by Alan Gold
The journey took them by plane from Tel Aviv airport to Cyprus, then by another plane to Ankara in Turkey. From there she’d flown to Sochi on the shores of the Black Sea where they stopped for the night, and had been given a very private conducted tour of Stalin’s favourite dacha.
The following day, they’d flown directly north onto a concrete landing strip in a field near the village of Domodedovo, twenty-five miles south of Moscow. Here a ZIS limousine was waiting to pick them up. Traffic along the route was cleared for them by motorcycle outriders as they entered Moscow central. Their car skirted the wall of the Kremlin, drove to the right of the Bolshoi Theatre, and came to a halt outside the entry to the Metropol Hotel.
Holding Vered, who was fast asleep in her arms, while porters scurried to take their bags, Judit looked around the marble columns and the grand ceilings of the famous and exclusive Metropol, and then at Anastasia. ‘We’re staying here?’
Anastasia smiled, and nodded, whispering, ‘Yes, my lamb. And there are many other surprises for you . . .’
Fifteen miles north of Jerusalem
1947
As Judit and Anastasia were being shown around the Metropol Hotel by sycophantic staff, sixteen hundred miles to the south of Moscow, Ashira sat on a low wooden bench outside a café in a western suburb of Jerusalem and waited, holding her breath because she was feeling so nervous.
Weeks had gone by since the UN vote, and it had also been weeks since Ashira had followed the woman she idolised, Judit Etzion, out into the streets of Jerusalem. The city had been infused that night with a mix of celebration and rage, yet what Ashira had seen made the city feel deathly quiet save for a single piercing gunshot.
The young woman, so eager and yet so naïve, had spent the weeks wrestling with her conscience, wondering what to do with the knowledge she held, the thing she had seen Judit Etzion do. She’d been back to the house and confirmed it was a Jewish home. A home in mourning because, according to the British police, some Arab madman, furious at the UN vote, had gone on a rampage that night and shot the scion of the family.
Whom should she tell? What would she say? And the more she asked the questions, the more she felt doubt creeping in. What had she really seen? Was it really what she thought? Perhaps there was a reason, a plan, that she was not privy to and could not understand?
Yet in the end it was the great weight on her conscience that she could no longer carry. It was then that Ashira had contacted the leadership of the Irgun and asked to meet with Immanuel Berin, head of the North Jerusalem division of the Irgun.
Ashira had been told to wait at the café until somebody came to collect her. The situation in Jerusalem had escalated into open violence between Arabs and Jews; shootings into cafés, roadside bombs and cold, brutal attacks on the streets. As the British planned their withdrawal the chaos was expanding. Attacking the British never sat well with Ashira, but fighting the Arabs with whom she associated all her hatred felt like the right fight. And it was this, perhaps more than anything, that had compelled the girl to speak up about what she saw that night. When the bullets of the Irgun should have been spent on Arabs, why had Judit Etzion killed a Jewish man from a Jewish family in a Jewish home?
The door to the café opened and Ashira was summoned to enter by a tall thin man who told her to follow him.
He pushed open a door at the far end of the café, and they exited to a laneway. He beckoned her into a car, which drove off immediately, but only two streets before depositing her into the garage of a nondescript house. The garage doors were closed immediately, and she was told to get out, and follow two men holding guns.
Inside the heavily guarded house, she found Immanuel Berin, the Irgun leader, seated behind a small and cluttered desk. In the corner was a small fan panning slowly back and forth but achieving little more than dispersing the thick cigarette smoke more evenly about the space.
Ashira coughed.
‘I’m told you have something important you wanted to tell me,’ said Immanuel. He was known as a direct man but also a cautious and deliberate one. Less the freedom fighter and more the methodical strategist than many of his counterparts. ‘I’m afraid that I can only give you a few minutes. Sit down . . .’ He gestured to a stool.
