rashid Ali at its head. In May, Luftwaffe aircraft began to arrive. With Vichy troops occupying Lebanon and Syria, Palestine was starting to feel hemmed in.

  When, on 29 April, Rashid Ali began besieging the British base at Habbaniya, fifty miles west of Baghdad, Britain sent a relief force from Transjordan which marched up the Euphrates plain towards the capital. Meanwhile, a four-man Irgun team led by David Raziel flew into Habbaniya. It was tasked with sabotage and its first job was a diversionary raid on an oil installation near Baghdad. The squad had another unofficial target in mind. They planned, if the opportunity presented itself, to kill the Mufti, now enjoying the hospitality of Rashid Ali. When the raid was called off, they were sent instead on a recce mission to discover the strength of Iraqi forces near Fallujah. On 17 May, the jeep carrying the party, accompanied by a British major, had paused by a flooded area when a German light aeroplane appeared and dropped a single bomb. Raziel was struck in the head by a splinter and killed and the major was decapitated.

  It was Roni who brought Stern the news of Raziel’s death. Despite their estrangement and the angry words that had flown between them, ‘the shock was very great,’ she recalled. ‘Yair’s head slumped and he held it in his two hands. I saw his shoulders were shaking with sobs. After a moment he recovered and regained his composure.’31

  Raziel’s death must have intensified an already acute sense of isolation. They had once been David and Jonathan. Stern began to think that his own end – imagined so often in his poetry – might not be far off. Yitzhak Yezernitzky, better known later as Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who had arrived from Poland aged twenty in 1935, joined the Irgun four years later, carried out his share of shootings and bombings and followed Stern in the split with Raziel, recorded a conversation as the pair walked one evening through Tel Aviv’s dark backstreets. Stern told him that it was ‘as clear as day that [the] police wouldn’t be satisfied with arresting him but would kill him on the spot. He said this in a quiet voice, with no emotion, and added that he was sure his murder wouldn’t be the end …
On the contrary the murder would increase the movement’s strength and many would join the ranks.’32

  Stern took premonitions seriously. He was superstitious. He read horoscopes and touched wood. Binyamin Zeroni remembered how once during a meeting a spider fell from the ceiling and onto Stern. Zeroni went to kill it but Stern stopped him. ‘It’s forbidden to kill a spider at night,’ he said. ‘If we do a catastrophe will befall us.’33

  With the dearth of money, the skulking, fugitive existence, where every knock at the door might herald the arrival of the CID, the organization was slowly dying. What was needed was action. But action required money. The extortion that the group practised against wealthy Jews yielded limited returns. In Netanya, local businessmen who were leaned on had had enough. A police report noted that ‘demands have become excessive and one or two persons have refused to pay’.34 When one man refused to cough up fifty pounds a ‘gang of thugs’ raided his residence and ‘his home and furniture were liberally daubed with human excrement’. It was time for another bank robbery. On the night of 13/14 July, a team tried to break into the Arab National Bank in Jerusalem. The operation was a total failure. Once again Stern did not take part, confining himself to reciting psalms while the attempted robbery was in progress.

  The failure prompted a crisis meeting at which frustration over the record of failure and deep misgivings about Stern’s German policy combined to spark a vicious quarrel. The revolt came from the top. Hanoch Strelitz, for several years an intimate and ally of Stern, and Binyamin Zeroni, who had shown his resolution and boldness in numerous actions, had had enough. According to Yaacov Levstein, the two now ‘saw no point in fighting the British while World War Two was at its peak.’35 Indeed, like the Irgun they were now ‘in favour of helping the British war effort’. Zeroni, with Strelitz’s approval, had already contacted Yaacov Meridor, an Irgun commander who had been with Raziel when he died, to see if they would be interested in allowing the Stern group back into the fold on equal terms. Knowing that Stern was unlikely to agree to the move, a contingency plan was in place to deal with him. He would be seized and kept under house arrest and confined to harmless activities such as writing poetry. As it was, the initiative came to nothing, but the scheme was a measure of how estranged Stern had become from his old comrades.