. … I continually I revisit the scenes that I saw during two years of cruel war against the same enemy that the whole world is fighting now.  I see men from all over the world who marched day and night, crossing enormous obstacles- savage mountains, deep rivers, closed frontiers- to  stand at the side of the Spanish people in their struggle for justice. I see  the men who went to Spain to die, but died on the way, assassinated by fascist sub-marines. They ran, clenched fists and songs of hope, towards a better tomorrow for humanity with this song on their lips.”

Henri to Yvette, 1942 November

Haim and his friend Arega , without papers, left Brussels and after passing a couple of days in Paris, moved on east. Crossing the Marne, the Meuse and the Moselle, they stepped off the train at Nancy, the steel town where Arega had friends  and they believed it would be easier to find work.  But only a  few days  later ,  young Haim  was arrested again and imprisoned. Released without charge, five days later , the police gave him a warning: “Listen, we know all about you; we’re watching you. You are a member of the Communist Party”. They were right and wrong.  A communist in belief and a demonstrator, he had not yet joined the Party. But after this, the friends decided to settle in Paris.

Paris in the early 1930’s. Intellectual, cultural, artistic capital of the world and of the country that by 1946 Henri declared he loved “with a patriotic love”, the city became the spiritual capital of Haim’s own revolutionary and romantic life. “ In moments of sadness,” he wrote later to Yvette, “I have always sought beauty and consolation in the chimney pots on the roofs of Paris, or between the columns of Notre Dame.While you were gazing at the reflection of the moon in a silent river that flowed across peaceful fields, I  was watching the reflections of the gas lights on the bridges of the Seine (especially the Pont des Arts) or the motor car headlights on the Parisian pavements, wet with rain. These always transported me into a world of beatitude.”

He and Arega rented a room in the Hotel Diana, 73 rue St Jaques in the 5^th, arrondissement a modest three storey hotel, paces from Metro Maubert Mutualite,  and around the corner from the Sorbonne, where Haim studied politics and law  while  employed, first as a car cleaner in the railways and later making underpants at a clothing factory in working class Belleville. Some time in 1933 he joined the Communist Party.

 It was just the right time for the young Sacco and Vanzetti protestor to join; Mussolini had invaded Abyssinia, Hitler had come to power and in France the violent right wing demonstrations against the Radical government of Daladier alerted anti fascist Frenchmen to the strength of their enemies.

Life for communist students like Henri and Arega  was tempestuous and hungry. When they could no longer afford the rent, the pair moved to a smaller hotel on the corner of rue Monsieur le Prince and rue Vaugirard in the 6th arrondissement near the Medical Faculty and the Jardins de Luxembourg.  Years later , it amused Henri to point out the building to his Australian relatives, to recall among fellow lodgers the Lithuanian anarchist, who later died in Spain and Maria, the small dark haired Polish economics student who became his first  lover. With gratitude he remembered the compassionate landlady who allowed him and Arega to paint the outside of the hotel in lieu of rent. And he never forgot the occasional five-pound note folded into a letter from his sister in Melbourne. She herself had borrowed the money from a longer established Polish Jewish immigrant and was paying it back at a pound a week. Manka had always readily lent a hand to her youngest brother and all the more so now that she too had joined the Communist Party. At exactly the same time as she was reading Lenin’s State and Revolution and Imperialism in Melbourne, her brother was reading them in Paris. Her communist newspaper was the weekly “Workers’ Voice” and his the daily “l’Humanite”; her monthly journal was the “Communist Review” and his “Cahiers du Bolshevisme”. Each took on board the same ideas expressed in the same vocabulary, she in English and he in French.

To Paris Haim had welcomed, with affection and approval, his brother in law when he arrived from Melbourne, in the spring of 1932, en route to Moscow, an unofficial member of the first Australian Trade Union delegation to the USSR, the land of socialism. They met joyfully and together visited local party headquarters.

 And finally to Paris came his brother David.

One by one, Adlers were abandoning their Brussels perch.

Soon after Hannah’s death, Jacob had disposed of his failing business and left Brussels for Antwerp where he married Mrs Lauffer. Then they left for Spain and finally, around 1933, with his new wife and her family, Jacob settled again in Palestine. Jacob was carrying his son Bernard’s British/Palestinian passport. 

