The Reckoning Read online

  Morton appeared confident of the approval and backing of his superiors. That was by no means guaranteed, particularly when the action was as robust as it had been in the Dizengoff Street raid. A few months previously, in October 1941, MacMichael had ordered a thorough report on the activities of the Jewish underground and their relationship with the Jewish Agency and other major institutions of the Yishuv. The memorandum that resulted concentrated mainly on the Haganah and its new commando unit, the Palmach, and the Irgun. The Stern group is represented as a bunch of Chicago-style gangsters, devoid of any ideological impetus, who operated ‘on the plane on which guys are merely bumped off, rubbed out or put on the spot’.14 It was ‘a menace to society but … not politically important’.

  The Haganah and the Palmach, and to a lesser extent the Irgun, were linked to legitimate political bodies with strong political connections, particularly in America. MacMichael already feared that the ‘Zionist Juggernaut … will be the cause of very serious trouble in the Near East’. He concluded that in dealing with the underground it was best to tread carefully because the danger they posed was ‘infinitely less easy to meet by the methods of repression which have been employed against Arabs’.15 The Stern group, however, had no powerful friends abroad and had been forced to seek alliances with Britain’s enemies. It followed, therefore, that in the campaign to shut them down, the same considerations did not apply.

  Morton had proved astonishingly efficient in pursuing the goal. Within hours of the special meeting he had gone a long way to achieving Saunders’ declared objectives. In a single operation he had conducted a ‘general round up’ of members as well as capturing one of the perpetrators of the Yael Street outrage.

  The police had already correctly surmised that Levstein had been behind it. In his report Morton refers to him as ‘having conceived and executed’ the attack. The evidence that he said was found at the flat confirmed it. As well as a loaded automatic and two hand grenades there was a length of fuse and ‘batteries similar to that used in the Schiff case’. With Zak’s capture another file had been closed. He was believed to have been the man who, two months before, had killed the Jewish constable Soffiof as he walked back from the cinema with his wife and child.

  None of this would have been possible had Morton not received an accurate tip-off. Where had it come from, and why? In his book Morton refers only to a ‘Jewish source’ and suggests that the main motive was money. The Stern group believed the information had come from the couple from whom Zak had sublet the room.16 Svorai claimed later the husband was a member of the Haganah.17 Whoever gave the tip-off, their motive was not financial gain. Morton’s reference to money may have been an attempt to put Stern’s followers off the scent. His book was published in 1957 when memories were still fresh and the thirst for revenge lingered.

  Writing to Giles Bey nine days after the shootings, Morton revealed that ‘the information leading to the arrests of these four gangsters was passed to me by a member of the public through the intermediary of two Jewish members of my staff’. He pointed out that, although a decision had been made to offer two hundred pounds each for information leading to the arrest of Zak and Svorai, the notices advertising the rewards had not yet been published. ‘The fact that this information was forthcoming even though no reward had been offered is in every way commendable,’ he declared. He went on to ask for one hundred pounds to be disbursed to the informant and twenty each to the Jewish officers, for ‘you will appreciate that all Jewish members of the CID at the present time run very grave risks, and I do feel that work such as this should be handsomely rewarded’. Giles responded with a cheque.18

  There was, it seemed, no shortage of money available in the hunt for the Stern gang. A decision had already been taken the day before the special meeting to offer a thousand pounds for ‘information leading directly to the apprehension of ‘Avraham Ben Mordechai Stern alias “Yaer [sic]”’. Five other names were on the list, carrying rewards of between four hundred and one hundred pounds. They included those of Hanoch Strelitz and Binyamin Zeroni, whom the CID appeared not to know had split from Stern. The inducements came with a threat, intended to draw the net yet tighter. The public were warned that ‘any person who knowingly harbours or conceals or assists in any way’ any of the wanted men would be subject to the full force of the emergency regulations.19 Morton had asked the Jaffa−Tel Aviv area Public Information Officer for some images for the wanted posters. He responded with ‘eight snaps of Herr Stern as requested’. He went on: ‘I understand that you are not only next on the list, but that you are very badly wanted by the gentleman referred to above and his honourable associates.’ He concluded: ‘I do heartily hope that you will get him and them before they get you.’20

