Blissful memories of the marriage week, new confidence and a joyous love  sustained Haim on his return to camp.

“ Some very serious things are happening in our Party. When I returned from Cairo, I resigned from our Company’s committee. This morning all sorts of functionaries and activists had long discussions with me about the situation inside the Party. I predict that they are moving very definitely towards a split. And a split is the gravest thing possible for the Palestinian movement at the present time”.  Censorship prevented him from expounding on the split; perhaps over how communists should react to the anti-British activities which had already split the Zionist movement. He was more straightforward about his army activities.

“Well, with me it has been  like this: in front of me stretches the cruel desert; the car travels, slides and bumps; it rains, it hails; the wind whistles and roars and there’s no window in my cabin…. I get all the rain, the hail, the desert and all the wind directly in my face. And my hands, which have to hang on hard and attentively to the steering wheel, freeze. Not at all pleasant, oh no!  Then suddenly, without warning, I say a word to the chap beside me (this time, a sympathetic corporal – they do exist!) I stop the vehicle majestically and softly, slowly I open my “kit-bag”(ENG) and take out of it THE GLOVES. I glove myself, I smile with mouth and eyes, triumphantly, and I start the engine up again.[…]It is the not the wool of these gloves, it is the sweetness of you heart. Since you gave them to me. It is your divine tenderness, It is your love – and mine.[…] It was Tuesday. I was with you. In our room where we loved each other so much. Do you dream about it as often as I do? Tell me, wasn’t that the most beautiful week you have ever spent? […] (March 31, 1943)

They managed to come together twice more before his departure. Once, when she visited him in his camp and again when they  met in  Tel Aviv, a happy, loving trio with her son, Ouri, who “enriched our afternoons and gave me a lot to think about. And one regret. A regret that will remain forever, alas: the pity that he is not mine, as he is yours distresses me.  But your little one has, better than anyone, made me understand how fine our life will be, when we are reunited again forever. […]I think of it ceaselessly. That and the memories  make up my daily life. Apart from what you already know: our friends with their petty disputes, my work ever more boring and my conscience ever more torn by the fact that I am  a sort of shirker.” ( May 1943)

In Tel Aviv, he met up again with Dov, discharged now from the army “a result of the dirty tricks of those who under cover of nationalist)?) ideology(!) shamefully betray the true interests of the Jewish people in this war against their most atrocious bestial enemy, the one most determined to exterminate them totally.”(June 1943)   A trick, he writes, played by the same man who had played a similar one on himself. Dov was upset and, like Henri, disgusted by the confusion among his comrades.

Travelling  with his truck along the lines of the allied advance through the “tiresome Near East”, he lays at Yvette’s feet a heightened appreciation of natural wonders: “You, cherie, have wrought miracles in me. You have transformed me into a man worthy of being loved by you”(July 1943)

And, stimulated by her love and by hearing that his sister in Australia has written a loving letter to Yvette,  he pictures the joy and beauty of the arrival in Australia of himself, Yvette and the little one. The two women, he foretells, “will love each other like very good sisters and comrades”.(July 1943)

Pining again and again for Yvette,  he compares his former self – the revolutionary idealist aspiring to transcend humanity – and the man he is today for whom happiness  is  “ to rest my head on your knees, to rest myself and, with your kisses, acquire a new energy to carry on my life and contribute with you, to making men’s lives more harmonious with the beauty of nature. Now happiness is loving you and sleeping with you. And it is also – oh little one- giving a brother to Ouri.” (July 1943)

Such a transforming passion troubled their closest women comrades friends in Tel Aviv . Yvette seemed to have replaced all his former interests and his apathy about

His apathy about everything for which he previously showed such vivacity was worrying them. Yvette, who had evidently read them his letters, reported their reaction to Henri.