Brother Szymeck had also moved from Brussels to Antwerp in his pursuit of Sonia Ginsburg, the young woman who soon became his wife. She was from a Russian Jewish family who fled to Shanghai after the October Revolution and later moved on  to Antwerp where her father bought a seat at the Bourse and traded diamonds with China. 

Bernard, unemployed when his father’s business folded, had found a humble job behind the counter at Felix Potin, the French grocery chain; he would soon be the only member of the Adler family left in Brussels.  David and Ala Levantine had been living pleasantly  with Szymeck in Antwerp since their arrival from Tel Aviv, now and then inviting David’s sons over from Brussels for a visit, but their good life came to an end, suddenly  when David started to go blind.   Despite a variety of treatments his sight was fading daily. He decided to seek help from the more renowned doctors  of Paris.

 The Adlers had followed each other from Sosnowiec to Tel Aviv to Brussels; now it was to Paris, and as young revolutionary Haim felt blood to be at least as thick as ideology, old Henri enjoyed telling his dauntless brother’s story. At Gare du Nord he had met David and Miss Levantine’s train from Brussels and led them, through the Metro, out at Gare d’Austerlitz and next door to the grand Hopital la Pitie.

Consultations produced a diagnosis of paralysis of the optic nerves (“effect of syphilis”, sniffed Itzhak in Melbourne) and David was admitted to hospital and administered malaria, in the hope that the high and regular fever would dislodge the paralysis. Haim, the virtuous young communist, regularly visited his amoral eldest brother. No hardship at all ,  Henri recalled, since he was often granted the bedside bonus of looking at the beautiful Ala. At other times feverish David  bewailed his own wickedness and wept for his poor mother, his wife and his children. “When the fever subsided,” Henri smiled, “it carried David’s conscience with it.” 

One day, he arrived at the hospital to find that Ala Levantine had gone. Back to Palestine, David told him, to collect money from her parents, then she would return to collect him. Time passed and eventually a telegram arrived. It was from Ala’s mother and it told David that their house was closed to him.

As Henri’s story went in 1975, David responded simply and immediately to the shock:  “I must go to Palestine.”  He put an end to his treatment, pressed Henri into organising his departure and found a second cousin who came up with his fare. Since the shipping company refused to carry a blind man travelling alone, Henri needed to find a woman passenger willing to watch over him. He found one without difficulty, he said, and saw his blind brother off from the wharf at Marseilles.

One brother, I was told, had seen him on board and another would meet him at Jaffa. Szymeck had already left Belgium for Tel Aviv, hoping to find a job and  escape having to work for his love Sonia’s father at the Bourse, a prospect which seemed inevitable, given his lack of skills, but which pleased him not at all.  Waiting at the dock with a cab, Szymeck collected David and the two brothers drove directly to the Levantine house. No one was at home, but they entered with David’s key and went straight into the living room.

“There used to be a china vase near the door” “ Is it still there?”

David asked Szymeck, so the story goes,

“Yes, here it is!”

“Give it to me”.

 And he dropped it through his fingers to the floor and smashed it.

“There used to be a crystal dish on that shelf?

 “Give it to me”.

Each expensive object David had lavished on Ala in the early days of their love  was dropped and smashed and then the brothers left the house to the shouts of the newly arrived and affronted Levantines threatening to call the police. Evidently they thought better of it.

Blind David, though pleased with his revenge, was not yet satisfied. “Come over and kill her,” he called to Haim in Paris, “you will be pardoned because you are avenging your blind brother.”

That was Henri’s story and he was indulgent as he recalled his long dead brother’s outrageous behaviour. Two  years later, Henri was again at the Gare du Nord; this time to meet David’s family, his wife Manya and their boys as their train arrived in Paris, en route for the same boat and the same destination.