  TEN

  ‘It Doesn’t Matter If They Kill Me’

  Avraham Stern’s face was everywhere. It gazed down from hoardings and out of the pages of the newspapers. The photograph was rather unflattering. The subject stared sullenly at the camera with dark stubble shading his chin and cheeks, his mouth set in a resigned, unhappy line. The picture had been taken after his arrest in 1939 and it created the desired effect. Gone was the romantic, dandy revolutionary; in his place was a seedy-looking gangster.

  The thought of his mother having to see her son’s image plastered over the walls of Tel Aviv with a thousand-pound price on his head filled Stern with anguish. ‘Dear and beloved mother,’ he wrote in what would be his last letter to her. ‘It pains me without limit that you are pained. But you know me and you know that the things they are saying about me are based on lies … may God grant that we see better days.’ He signed it with his childhood nickname, ‘Mema’.1

  For months he had been able to keep up only intermittent contact with Roni, usually through letters delivered by courier. One day he decided to risk a night-time foray to see his long-suffering wife face-to-face. With Amper and Zak lying gravely wounded in hospital he had to rely on Yitzhak Tselnik – a graduate of the Polish training camps and now his chief lieutenant – to accompany him to the rendezvous. Roni arrived with her mother. Even though the couple’s circumstances were more desperate than ever, they had forgotten or perhaps deliberately abandoned their previous agreement not to have a family and she was now two months pregnant. They walked the darkened streets together for an hour. Stern seemed in good spirits, joking and murmuring endearments to Roni in Russian. When they parted his last words were: ‘You aren’t angry with me, are you? Tell me you aren’t angry. Tell me you love me.’ There was one further communication. He sent a note asking for clothes and enclosing five pounds. In it he remarked how it was only in the last few days that he had come to understand ‘how good it is that we will have a child’.2 Roni sent back a parcel of garments for him, including some silk socks.

  If Stern remained in Tel Aviv he was bound to be caught. If he ventured out he was certain to be recognized and few would have any qualms about turning him in. Stern’s behaviour had dissolved the code of solidarity that made even law-abiding Jews reluctant to hand over one of their own to the British. The lavishness of the reward would also help to dispel scruples. A thousand pounds was a lot of money, enough to buy a substantial villa in Tel Aviv, and everyone was on the lookout. The Palestine Post, under the headline ‘Policeman Who Looks Like Gangster’, had related how ‘a Jewish plainclothesman unfortunate enough to bear a likeness to the much sought Abraham Stern has twice found himself dragged before the police since the publication of the reward notices. An Australian soldier seized the man in the street yesterday and brought him up to a Police Constable demanding the [money] on the spot.’3

  Stern would be no safer if he stayed put. The unusual ménage in the rooftop flat in Mizrachi Bet Street was sure to attract attention. The roof was a busy place, with the other tenants coming and going throughout the day to hang up and take down their washing. How long could it be before someone began to wonder about the furtive figure flitting around behind the shutters of the apartment of ‘Mrs Bloc
h’?

  There were just two of them there now. Moshe was only a mile or so away, recovering from his wounds at the Government Hospital in Jaffa. Tova did not dare visit him for fear of being followed. With Stern in residence, the flat was no place for a little girl and Herut was being looked after by her grandmother.

  He passed the days writing and reading – Israel Zangwill’s Memoirs of a Social Revolutionary and a novel by Vicki Baum. The main contact with the outside world was through a thin, bespectacled woman called Hassia Shapira, a telephone operator at the newspaper HaBoker. She would deliver food and domestic supplies, carry messages and letters from the dwindling band of people willing to have anything to do with Yair, and take away his replies. Her comings and goings provided more fodder for gossipy neighbours. Tova told anyone who asked that the visitor was a friend who was looking after her while she recovered from her illness. By now the pretence had become a reality. Tova had developed a liver condition, which caused her acute pain in her side.

