by Alan Gold
He loved her still with all his heart and ached for the Judit he’d married only a couple of years ago. Yet he knew that they were growing apart. For he had changed too. They no longer spoke of Lehi and their objectives. Shalman assumed Judit knew about the mission to destroy the airfield, but she never asked about it and he never spoke to her of the young Arab boy engulfed in flame. And he never asked where she went or what she did in the dark hours of night. When she first disappeared in the evenings, or for a few days, he’d asked, indeed demanded, to know, but she was evasive and told him that these matters went to Lehi’s secrecy. So he stopped asking and bore a resentment at the growing isolation between them. The house was filled with silence broken only by the occasional tears and tantrums of their daughter, Vered.
It was this that hurt Shalman the most. Was whatever grand objective or cause she was undertaking more important than being a mother?
Their beautiful Vered’s attachment was almost exclusively to Shalman. He was mother and father and entire family to their daughter. He fed her, read to her, dressed her, nurtured her. When Judit was in the apartment she would play with Vered but even the little girl clearly sensed that her mother’s mind was elsewhere and would seek her father out instead. And Shalman would watch as Judit asked Vered what she’d like to do, and the child would look at her father for permission. It was heartbreaking.
He confronted his wife one night in their bed.
‘Something has changed in you, Judit.’
She just scoffed and rolled away from him to face the wall.
‘Is the fight so great that it’s more important than your family?’
‘The world is bigger than just this apartment, Shalman. Bigger than just this family,’ she said in a detached voice.
‘What does that mean? Where do you go at night? What do you do?’
At this, Judit fiercely rolled back to face Shalman.
‘What must be done, Shalman. I do what must be done.’
‘What you need to do is be here, with us, with Vered!’
Shalman’s voice had strengthened in volume and, as the walls were thin, Judit replied with a harsh whisper.
‘And what of you and your expeditions into the past? Digging in the dirt – for what? What happened to you out there? The Arabs want you dead and the British grind you under their heels and yet you’re scrounging around caves with an Arab!’
‘He saved my life,’ said Shalman flatly.
Judit tilted her head and raised an eyebrow. It was a look that once upon a time he had found so alluring. But now it just seemed jaded.
‘If it wasn’t for him, I’d be dead.’
‘So it’s guilt. You spend time with this Arab because you feel guilty?’
‘No!’ Shalman had raised his voice again but quickly lowered it. ‘No. It’s feeling indebted. It’s a debt I can repay.’
‘How?’
‘I’m teaching him. What I’ve learned at the university. I’m teaching him.’
‘So he can be an archaeologist like you? You have to be kidding me, Shalman! If there is to be a nation of Israel, it will need builders, workers, engineers, not people who play in the dirt looking at an irrelevant past.’
At other times there would have been so much to say, so much to argue, but Shalman had not the words or strength.
‘You’re more interested in the fight than you are in your family. We’re almost there, Judit. Israel will soon be declared as a new nation. Can’t you come back home and be a wife and a mother again?’
‘And when Israel’s declared, you think there’ll be doves of peace flying through rainbows in the sky? Don’t be naïve, Shalman. When Israel is declared, war will follow. Your Arab friend will quickly be your enemy. Where will you stand then?’
‘And what of you, Judit?’ Shalman shot back. ‘Where will you stand? You fight for Lehi but I know your heart. I know there is something else in you. Who do you really fight for? I’ve seen you when you’re with people from Russia and the way you speak of Moscow and Stalin with nostalgia. Sometimes I think you’d prefer to be back there than here.’
Judit suddenly sat up. ‘How could you say that? Have you any idea what those Russian bastards – ’
‘What else can I say? It’s like I don’t even know who you are anymore. I’m not sure I ever did . . .’
Judit’s face showed no emotion. But inside, she trembled. She looked at her husband, a man who lived his life with a transparency she didn’t have and never would. He said what was on his mind; she said what she had been taught to say to avoid telling the truth.
She remembered her mother’s life, brutalised by a drunken and violent husband; her own life as a child, always in fear; then Beria and Anastasia and the power they had given her over her life. They made her capable of anything and the fear of being that girl under the table again had hardened her.
‘There’s so much I want to tell you, Shalman. But I can’t . . .’
Peterhof, the Palace of Peter the Great
Leningrad, Russia
October 1947
Rubble-strewn, dilapidated, literally a shell of its former self, Peterhof, the once proud summer palace of Tsar Peter the Great, somehow remained standing. Despite the attempts by the Nazis to destroy all that wasn’t German, and despite the cost of tens of millions dead, Mother Russia had triumphed over the Germans.
Since his incarceration as a rabble-rouser in Landsberg Castle, since his rise to chancellor, and since his Nuremberg speeches spitting hatred, Adolf Hitler had defined any race east of Germany as sub-human: the Slavs, the Russians, the Asiatics. Not, though, the Japanese, who were useful allies in the war; but Stalin often speculated how long it would have been before the madman Hitler tried to exterminate them, had he won.