“ Not true!  was his spirited reply :“Drive far away the least suspicion that you have uprooted me from my past life. What you had done is  uproot me from what was ugly, unwholesome, empty and futile in my past life”(22 July 1943)

While translating these war-time letters, I was all on  Henri’s side and disapproved of Yvette’s sharing such private emotions. But I must admit that had I read them  at sixteen, instead of  nearly sixty years later,  I would have responded like Adina and Clara to the outpourings of my idealist hero and communist uncle:

“Dear little one”,( he  wrote on my birthday)  “I have just received the authorisation from my C.O. for our marriage. Now there is nothing more than a simple formality that I hope will quickly be arranged. I want to tell you again that I love you so much that I have become quite mad. It seems certain to me that I am not able to live for long far from you without losing my reason. ”(December 7, 1942).

Mixed waves of joy and sadness  surge through him after another passionate meeting in Cairo and Ismalia and throughout  the tense time of waiting to set off for the “ great departure”.

 “I am writing from the road” he wrote “we have come to a halt and I don’t know how long it will last or when I will be able to send you another letter…. I am writing in a great hurry and want to content myself with telling you the truth and nothing but the truth. So listen. I am madly in love with you my darling wife. You fill my entire horizon” ( August14.1943) And three days later. “The halt still continues. Nerves are tender. Long days of waiting, empty of all interests are tiring to morale. The heat is more and more overpowering, the sun more and more irritating. I have nothing to do because I am ready. Physically and morally..I am calm and confident. I know only too well why I am here and what is expected of me. All my previous life has been on this side of the barricades. I am only continuing….When I compare the peaceful sadness which fills me now with the enthusiastic joy that I felt when I found myself in the same situation 18 months ago… before I knew you. Fear nothing, you have removed nothing of my hatred for the fascists nor my love for the building of a better human society.”(August 17, 1943)

And then, out of the blue, she came and the effect was overwhelming. “Yvette, my darling wife, thank you, oh thank you so much for coming. I was so impatient to see you. I felt so terrible about leaving without being able to speak to you again, embrace you again, caress you, love you. When you are concerned, I cannot play the Stoic…

I was desperate – and then you came…

The calm, that pale light, the sweet traits of your good intelligent sleeping face – that is the image I will guard jealously in my heart to the end, to the very end. Your love for me is so great, so sweet: it enlarges me, it purifies me. It gives me goodness, courage, intelligence. It makes a man of me.… Never before, never, have I left for battle so alive, confident, strong, so manly as now.

Little one, cherie, my wife so loved, my little Yvette, be strong, confidant and courageous.  Work hard. Be good, brotherly towards our wounded. Do not let yourself be carried away by the pain of our separation.  Consider what is at stake. We must fight to reconquer the right to live with human dignity, to give dignity back to our France, darling, to give back liberty to the peoples, to rebuild Stalingrad, to build a new and better world. But it will not lessen your strength if, from time to time, in the evening after having fought all day against death, you dream a little of me. Of my love. Of our life….. Of our little house. Of our kids—“- August 20 1943).

During the following weeks of waiting in the mail less void but strengthened by her presence – “You are with me so I  live “ – he writes long  letters  of love,  he reads and is profoundly moved by Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Fall of Paris, which carries him again into “the streets, the houses, the mansards, the bridges, the footpaths, the lamp posts…The Faubourg du Temple, that ancient rising street ….The Parisian prolo leaning against the bar drinking his Pernod – and a Nazi right next to him! The garden of Notre Dame, there on the corner where the Seine is cut in the middle, and the crooked cross on all that!….How to imagine the little streets of Republique, Bastille, Gambetta, Belleville, Pere Lachaise, Roquette or Mouffetard!…  The footpaths of those streets, the walls of the houses, the men and women who live there… will they still be the same after the great wound they have received? They must be. If not, nothing is worth the trouble.”(August 27 1943)

From Alexandria on the eve of the great departure , “ravenous” for Yvette and hoping she  may come for a last visit,  he sits in the YMCA drinking  coffee and smoking and from there writes his last letter before setting sail for the invasion of Italy.