How should she begin? She’d been practising what to say all morning, not wanting to sound stupid or hysterical. But now that she was confronted by one of the Irgun leaders, she was suddenly lost for words.
‘I . . . I mean . . . I don’t know whether I should . . . I saw a . . .’ She devolved into silence.
Berin looked at her and forced a smile, trying to put her at ease. ‘You’re pregnant?’
She looked at him in shock. ‘What? No!’
‘You want to convert to Islam?’
Her eyes widened as she stared at him.
‘Well, if it’s neither of these, then you won’t shock me. Just tell me what’s on your mind.’
Suddenly, she smiled. ‘I’m sorry. I must seem very stupid to you.’
‘Not at all. You seem nervous. So just start at the beginning, one word in front of the other.’
She nodded. ‘It’s about Judit Etzion.’
Now he was surprised, but he remained silent, nodding and encouraging her to continue.
‘I joined the Irgun in part because of Judit. She’s such a hero in the movement. She’s so brave . . . I . . .’ Ashira stumbled again.
‘Go on. What about Judit?’
Ashira swallowed and continued. ‘The night of the UN vote, I followed her. I just wanted to . . . I don’t know. I followed her hoping that I could be with her, learn from her.’
Ashira looked down at the table, unable to continue. Immanuel knew from the look on her face that the young girl was wrestling with a dilemma she desperately wanted to be free of. Before the Nazis and his arrival in Palestine, Berin had been a psychiatrist in Vienna. While far from a practical skill in times of war, it had none the less proved a valuable asset as a leader in understanding the minds of his people. He knew this was a moment when he had to remain silent, putting gentle pressure on Ashira to continue.
‘She . . . I don’t know why . . . I followed her. I was going to catch her up, just to talk with her, be with her . . . but something made me hold back. I don’t know what. She walked quickly as though she was on a mission, but there was no mission for her that night. She was hiding in the shadows. Then she turned into smaller and smaller streets. And soon she came to a street with houses, Jewish houses. People had been celebrating. You could see people through the windows. They were all so happy with the partition news. And then I saw her go into a garden. She took out a sniper rifle from inside her overcoat, and then she . . .’
‘She what, Ashira?’ asked Berin, his voice barely above a whisper.
‘She fired a shot into the house. In front of his entire family. She just stood there hidden by a tree and fired. She murdered the man. He was a Jew. A professor. Then she walked away. She didn’t see me. I just stayed in the shadows. I was stunned. I didn’t know what to do. I could hear screaming from inside the house. The window into the front room was shattered. I could see his wife and children screaming. I walked towards the house, and I knew immediately that it was a Jewish house. There was a mezuzah on the doorpost.’
Unable to continue, Ashira began to cry. She buried her head in her hands and sobbed. Immanuel looked at her and could understand her inner demons. The child was hideously conflicted. But he knew of the incident. Everybody knew of the murder of Professor Durace in front of his entire family on the night of the UN vote. And like so many, Berin had assumed it had been an Arab attack. Or at best, a stray bullet with no deliberate target.
Berin’s mind began to spin. Judit? Judit Etzion? How could this be?
Was Ashira mistaken? It didn’t make sense. What was the motive? Why would Judit kill a Jewish professor?
‘Ashira, you’ve done well to bring this to my attention.’
But Ashira verbalised the questions in his mind.
‘Why? Why would Judit do this thing?’
‘I am a methodical man and we are a methodical people,’ said Berin, standing and putting a hand on Ashira’s shoulder. ‘We shall not jump to conclusions.’
‘But I know what I saw.’ Her worst fear of not being believed rose up inside her.
‘I don’t doubt you. But we shall be methodical and I will need your eyes for that, Ashira.’
The young woman looked up at Berin, uncertain of what he meant.
‘I need you to be my eyes so that we might learn the whole truth. And part of that learning is that this must remain between us until we understand what happened. You mustn’t discuss this with anybody . . . I mean anybody at all.’