It was only during the relative equanimity of the opening months of the war, when the pact between Germany and Russia held fast, did the Nazi leader refrain from defining the Russians as sub-humans. But since he’d instigated Operation Barbarossa and invaded Russia, laying a murderous siege to Leningrad and a scorched-earth policy in the rest of the western territory of the nation, his visceral hatred of everything that wasn’t Hunnish and German had been evident for all to see.
It had taken years, and the bodies of more than twenty million Russians, but the invading German armies had been repelled. From that time, the might of the Soviet army had slowly ground down Nazi Germany. Yet despite the victory, the pride of Russia’s greatness had been badly damaged, and Stalin had promised himself that the palaces that had once belonged to the privileged classes would be rebuilt and used as Soviet offices and for museums. One of the most pressing of all was the palace that Peter the Great had built for himself, over the water from Leningrad on the shores of the Gulf of Finland.
For two hundred and fifty years, Peterhof had been the honoured sentinel of Russian magnificence, positioned as the entryway to Leningrad and from there to the rest of the nation. Its restoration would be a symbol of Russia’s re-established place in the world.
Yesterday, a thousand workers had been feverishly hammering and sawing and screwing and building and repairing, clambering over the walls and gardens like a frenetic nest of ants. Today, only two men stood in the long garden, viewing the damage from the sea wall, slowly walking up the vast lawns, lakes and canals towards the distant bombed- and burned-out palace that stood sorrowfully on the high hill. A hundred guards were strategically placed out of sight in the woods, ensuring the safety of the two most important people in Russia – Comrades Stalin and Beria.
The two men inspected the rebuilding work slowly, taking in the devastation. They walked from the sea to the remnants of the palace as though they were the only people on the land.
Stalin spat a globule of phlegm onto the ground as if that was all that needed to be said of Hitler and the destruction he had wrought.
The two men continued to walk along the long gardens towards the wreck of the palace.
‘When will this be ready?’ Stalin as
ked quietly.
‘We hope in a year or two. It will be restored, and then we’ll use it as an administrative centre for Leningrad.’
‘And the other matter?’
Always wary, Beria didn’t want to ask what particular matter, but searched his mind for recent conversations so that he didn’t give the wrong answer.
‘It’s going according to plan,’ he said, stretching out the conversation so that a clue might reveal what was in Stalin’s mind.
‘And is the group achieving its aim?’
Beria still had no specific clue. Of all the myriad plans they had in place, not least the growing difficulty of tensions with the Americans in Berlin, he had no idea what in particular Stalin was talking about.
The Supreme Leader of all of Russia turned and looked at his second in command. ‘It has been some years now since they left for Palestine . . .’
At last, the clue he needed. Beria’s agile mind slipped into gear.
‘The natural leader is the Jewess Judita Ludmilla. She’s about to take command.’
‘Is it wise for a Jew to take over a leadership position?’
Beria thought for a moment, so it appeared he was considering the great man’s question with utmost precision. ‘In this one isolated case, comrade, it is wise. This will be the land of the Jew, and to have a non-Jew in control would look and feel wrong. It would raise suspicions.’
Stalin nodded. They continued to walk towards the palace. ‘This girl. Will she achieve the objectives of Operation Outgrowth? Much depends on it. The discussion about the future of Palestine will soon be taken at the United Nations. She and the other agents must be ready. When it comes to a decision, we will vote for the partition of Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. And she and the other agents will be our puppets, yes?’
‘Yes, Secretary General. But there are those in Palestine, Jews of course, who are showing some signs of resistance and leaning towards British and American interests. So strategic targets are currently being selected for extermination. Once their voices are silenced, then the road will be clear.’
‘And do you think that this girl is capable of turning the Jewish population in our direction?’
‘Alone, no, Comrade Secretary General. But she has a number of highly trained agents under her, and we are keeping our eye very carefully trained on her. Her handler, Anastasia Bistrzhitska, has been moved to our Mission in Jerusalem in order to coordinate the operation. She was one of our top people in Washington and I ordered her back to put her in charge of training the Jews for this mission. She’s done an excellent job.’
They reached the hill that rose towards the shell of Peterhof Palace. ‘Good,’ said Stalin. ‘Very good. And who knows, maybe I can get the Jews and the Muslims to love each other. They once did, you know, Lavrentiy Pavlovich. A thousand years ago, in Baghdad. Now, let’s see what damage those Nazi bastards did to my building.’
Acre, north of Haifa
1947
They arrived at different times, and on different days. They stayed in different boarding houses, some in cheap dockside hotels, some with sympathetic supporters, and some in lodgings as though they were students here to visit the antiquities of the city. By design, some spoke Hebrew, some French, some Russian, some Yiddish and some German. They went unnoticed by British security.
Yet by design, thirty-four freedom fighters from the combined Irgun and Lehi forces gathered together in order to break their comrades out of one of the most secure and impregnable citadels in the Middle East.
The date of the assault had deliberately been advanced by more than a week, in order to cause maximum embarrassment to the British. It was decided by the Irgun leader, Menachem Begin, that the assault on the prison, and the release of a hundred incarcerated freedom fighters, should coincide with the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations that had been specially convened to discuss the British mandate and the entire Palestinian issue.