All members of the European and Australian Adler family found irresistible the next chapter of David’s story; even the un-romantic and disapproving Itzhak. After his smashing return to Palestine, David settled into a hospital for the blind in Jerusalem where a friend from the 1920’s came every day to take him out for coffee and cake. They favoured a Swiss patisserie, owned by a devout Christian with a special sympathy for Jews, perhaps because they were always served by the owner’s daughter, a fine looking blonde with large blue eyes , so the friend informed David, and as good as she was beautiful.  Her name was Friedi and, as the story goes, one night she had a vision in which Christ appeared  and told her she must marry this poor blind Jew. So she did. Henri  learnt of the marriage in Paris, he told me, through a headline in the Jewish papers that proclaimed: -“Miracle in Jerusalem”. Henri was surely having me on about the headline but certainly David was a miracle worker. Transforming himself from the Polish Adler  into the Hebrew Nesher he had flown, completely blind, into a new marriage and a new life. Far away in Melbourne the miraculous story was told again and again. Images of the fine blonde Friedi arm in arm with David, grown fat since his blindness, were passed around the table by his admiring sister to a fellow migrant from Sosnowiec, an old friend of David’ s and to his romantic niece. My fantasies about European relatives now broadened to include a rich Swiss uncle.  For David and Friedi finally gave up, after some unsuccessful ventures in Tel Aviv, which included a café called Opera that employed his eldest son Willy, and moved, before the war, from Tel Aviv to Friedi’s home town of Zurich. In prosperous, capitalist Switzerland, David, the blind foreigner, was again successful. He opened an epicerie and became very rich. “A millionaire in Swiss francs”, was Henri’s estimate, ““richer than the family had ever been in Poland.”

But back in Paris Haim’s financial problems increased. His communist life was, unexpectedly, ess active than his sister’s on the other side of the earth in Melbourne. He attended only four meetings of the communist cell, during his time in Paris, according to his own account inscribed a few years later in the Spanish questionnaire, because his work and studies made attending difficult. Although a member of the Sorbonne cell of the communist party and the Union of Students, he felt diffident, as a recently arrived foreigner, about engaging in the great arguments that rent the communist movement in those days. Perhaps his French was not yet confident enough to oppose the supporters of Trotsky or “ social fascists” or to cope with sectarian fanaticism. Reflecting on this phase of his life later, in his war time letters, he described himself in those days as only a “fellow traveller”.

In the end, after the three friends had been thrown out of their lodgings again, unable to pay the rent and as his love, Maria became poorer and poorer, the tender and restless Haim decided on a practical move. A British subject with a Palestinian passport and a family to lodge with, he would go back, get a job and send money over to his two dear friends.  In 1935, with family help, he took the familiar route again from Marseilles.

 Although the country had never appealed to him, Palestine was Henri’s home on three different. occasions. His Jewishness,  never denied , was but a thin crust on his idealistic revolutionary socialism.  A communist and an assimilated Jew , he was hostile  both to all religion and to the Zionist dream. A European man of the city, whose particular love for Paris had already taken root, he had nothing to say to me, during our many conversations, about the years he had lived in Palestine. His activities there along with his judgments of the country  came to light only when I  read his war time letters and his Spanish communist questionnaire from the Comintern Archives in Moscow.

 When Haim arrived first arrived with his family in the twenties he had formed part of the wave of Polish Jewish migrants ; he came now after the violent German elections of 1933 and Hitler’s accession to power. Now German Jews began to arrive in Palestine and more came  after the 1935 Nuremburg Laws deprived Jews (including  people with one Jewish grand parent) of jobs and citizenship rights.  While in Europe, Zionist leaders, fearful of the future for Jews, called temperately on Britain to speed up the creation of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, already agreed to in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and clinched in the White Paper of 1922, in Palestine revisionist Zionists attacked the Zionist Congress and demanded unlimited immigration, the Arab High Committee called on Britain to immediately halt immigration; the tiny band of  communists supported that , adding the annulment of the Balfour declaration and the abolition of the British Mandate to their list of impossible demands. Utopians to and internationalists all, communists hated nationalism but countenanced  anti- colonial nationalism, believing that under communist leadership, such nationalism  would metamorphose into the socialist revolution.

The general strike called in 1936 by the Arab leadership to protest against Jewish immigration exploded into open warfare against the Jews: burning, looting and killing as Arabs attacked and Jewish defence units retaliated.   It was into this new and bloody crisis in the highly charged and deeply divided colony that he had left as a schoolboy and cared nothing for that Haim now plunged. And it was only after he arrived in Palestine during 1935,  as he wrote later, that his life as a communist revolutionary began.

 The difficulties and complexities of that life were drawn for me vividly during the summer of 1999 at Sevres, near Paris, in the sculpture garden and studio of Achiam Shoshani, who had been a youth in Palestine during the thirties and a member of the Communist Party of Palestine (PKP).  He could not recall Haim, but thought he must have known him. “There were only about 50 people in the whole country, Arabs and Jews, in the party”, he recalled, “ and besides none of us used our real names.” No matter about the figure; I knew there had been  more  but never checked it because the feeling of isolation was clear and accurate.