Ashira nodded, feeling a weight of relief lifted from her shoulders now that she’d unburdened herself.
Metropol Hotel, Moscow, USSR
1947
Judit and Anastasia sat in the dining room of the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, with Vered in a pram. They were eating breakfast on their second day in the city, and marvelling at the sophistication of their surroundings. A harpist on the stage was playing for them. A marble fountain cooled the middle of the room. Both women looked up at the stained-glass ceiling high above them, painted with motifs.
To Anastasia, Judit looked like a country girl visiting the city for the first time. ‘You know,’ Anastasia said, ‘Fyodor Shalyapin sang here . . . right here. And Lenin himself made speeches here. And the Englishman George Bernard Shaw stayed here and extolled the virtues of the Soviet people.’
‘He was Irish,’ Judit said.
Anastasia frowned. ‘Irish. English. What does it matter? This is a place for special people.’
Judit looked around the room, examining the other diners. Many of the older, more overweight men had young women at their tables. Others had wives and children.
Anastasia lowered her voice. ‘They’re party officials; some from the provinces – they’re the ones with their fat wives and snivelly kids. The wives insist on coming to Moscow so that they can show off to their friends back home how important their husband is. The others are here with their “nieces”.’ She exaggerated the word to emphasise the deception.
Judit turned back to her handler quizzically.
There were times when Anastasia was reminded of how young Judit was, despite the role she played and the things she had done in Palestine.
‘Prostitutes, my dear, although some of them, the taller, thinner ones, are ballerinas from the Bolshoi just over the road. The ballet is the zoo where our leaders go to find their next pet.’
Judit looked shocked, ‘But prostitution is illegal.’
At this Anastasia laughed out loud.
‘Yes it is, my dear. But this is Moscow and for some women, working on your back is better than standing in poverty.’
‘But the system should provide. For everyone.’ Judit’s concern was genuine. Her memories of her childhood poverty were always sharp, but now she was back in Moscow, they were particularly focused.
‘The system should provide. It can. But sometimes . . . not so much. There have been hard times since the war.’
‘Are people starving?’ Judit asked.
‘Not like in the winters after the Revolution. You were too young, but I remember the winter of 1932 when I was in the Ukraine. Seven million people were deliberately starved to death by Kaganovich, just so he could provide his Moscow masters with grain. They were dark times. I’m ashamed to say that we can’t be proud of all the things that the Soviet has done in its past, but things are no longer like that.’ Anastasia leaned closer, almost conspiratorially. ‘But you and I are women, Judit. We’re not like men. We’re far more pragmatic and strong. So if it was the difference between hunger and cold, and dining here in the warmth on caviar . . .’ She sat back and cast her arms wide at the magnificence of the hotel. ‘I know what I’d do. If I was starving, then for a good meal, I’d let them have me.’
Listening to these words, Judit found herself doing something she so very rarely did any longer; she thought of her family. Not Shalman and Vered, asleep in the pram beside her, but of her parents and her siblings and the life she had left behind. She looked to the ‘nieces’ laughing and smiling at the tables of privileged, fat men and wondered if that, too, might have been her fate. Was she as pragmatic as Anastasia was suggesting? If her father had died and left the family alone, what choice might they have had? And in that moment Judit was struck by how sentimental she suddenly felt.
‘This will be an exciting time for you, Judit. You are now in the bosom of Mother Russia; you are intrinsically important to her success. And Russia intends to show you her love . . .’
Anastasia went on to tell Judit of the important people she would need to meet with and the places she would need to visit. Lenin’s tomb, the Alexandrovsky Gardens, the Kremlin.
‘Why? Why will I be going to all these places?’
Softly, Anastasia answered, ‘We have an enduring problem with our agents in faraway places. When they’re training, surrounded by the symbols of their country, they understand the bigger picture. But holding on to that when they’re operatives abroad is not so easy. This you know yourself, Judit. Agents in a foreign land sometimes become too integrated. You, my dear Judit, are too important for that. We have to ensure that you’re not blinkered by the relationships you form in Israel. Not blinkered by your Jewish friends.’