  Stern had to move, but where to? Roni’s brother, Nehemia Brosh, would claim later that at this time the head of the Haganah, Eliyahu Golomb, came up with an unexpected offer. He proposed to hide Stern on a remote kibbutz and put the word around that he had fled abroad. Given the organization’s alliance with the British and its hostility to Stern, this seems remarkable. Brosh’s explanation was that Golomb had heard from the Haganah’s contacts inside the police that a decision had been reached that Stern would not be taken alive, and he wanted to spare him from the vengeance of the CID. The Haganah certainly had many agents among Jewish members of the force. It is possible that one of them had formed this impression from conversations or documents relating to the manhunt. In any case, Brosh said, Stern turned the offer down. He could not run away and hide when his men were in prison or lying in hospital under police guard.4 He could at least, though, try to move to somewhere less hazardous. Stern’s presence in the Svorais’ flat was a measure of his desperation. He had nowhere else to go. Ever since he had moved in, he, Moshe and Yitzhak Tselnik had tried to find safer alternatives. One idea was to move him to an ultra-religious neighbourhood where the inhabitants’ complete absorption in their own lives made them oblivious or indifferent to the activities of outsiders and there was a reduced risk of betrayal. Another was to smuggle him to Jerusalem in the back of a furniture lorry. This seemed to have the most chance of success and Tselnik was charged with organizing it. The operation was supposed to take place at the beginning of February.5

  Every day brought new disasters. On 1 February, five days after they were shot by Morton, both Avraham Amper and Zelig Zak died of their wounds. According to Yaacov Levstein, he and the others had maintained a defiant front despite their injuries, threatening a hunger strike unless they were treated by Dr Marcus, a local physician who sympathized with their cause. They had ‘fasted for one day when Amper and Zak seemed to be doing better. Zak woke up and said that he felt strengthened by his wounds. Jokingly, he added that he was now bullet-proof. Amper also seemed to be in good spirits and sent regards to his friends and relatives.’6 The next day, though, they woke ‘pale and listless. At noon Zak suddenly collapsed, and by the time the nurse came in he was dead. About an hour later Amper suddenly took a turn for the worse and expired.’

  The photographs published in the newspapers on 3 February showed Stern and five other wanted men. Pictured with him were Yaacov Polani, Binyamin Zeroni, Hanoch Strelitz, one Aharon Zukerman and Nahman Shulman, a low-ranking member of the band who was reported to have been hanging about 8 Yael Street before the outrage. Shulman was arrested the same evening.7

  Those still at large had four choices. They could wait to be picked up. They could act like the ‘anonymous soldiers’ of Yair’s imagination, fight on, and, in all probability, meet the same fate as their comrades in Dizengoff Street. They could flee. Or they could give themselves up. Polani, who had a four-hundred-pound bounty on his head, took the third option and disappeared to a kibbutz at Maale Ha-Hamisha, in the hills west of Jerusalem.8

  On 4 February, Strelitz and Zeroni, who, despite being far more important than Polani, merited bounties of only two hundred pounds each, gave themselves up. There are two versions of how this came about. According to police chief Alan Saunders, following the quarrel with Stern they had made up their minds that it was time to make their peace with the British. The police were ignorant of the split when ‘the two men approached the CID through intermediaries with a view to surrender’. Negotiations were still in progress at the time of the Yael Street bombing. Saunders was well aware of the potentially sobering effect that the subsequent shootings in Dizengoff Street had on the rest of Stern’s past and present associates. He wrote that, ‘unnerved, perhaps, by the vigorous police action at Dizengoff Street and the sight of their photographs in the press side by side with those of Stern and other desperate men, Strelitz and Zeroni surrendered unconditionally at an address in Tel Aviv’.9