The violent past was far from the garden and the galleries. Achiam’s work sings of life. Pregnant women, biblical figures and large humane, round forms blessed us while he remembered the hard times communists had endured in Palestine sixty years before. The Communist International had ordered the PKP to “Arabise”. They appointed Arabs to the Central Committee and sent Arab communists  to Moscow to study at a special university, despite the fact that 85% of the membership were Jews. At home PKP members wrote leaflets calling on Arab workers to revolt against the colonial power. When they did, in 1929, killing and wounding Jews not British soldiers, the PKP’s instinctive reaction was horror and self-defence and even the Comintern agent sent from Moscow reported home, “It’s a pogrom”. But the Comintern’s line remained inflexible: capitalism and imperialism were the enemies and the killings were defended as the outcome of an anti-imperialist uprising. Life for Palestinian communists became tougher during the thirties, as their activities brought them into conflict with all the Jewish groups, political, military and trade union, as well as the British colonial government.

Fighting broke out between mainly Jewish communist groups, formed to defend Arab labour, and the Haganah, the Jewish defence force formed to defend Jewish settlers against Arab attacks .Achiam was there. When the Haganah denounced the communists to the British, as traitors to the Jewish cause the communists were confirmed in the correctness of their position.

Achiam was arrested many times during these fights and held in prison while his young friend Benjamin Schnitzer, whose father was a member of the Central Committee of the PKP, watched it all from the dangerous sidelines. Haim must have been there too.

In Newe Tzedek, the oldest quarter of Tel Aviv, where he lives now with his wife Ruth, Benjamin Schnitzer told me his story. In 1937, after the Arab revolt, when he was 10 years old, his family fled to Paris to escape imprisonment. Before that, he recalls, every one of his five brothers and sisters had been born in a different country, as his father was fleeing the police. At home in Palestine, his father was almost always in jail. “ As all Communists were “ said Benjamin as we sat in his little house, just around the corner from the spot where my father had landed eighty years before, though quite unrecognisable now. “Six children and the grandmother lived together on a tiny pension while father worked full time for the Communist Party. My sister was arrested and her husband chased to their house by the Haganah and bashed up in front of me. I was a small boy at the time. They were both imprisoned at Petah Tikvah.” 

Benjamin also remembered – shaking his fine 70 year old head in disapproval – those Yom Kippurs  when his father and other comrades would go down to the beach and demonstrate their disdain for religion and their rebellious spirit by letting off fireworks, singing, dancing and feasting.  Ruth, the beautiful Yemeni woman who met her future husband when he was her leader in the Young Communist League intervened.“ After the war” she said, “he and his friends used to do the same thing!”

My cousin Willy, David’s son, also lived through this troubled time, but retrieved different recollections as we sat in Mannheim , sifting through a box of family photographs, searching for the ones he had taken, when a keen seventeen-year-old photographer, of his young uncle Haim. He was puzzled. “Haim was like a son to my mother; he ate with us and was a member of the family. He was very fond of us all, but there is no mention of my mother in Henri’s memories”

But think of how many things Haim had on his mind. Financially, he obliged himself to send something regularly to Maria and Arega out of the 6 pounds a month he earned; politically he was a member of the illegal PKP. Willy’s romantic images of smiling Haim, his hand clenched in the communist salute in front of the flat white buildings of Richon le Zion that we are looking at, are those of the family member, the uncle; concealed were the harsher realities of his life.

None of his family knew that while living with them at Richon le Zion he was busy with the tasks he had been given of forming a communist party cell in the village and trying to organise Arab intellectuals.  Both were the party jobs he wrote down, three years later, when he filled in his Spanish questionnaire. How he worked, and with what success, he does not say and nowhere does he mention the Arab rising and the bloodshed that followed. My guess is that, as a communist with no intention of settling in Palestine and hostile to Zionism, he distanced himself from the deep, but theoretically impossible,  un-Marxist, divisions between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. I imagine him turning with relief from this painfully intractable problem to a clear-cut and European battle.