There were many nations among the fifty-seven member states who would vote against the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab nations, but Menachem Begin and other leaders were certain that if enough damage was done to the reputation of the British army, then votes could be swayed away from a further mandate.
The mood of the men and women who met late in the evening at the home of an Irgun supporter in the upper reaches of the Neve Sha’anan region of Haifa was one of restrained fury. Only two or three weeks earlier, four Irgun freedom fighters had been hanged in the prison. The death of the men was the spark that ignited the decision to bring forward the operation to free the other people incarcerated.
To prepare for this mission it had taken days and days of intense study of the fortress, the roads around it, and the most vulnerable access points.
It was Judit who had been instrumental in sourcing much of the information. She’d seduced a sergeant major in the British army in order to acquire plans of the Acre Fortress so that the Irgun’s bomb makers could estimate the type and quantities of explosives necessary. The sergeant major had subsequently died in a road accident.
Judit was also put in charge of stealing British uniforms, buying jeeps, trucks and ordinary motor vehicles, and then arranging their painting in British army colours and insignia.
To her comrades she was a fierce strategist for the cause of Lehi who’d do anything necessary to achieve their ultimate goal of a free Jewish Israel. But to herself she was a servant of Soviet Russia who at this moment saw a clear alignment of both ideals.
In the past month, she’d caused accidents – road, boating and gunshot – that had led to the deaths of five prominent people on the list she’d been given by Anastasia, people whose right-wing and ultra-nationalist ideas would put them at odds with the ambitions of Moscow in a future Israel, a friend of the USSR. People who said publicly that they saw no point in replacing Britain with Russia; people who would have stood in the way.
In a week’s time, she’d have to find an excuse to travel to Tel Aviv to meet with Anastasia and the Russian team of which she was now leader, to receive their reports and mete out punishments to those who had failed in their missions. But in the meantime, she had an Irgun mission in which to participate, helping her colleagues to blow up a British prison to hell, and free dozens of imprisoned Irgun soliders. And by coincidence, one of the men still on her list was participating in tomorrow’s assault on the fortress at Acre.
Dov was dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant in the Engineering Corps of the British army in Palestine. He was supervising five NCOs laying telephone and electricity cables close to the southern wall of the citadel above an old underground Turkish bath. Dov stood and pondered why he so favoured the operational name he’d chosen.
All Lehi and Irgun fighters adopted operational names, partly out of security and partly out of bravado. He’d chosen as his nickname ‘Shimshon’, known to the British he was so often fighting as Samson. He had been the character from his childhood stories in Riga who had embedded himself in Dov’s imagination. In bed at night, beneath the covers, he’d fantasise about being Samson – a great judge, brave, daring and relentless against his enemies, slaying a lion with his bare hands, killing an entire army with the jawbone of an ass, and destroying a pagan temple using his strength alone; then appearing before the people and lauded as a hero.
Dov’s life hadn’t been so heroic. He’d stolen weapons, bombed rail-lines, shot British soldiers and fought off Arab attacks, but always in the dark and the quiet. Something in him longed to be a hero.
He glanced over at his colleague, Ariel Waxman, a right-wing firebrand journalist whose articles in the Palestine Post were becoming increasingly militant, calling for the British to withdraw immediately, and allow Arabs and Jews to decide the fate of the new nation. Waxman’s membership of the Irgun was something he even hinted at in his articles, and he’d only just been released from imprisonment in this fortress for inciting revolt.
Dov looked at his watch and hoped tha
t the other Irgun troops under his command stationed at the other sides of the walls of the prison weren’t meeting resistance or scrutiny. They each knew precisely how to perform their roles, as did the prisoners inside the gaol. It had been planned to begin at precisely 4.22 pm, when the day guards were tired and distracted, thinking about what they’d do during the night, and the evening shift workers were not yet in place to take over.
The first explosion would be in the one weak spot of the prison in Acre, where he and his men were pretending to lay cables. When the Ottomans had conquered Acre, they’d built a Turkish bath in the basement of the citadel, and had significantly weakened the structure above. It was the only point in the walls of the vast fortress that was vulnerable, a weakness discovered by Judit.
The minutes ticked on, and at 4.10 pm, in the most British voice he could muster, he said, ‘Alright, chaps, that’s enough. Clear up. Our work’s done here.’
It took them three minutes to pick up their tools, leaving the explosive they’d planted inside the hole they’d made in the wall covered with rocks and debris. They’d buried it in a cavity that would ensure that the explosive forces expanded upwards, downwards and into the building, and would not dissipate uselessly into the street.
Bundled into the British Army Engineering Corps truck, they trundled north and then into a side road near the market to wait. Dov peered steely-eyed through the windscreen. Around him the men were silent. No longer naïve boys driven by anger and ambition, they were now veterans; experienced guerrilla fighters. It hadn’t been easy and they’d lost many along the way – imprisoned or dead. But those that were here were reliable.