“The news is good. The end of fascism approaches. The Red Army produces marvels and it seems that the Allies have decided to go right to the end. (That is up to a certain point). My heart rejoices and I long  to get into action  more quickly.”

And he ponders the future. “What will happen after the war, cherie? Fascism defeated, the peoples in revolt for a more just social order and you, recovered again and living inseparably with me.  You agree, darling, that this will happen? I love to imagine it. In  detail.  First of all, we will meet each other again. Here? In liberated Europe?  What will our meeting be like? Will I  cry out like a madman or be stupefied, as I have been before? Then we will have to dream about our “establishment”.  What a grand word! Five thousand francs per month eh!  A trifle! It won’t be too difficult for us to find a corner to bring up our kids in dignity. Isn’t that so darling?  Somewhere in the world there will be a little house with a pretty garden all around (flowers and also vegetables) and in the house there will be our children Manka and Jean or the little Helene or the two of them and others, all of whom we will cherish. And we two, we will love each other so tenderly, in our work, in the struggle, in the whole of life…..Oh, I begin to wander. You see how empty I am. Impossible to connect my thoughts. They are only of my love for you”  (September 5 1943”

And  then,between the 20^th and 30^th September.

“In action again. I find myself in the most fought over sector of the front, with the liberating troops of Europe. The battle is fierce. The most important thing is that our air power is far superior to that of the enemy. It is very evident that the nazis can no longer do more than defend themselves. I write these words from a trench and the sky is full of the sound of our vanquishing engines and the world around trembles and vibrates with the earth under the powerful blows of shells and bombs.  But when the bombs burst ,Yvette cherie, you are so close to me that fear departs  and I joke. My comrades are astonished, but they don’t know  you are with me.

Now I must finish; there is an order to carry out. I love you, cherie, I love you with all my soul and body. I will write you a long letter later for I want you to have news of me. I have heard nothing of you, since you left me in Alex.

Goodbye. I love you. I embrace you so very tenderly, little Yvette.(between September 20-30, 1943.

How enthusiastically and with what pleasure Henri’s  letters express his pleasure to be back again in “good old green Europe, contributing his share to its liberation and the liberation of “our France”. They express too his mixed responses to the world stretching before him to the horizon,  “filled with misery and destruction” Every day, as he watched the “little groups of  Italian solders, in rags and bare feet, returning to their houses – if they still exist”, he felt not one bit of vengeful pleasure. “ I feel their pain, “ he wrote “as I do that of the French, the Jews and the Russians.” (1943, no date) But since their agony signalled  the end of Nazism, which he felt was  approaching, it also brought him  joy. “The day Nazism dies, my joy will triumph ; you will again be in my arms”.(1943, no date)

During the next two and a half  years in Italy , as he drove north with the Allied advance, his letters advance the same passions: overwhelming love and deep sadness at their separation, joyful thoughts of post war life, hatred of fascism and plans for the new  post war social order, hostility to the Zionist solution for Palestine, love of the European landscape and of Paris. Above all shines his communist idealism: “You can imagine how the news from the USSR thrills us, cant you darling! And here too, you no doubt jnow that we continue to advance. Little one, I told you earlier to what extent my ideal lives in my heart. I want to repeat that I never think about all that without you being present. You accompany me everywhere. In my thoughts in my hopes in my struggle. You are in my eyes when I gaze on the ruins of the war…Nothing scoffs more at human dignity than this cruel but necessary war. Cherie, it must, it must certainly be the last. And though one can treat me a thousand times as naive, I want to believe it. I believe it strongly, deeply and I attach myself to that faith with all my strength and I will devote all my strength to the service of saving humanity.  There is so much to do! You well know that there is only one way. One only. And everything depends on us.”(November 6, 1943)