For July 1936 brought the generals’ coup against the recently elected Popular Front left wing Republican government and the first actions in the Spanish Civil War which soon became the moral issue of the 1930’s.  A few years later, Henri  laid it out clearly in a letter to his love:

“From all over the world, men marched day and night, crossing enormous obstacles- savage mountains, deep rivers, closed frontiers- to come and stand at the side of the Spanish people in their struggle for justice. I see how the men who went to Spain to die, died on the way, assassinated by fascist sub-marines. They ran, clenched fists and songs of hope, towards a better tomorrow for humanity with this song on their lips.”

Haim was one , he wrote from an army camp during another war in 1942,” who were among the first to give a vigorous “NO” to the criminal wishes of the fascists”. Early in 1937, about the same time as Benjamin Shnitzer’s family fled to France, Haim left for Spain. His local family was in the dark about his plans. “He told us one day, while he was with us in Richon le Zion, that he was leaving for Paris,” his younger nephew Jules told me one day in Frankfurt,  “We heard nothing then, until we received a postcard from Barcelona.”

The first batch of volunteers, most of them recruited by the PKP, arrived in October; by November despite the length  and cost of the voyage, 60 men and women had arrived from Palestine to join the International Brigades. Most of them were Jews.  Photos, letters and inscribed books landed in Melbourne from Spanish fronts, informing Haim’s Australian family of his doings and those of the International Brigades, all in the clear black and white of war time propaganda and under the harsh eye of war time  censorship.

Those letters later disappeared either during my family’s moves  or, more likely, during their destruction of private papers in the worrying time of the anti- communist referendum of 1950.  He recalled his Spanish experiences later in letters to Yvette and, much later, talking to me.

Haim had left Jaffa in 1937 for Marseilles, the familiar port, and waited there concealed by comrades until, with about 20 volunteers, from Palestine and France, including 2 or 3 women, he boarded a boat trading with Barcelona. They landed on March 13 and were moved on to Albacete, headquarters of the recently formed International Brigades. Assimilated Polish Jews, like Haim, were to be found in all the Brigades.  In 1996, at the Homenajes for the International brigaders on the sixtieth anniversary of the war, when I was asking  likely brigaders abut my uncle Henri, an unexpected number of Canadian, French and other European ex Brigaders I met in Spain turned out to have been originally Jews from Poland. Haim was one of those Jewish brigaders, who did not hide his Jewishness, but thought it completely without importance. Religion, like nationalism, to them was a mere diversion from the class struggle.  Though Haim Adler would have preferred to serve with the French, he allowed himself to be convinced by the comrades at Albacete that since Poland was the land of his birth, he should join the newly formed XIIIth Brigade named for the patriotic Pole, Jaroslaw Dabrowski. A graduate of the military school of St Petersburg, Dabrowski had fought against imperial Russia in the Polish revolutions of 1863 and 1871 and later had died on the barricades in Paris, defending the 1871 Commune.    Haim Adler, like many of the International Brigade , was known in Spain  by  another name; he bore the Slavic non-Jewish fore -name Henryk and the false surname of Trojan. How and when he used  his new Dabrowski name and how he responded to it, no one will never know; what I do know now, from the Comintern Archives, that he gave his name as Haim Adler when asked by the Communist Party of Spain. From the same source I learnt that by June 1937, he was serving with other Slavs in the Primer Grupo Eslava, a newly formed artillery group, which would fight at Escorial, Brunete and Estramudera and that by early 1938, he had risen in rank to alferez    (second lieutenant).   Haim Adler is his name in the records of  the Albacete headquarters of the International Brigades, held  now in the Military Archives at Avila.

From the time of our first meeting in 1968,  Henri had locked his Spanish past so tightly inside himself that despite my eager questioning  I knew little more about his International Brigade life than I had known as a child.  Suddenly, one evening in 1975, at a restaurant in Paris, he began to talk.