  A slightly different account circulated later which showed the pair in a less timorous light. According to this, they insisted on certain preconditions before handing themselves over. They approached the British through an intermediary, Yitzhak Berman, a Ukrainian-born, London-trained lawyer who was also a senior figure in the Irgun’s intelligence bureau. He was to offer their surrender, subject to three guarantees: they would not be handed over to Morton in Jaffa but to the CID at their headquarters in Jerusalem; they would not be tortured; they would not be put on trial but sent under the emergency regulations to a detention camp. Berman, who went on to become a government minister, claimed later that he took the offer to Dick Catling who pushed it up the line to Giles Bey. Giles agreed. Strelitz and Zeroni were whisked off to Jerusalem in Catling’s car and the British kept their word, sending them off to Mazra’a to join their brothers-in-arms.10

  The following day, Aharon Zukerman, described by an informer as the group’s ‘secretary’ in Tel Aviv, followed their example. He had imagined that the police knew nothing about him. He was having breakfast in the Shederoth café in Allenby Road in Tel Aviv when he opened his newspaper to see his own face staring back at him above an offer of a hundred-pound reward. According to Giles he surrendered ‘unconditionally’ at CID headquarters, though again there is another account stating that via Berman’s good offices he managed to strike the same deal as the others. On 10 February, Baruch Moisevitz, whom the police believed to have been leader of the group in Tel Aviv at the time of the Yael Street bombings, and was perhaps the man mentioned by Levstein in his account of the attack, was arrested ‘on information supplied by secret sources’.11

  Whether or not he was bypassed by these arrangements, Morton must have felt great satisfaction at the way things were going. One way or another, the Stern gang was being mopped up. Furthermore, the vigour the police had shown – exemplified by his own actions – had sent a strong message to other potential enemies that the game was not worth the candle. ‘It is generally believed among the more politically-minded Tel Aviv Jews that the tempo and determination displayed by Government and Police to root out and destroy the Stern movement will have far reaching results,’ he wrote to Giles Bey on 3 February.12 ‘If successful [this] will serve as an effective deterrent to other individuals and groups who, in the future, like Stern, may become possessed with the idea that without political and party backing, and with public sympathy they can overawe the nation and set up [a] “Chicago administration” against which the government would powerless to act.’

  This was a succinct but fairly accurate assessment of what Stern had been aiming to do. All his life he had tried to fit his talents and ambitions into the confines of institutions and organizations – the Hebrew University, the Revisionist movement, the underground. His nature ensured that each attempt ended in failure. The name he had been born with and the name he had chosen for himself revealed the problem. Stern, by coincidence, means ‘star’ in Yiddish, one of the languages spoken in Suwalki. From childhood he had been a performer, reve
lling in the limelight of theatrical productions and recitals. His desire for attention was evident in his dress. The man who proclaimed his willingness to endure misery, filth and death felt uneasy if he was separated from his silk socks. Behind this apparently harmless, even touching vanity lay something much more dangerous.

  Stern was incapable of sharing centre stage with anyone. To act alongside him meant accepting a minor part, and those who questioned his right to the top billing, such as Raziel, Strelitz and Zeroni, were first confronted, then rejected.

  He picked his own roles – poet, dreamer, lover, international wheeler-dealer. The greatest of these was that of ‘Yair’. Yair was the man he wanted to be, a feared and fearless warrior, noble and self-sacrificing, whose dedication would lead him to a redeemer’s death. Now the performance seemed hollow and ridiculous. His poetry was steeped in blood, but he had never felt the rush of horror and excitement that came with looking a man in the eyes as you shot him dead or pressing the button that exploded an infernal machine. But the drama was not over yet. There was still another act to come, still time to bring the theatre to its feet.

  Later his followers would claim that he knew the end − a violent one − was coming but was fatalistically resigned to it. It would not mean extinction but redemption. Binyamin Zeroni testified that ‘Yair dreamed of death. In conversations and discussions between us he always focused on death … whereas I thought you must fight for an idea, he said you had to die for it. He would often say “it doesn’t matter if they kill me”.’13 Yitzhak Tselnik would maintain later that before the Dizengoff Street shootings Stern had seen his capture and trial as an opportunity to denounce British policy in Palestine. After the bloodbath ‘it was clear to him he wouldn’t be taken prisoner but instead would be shot on the spot’.14