As though on cue, Vered began to whimper in her pram.
‘Are you saying I’m blinkered by the love of my daughter and my husband?’
‘No, of course you must love Vered and Shalman. But you must love your mother more. Not the poor woman who gave birth to you but still failed to protect you from a drunken father. I’m talking about your real mother, Judita, the mother who loves you more than life itself, Mother Russia.’
It had been two days since the reception in the palaces of the Kremlin. She had never seen such opulence and ceremony, and her former life in Moscow as well as her current life in Palestine both seemed alien to her that night. She had been made a Heroine of the State by Comrade Beria and for the briefest of moments General Secretary Stalin himself had shaken her hand. In that moment, Judit felt more tiny, yet more powerful than she had felt in her whole life. As the great leader’s hand slid away from hers she knew who she was, what she was – what her purpose was – without doubt or hesitation.
But it had been two days since the reception and the power she had felt was receding. She was also now, for the first time since arriving in Moscow, alone. Anastasia had left her to attend to meetings and Judit had time to walk the streets of the city she once called home.
Pushing Vered in her pram along Vysheslavtsev Street, within sight of the synagogue, Judit’s heart beat faster. These streets were so familiar to her, yet so strange. Her life was now in Jerusalem. Her home, the roads where she walked had their names in Hebrew, Arabic and English. The Cyrillic Russian letters that she could read perfectly now looked strangely foreign. These potholed and filthy streets from another era seemed to belong to another person’s life.
Then she looked at the men and women in the street. Post-war years of privation and austerity had been cruel to most of them. Their hollow-eyed and gaunt faces studied her as a stranger, a potential threat. Had she changed so much? Or maybe it was because she was well-fed, tanned and walking with upright square shoulders, while they were gaunt, dour and bent in stature.
Judit walked without any conscious direction or decision about where she wanted to go but her feet seemed to carry her until she found herself standing on the street of her old family home.
The building where she had been born was a house divided into seven apartments, each of one or two rooms where upwards of four or five members of the same family eked out their existence. Judit was struck by the irony; Moscow was ten times bigger than Jerusalem – Russia was a thousand times bigger than Palestine – yet here, everybody was squeezed into a living space the size of a cupboard.
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br /> Judit stood in front of the building, Vered cooing softly and wide-eyed from the pram, and looked up at the building and all its memories. She had no idea how long she stood there but the trance was broken by a face. Judit did not remember the woman appearing and wondered in that moment if she had been standing there in front of her all along.
‘Judita.’
Judit blinked at the sound of her name. The woman stepped forward.
‘Judita.’
Closer still she came, age and incredulity worn into her face.
‘Judita?’ No longer a name but a question.
Judit’s mother, Ekaterina, stumbled as she walked towards her daughter and Judit instinctively threw out her strong arms to catch her. The woman’s body she held was thin and bony and light as a feather. Ekaterina looked up at her daughter and said her name again with disbelief in her eyes.
‘Judita . . .’
A short time later Judit found herself seated in the tiny living-room table of the cramped apartment with her mother standing before her. Judit couldn’t help but remember her child-self hiding under that very same table all those years ago.
Her mother wept.
Ekaterina knew, as did the whole community, that Judita had been taken away by the NKVD – taken from school when she was only fourteen, and never seen again until now. No one would have ever expected to see her again, so to her mother, Judit was a walking ghost, bringing as much fear as joy.
Judit expected to be asked where she had been, what had happened, but her mother managed no such words between sobs, so Judit had instead asked after her siblings.
‘Maxim works at the factory. He works so hard . . . Your sister, Galina . . .’ But Ekaterina didn’t finish the sentence and Judit’s mind wondered if her younger sister had been forced to sell herself to support the family like other women in the hotel where she and Anastasia were staying.