He would rarely agree to be taken out to dinner.  Adler men always paid for women, especially for female relations, and if he could not pay he would not go; but on this occasion Ken was there too and had thought up a special anniversary dinner to celebrate  giving up smoking. ”I have saved one million old francs in those twenty  years”, he calculated,  “more than fifty dinners chez Wepler”. And Henri was beguiled into accepting.  After an excellent dinner and much wine, while we lingered over coffee, Henri suddenly became loquacious and I scrabbled for a pen and paper.. “Le Chef du Division etait un Bulgare, Dimitroff; moi, j’etait Adjoint du Division”, he began. I scribbled on paper serviettes and any scrap of paper we manage to dig out of wallet and pocket; at first simultaneously translating, but unable quickly enough to capture each idiom, I began to transcribe as best I could. Dimitrov!  THE Dimitrov, the famous hero of the Reichstag fire trial, then Secretary of the Comintern?  Of course not; he is a namesake, a long time communist who had been condemned to death in Bulgaria and escaped to Soviet Russia. Head of a heavy  artillery division that included a Polish, Czech and a Balkan battery, and Uncle Henri -Henryk Trojan- was his Adjunct. 

He and Dimitrov had already had some disagreements, when early in 1938, all the commandants in the Andalusia area were called together by the Spanish Army chief and informed that an offensive would begin in 24 hours. It was to be an important diversion for the main offensive at Teruel and they must hold on at all costs, despite intelligence reports confirming that the offensive had no hope of succeeding. Dimitrov was absent during the battle, when Henri and the artillery were placed on a hill overlooking the infantry. As the infantry was driven back, broken into two flanks that left the heavy old guns exposed and difficult to move , he rang Dimitrov and begged: ‘Give orders for our men to retreat!” “OK” replied Dimitrov; “ I’m coming!” “He arrived in his chauffeur driven car as the fascists were coming up the hill,” said Henri  and ordered, “Retreat!  “Fly!”. Then he leapt into his car and drove off, leaving me in command.” Many had been killed, the rest retreated in good order and arrived at Headquarters to find that Dimitrov was not there . Its occupants marvelled: “ But Dimitrov said you were all killed. That no one was left!”

“He was an ambitious man, altogether unworthy, politically, militarily and as a human being” Henri concluded firmly. Henri was convinced that military command – and perhaps his famous name- had gone to Dimitrov’s head.

That was bad enough but worse was to come.

Fifteen kilometres behind their line, said Henri, was the field hospital, directed by two doctors, one a Hungarian Jew, the other his German, non-Jewish wife. One morning an anarchist brigade leader approached Dimitrov and asked, “Can you describe your doctor as anti-fascist?”  “Of course” he replied, but learnt that the doctor was being held captive. “He was found on the other side of our lines” the anarchist leader revealed. “ He wanted to desert to the fascists.”

Though the anarchists did not want to give him up, Dimitrov fetched the doctor and locked him in a cell. Henri was given the task of interviewing him.

“What happened?”

“I just rode my horse to do my normal work at the Polish battery and was fired on. I stopped. But I was in front of the lines so they arrested me.” The doctor had not been aware that the anarchists had retreated in the night and didn’t know where the line was and besides ,  he was short sighted. Though Henri believed his story, Dimitrov refused to listen. “The man is a fascist”, he insisted, “ and must be shot immediately.”

Henri, troubled and reluctant, wanted to wait two days until the Political Commissar returned and could investigate the matter. “He’s in our hands” he argued, “What’s the hurry?  “He might have accomplices “Dimitrov insisted and at two o’clock next morning, a Bulgarian sergeant woke Henri with a signed order: “the doctor is to be taken out at 5 am and shot while trying to escape”. Henri refused to obey, still insisting on an investigation, and the sergeant left, shaking his head. “This will go hard for you, refusing to obey an order.”

Dimitrov, refusing to be baulked, did the job himself. Later in the day, he called a meeting and reported to the group: “He tried to get to the fascists while we were out. I shot him down.”

To the doctor’s wife, Dimitrov explained that her husband had been a fascist and had been shot. With a terrible shriek, she cried out “NO! NO.  That night she hanged herself. “I can never forget the sight of her, hanging with her stomach”, Henri almost wept as he told her story, “She was five months pregnant.” We sat silent, alone among  the empty cups and glasses .  “What happened to you?” I asked, at last.  Henryk was tried by the Polish party members of the Brigade: “ soldiers, miners, workers, analphabets”, he described them. He was vindicated and Dimitrov expelled from the Party. Though not tried for murder, as we both by 1975 would have agreed was a more appropriate punishment. Henri never said another word to me about Spain. A few years after this evening, in 1980, while he was explaining his past life to his daughter Helene, he wrote: “ My doubts concerning the life of the Party had their beginnings in Spain. But the over-riding necessity of mobilising the masses for the war against fascism blurred my doubts and galvanised my convictions.”

Doubts never surfaced in Henri’s wartime letters , only galvanised convictions. “ Five years ago,” he wrote in November 1942, “I was there, in martyred Spain, a soldier  sharing the same troubles the same risks and the same glory…For some (who lacked understanding or were too refined) we were “vulgar adventurers”, for those with a human heart, we were “the flower of humanity”. Oh, that flower didn’t smell very nice. It stank of blood and sweat. But how proud I was of that time!  I learnt there to hate the ugly and the cruel and to love the good, the beautiful and the just.”

And he reflected in 1944, “Through the war in Spain, I became a true revolutionary, conscious and ready for any sacrifice for the triumph of the cause.”

His  judgement of the war never altered. As to his feelings about the events of his dinner time revelation, I judged he had singled out the Dimitrov episodes to demonstrate that even a just war is a cruel dirty business, and that not all communists are soft hearted idealists, like himself. A man who died with many secrets still locked up inside himself, he must have been haunted enough by the spectre of the dangling German woman doctor and by Dimitrov’s actions to open up a little to an appreciative if naïve audience.

According to the  International Brigade documents , the First Grupo’s doctor was Teniente Rudolf Forgazs (evidenlty a Hungarian) but of the three batteries that made up the 1^st Group de Artilleria Pesado: Chaim Adler was Alferez in the Second Battery and Dimitir Dimitroff, Teniente in the third. Not, as I had taken down, that they were both in th same battery, Had time  played tricks with his memory?  Had my transcription been faulty? Or do documents tell only part of the story.

****                              *************8

Towards the end of 1938 the Brigades were withdrawn from Spain conflict by the Negrin socialist government in the mistaken hope that the Germans and Italians would also withdraw their troops. Haim set off for yet another country.  Encamped near the French border, he and another Palestinian Brigader found themselves with a British group and were gathered up for repatriation by the British Government. The unlucky Polish, Czech and Yugoslav survivors of the Primer Grupo Eslavo were marched over the border and railed into French concentration camps while the British group, accompanied by the British Consul, set off for Paris and passed safely through the stations of Austerlitz and St Lazare, watched closely by police guards. Across the channel at Newhaven, as they were boarding the train for London, English police stopped the Brigaders. “We believe there are two illegals here. Where are they?”  Haim and his companion waited fearfully, listening to the English comrades who refused to hand over the two Palestinians and made such a fuss that the police waved them on to London.

In 1983 I spent some days with Henri in Adolphe Cherrioux, before meeting my friend and age-mate Netta Burns in Barcelona. Together we planned to follow the footsteps of our Australian Brigaders to Figueras, Mataro, Girona, Benecassim, Albacete and Madrid. It was a project I imagined might  interest Uncle Henri, but it did not. Australia, the land of  wattle, sheep and kangaroos, was too far from Europe to be taken seriously by my European relatives.  Seventy Australians had fought for the Spanish Republic, 9000 French; what could an Australian say of value about the Spanish Civil War?

”Come with us!” I urged Henri. “You could help us with your Spanish and show us where you’d been; you can see the country again.” 

I had not then read his own words about the fields of Andalusia, the pastures of Extramadura, the mountains of Guadarrama where he had found consolation. “ When evening came and the macabre music of the instruments of death that human genius created stopped” he had written in 1942, “ I walked out of my shell hole  somewhere in the Sierra Morena and my whole being found sweet rest in the beauty of nature which surrounded me. The shape of those vast far off mountains fraternising with the unclouded Spanish sky; the vast fields covered with stalks of yellow wheat stretching out to the feet of my warrior mountain; the whole intense life of the earth gave pause to my cruelest wound.”

I had not read those words, but I knew that like all International Brigaders, he had fallen in love with Spain and Spaniards and I counted on the unlocking effect of the Spanish landscape to learn more about the International Brigade past of this sedentary and tense fellow. “ It would be great for us”, I urged. He was tempted, and I believed then that had the twinkling Netta been years younger he may have  come.

Today I believe other motives may have inhibited him.  In 1944, he had written to Yvette, from Italy, about a comrade of his from Spain who had befriended her in Tel Aviv, “ our collaboration in Spain was not always very happy. We had different tasks to fill whose success depended on our collaboration and that went wrong.  Mistakes? Yes, for sure. And on both sides, without doubt. All those who were in Spain have something rich about them. Rich, good and intelligent. And all of them are my best comrades and friends. In spite of the faults.”   In August of the same year he received news of a conference of former International Brigade members to be held in Haifa. “I don’t know why this story leaves me rather cold.”, he wrote to Yvette, “ It seems to me that it’s an enterprise doomed to failure. It already belongs to history, given this new war with its new constellation of “heroes” and the misery that has crashed down on all people in between times. Given all that, I don’t believe it possible to realise the aims our friends insist on. And besides, at this time it feels like cheap advertising. And I don’t like that. History has made a great leap between 1936 and 1944. We mustn’t forget that and we must no longer live on past glories. If I’d been there I would have opposed the formation of this new pretext for chitchat. Especially in the reality of Palestine, as I knew it. So it’s perhaps a good thing I wasn’t there though  I wish them much success.”

By 1983 Henri’s past was even more to be put aside, hidden, forgotten. In Paris, he had shunned all advances from the Amicale des Anciens Volontaires en Espagne Republicaine and crankily rejected my suggestion that these old comrades in arms might provide congenial company in what had become a sadly solitary life. I suppose he knew that many of these ex Brigaders would not be sympathetic to his having abandoned communist Poland in 1959.

In 1986 and again in 1996 at the fiftieth and sixtieth Homenaje, I  enquired about my uncle from every Dabrowski man I met in hotels, on buses and at meetings , but no one had known him. Either as Adler or Trojan. Not really surprising, given war –time conditions and the large number of Poles in the International Brigades. And it may not have been prudent , even in 1986 to admit knowledge of a Jewish ex-Brigader who had abandoned Warsaw for Paris.

Though Henri kept himself and his Spanish past locked away from others, his experiences lived on, despite himself. The fourth tree planted by  Salman Salzman, a fellow Brigader from Palestine, in his Israeli  Grove of Peace and Friendship to honour the International Brigades bears the name of Henryck Trojan, although Salzman had no idea at the time who he was or even what his real name was.  As “Adler Troyau,” he is listed in a French book about former Spanish fighters  “living in Israel”. He appears, as Henryck Trojan and Chaim Adler in two Hebrew books about Jews in the Spanish Civil war. In one, he died there, in the other it is recorded that during the 1950’s, along with other members of the PKP in Poland who had fought in Spain, he was  “cruelly tortured” and made “state witness”.

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At the beginning of 1939 Henryk Trojan arrived in London, thin, pale, and unwell. The Party was his safe haven and billeted him with a Party member and his wife. He was a printer who worked for one of the big newspapers and she had time on her hands. She cared for the heroic young Brigader in her house, fed him on porridge and other English food that he ate with surprise and distaste and when he was sufficiently restored in health and fitness they briefly became lovers

Twenty seven years old, without papers, his only professions so far were artillery officer and revolutionary, he was at the British party’s disposal. He did not want to stay in London, “an enormous, hideous city in a very strange country” as he described it later. Recalling those days to his wife he wrote in 1944, “ I had no attachment, no home, no wife, no child. No trade. It was one of those stages that mark the life of a man; one of those stages that formed me. I suffered inevitable torture of mind and body. It was hard.”  A Palestinian citizen who did not want to return to Palestine, he asked whether he could have a visa for the USSR, but it had not arrived when D.N.Pritt, the Communist lawyer who was handling legal matters for International Brigaders, finally secured him a passport. It was stamped “restricted to returning to Palestine.” Soon after, he left for France and was back in Marseilles waiting for a ship and working for the Party when his sister and her husband landed in the spring of 1939 for a European holiday. He was both delighted and dismayed to see them. “Don’t you know there’s going to be a war? You must get out straight away.” But as his brother in law dogmatically refused to believe that there could be a war between capitalist powers, he gave up and travelled to Paris with them to enjoy their company for the short time before they left for Poland.

Just a month before the outbreak of World War II, he tried again, unsuccessfully to stay in Europe.

At the beginning of 1940, after the Nazis had invaded Poland and his Australian sister and her husband were tacking slowly and carefully across the Atlantic on the Arandora Star,  Chaim Adler, exhausted in body and spirit, confounded by conflicting emotions and distressed at the prospect ahead of him, landed back in Palestine.

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