 Naples overwhelmed him with beauty of nature. Walking  along the city’s “ sordid little streets that smell of  vermin,. narrow, winding little streets with their facades almost touching, where you can see only a tiny scrap of blue sky, where the beauty of the kids is hidden by a great layer of filth, where you smell the misery. but  where human beauty is everywhere, someone touched my belt. He was so small this kid that his arm could only reach my belt. “Foki – foki, ma bella signorina.. A sweet  pale little face, selling sex, a wicked smile in his black eyes. I lifted my hand to hit him. But I didn’t hit him. I fled. Here to this café.”(November 26, 1943)

Compassion and revolutionary solutions vie within him:

”I know that the smell of urine in these little streets can not be washed away with all the soap in the world. Only dynamite will make that smell disappear. Well placed dynamite.”  But he rejects as forcefully  Lord Vansittart’s  call for the total destruction of the German people”. “That too, is Nazi poison. I know, I understand their great and justified hatred. But it’s a blind hatred all the same. And for me it is Nazism in reverse.”(November 26, 1943)

And always, he is anxious about lost letters; irregular letters; letters that express Yvette’s concern about her child and his minders. And above all, love expressed with his literary models in mind. “Cherie, cherie, cherie,… you don’t know how much I want to hold you in my arms. To look at your eyes. Into your eyes. To hold you and caress you and whisper into your ears my desire for you, a vibrant desire, the beautiful desire which tears my entrails but which makes me live[…]To play with your hair, to play with you nose. To feel your body living under my touch. To feel the lovely heat of your body – in your body. To love you, to love you. To fold you in my arms in my legs. In my heart. To feel your tongue in my mouth. …To wrap myself in you, my sweet one, to wrap myself and to rise with you, near you, because of you into the blue heights, where everything disappears nothing remains but the tender blue of our naked bodies – where nothing lives save you and me, and me in you. “ (December 15,1943)

 Yvette is  promoted.  “I walk among my comrades crying “There is now one Sergeant at least In the whole Army that I love  very much!”. But when she decides  to leave the Army to resume the upbringing of her son and is anxious that Henri may disapprove, he is pained but reassuring. “How can you doubt?…” If she were in another country she would be a partisan and there would be no question of leaving the fight, but from the hospital there is no shame. “I love the mother in you” (January 10, 1944). He arranges to send her more money which she will need to supplement her wages in the job she must find. But her new plan also exposes Henri’s  deep uncertainties and he ends the letter with a plea: “Wait for me. Keep your heart for me.

Later, when she is back in Tel Aviv and living with her son in Bar Kochba Street, Yvette takes up again with their comrades and friends ; he hears that and goes to concerts with Dov. The beautiful Italian spring penetrates his heart with a longing that he controls while sharing the sights with  her: “As I write this letter, everything has disappeared. A strange night has fallen over the world. Vesuvius is angry. It weeps lava. Though it’s daytime I am writing to you with electric light. Outside everything is black. For long and lugubrious hours it is raining great chunks of lava, which fall from the sky and cover the earth with a blackness that causes anguish in men’s hearts. And there, so near to the mountain the mass of fire advances- a red avalanche- majestic, irresistible. Cruel. It wipes out and burns, devastating fields and villages. It destroys and entombs.” The country ravaged by passions of men, by hunger and hideous speculators, now has the ravages of Vesuvius in 1944 to add to its miseries”.((March 22 1944)

Now, at last, he is able to tell Yvette where he had been and what he was doing now. “Among today’s orders we have been given permission to talk , so, you remember the letter where I described my ‘ more important work’ and you asked me what it was?. Now it is no longer a secret: I was at Anzio. After the invasion of Salerno, I had ‘the pleasure’ of helping (a little) with that of Anzio. But all that is over now and I have already forgotten it.”.. ( March 23, 1944,)

 And on the first anniversary of their passionate encounter in Cairo his vivid recollections  cross with letters from her “filled with sweetness, love and tenderness”   but imbued with a loneliness that adds to his burdens.  The heaviest of these is guilt..

…”. If I were a partisan! If I were a fighting soldier. If I were one of those who day and night in the mud, in the blood in the fire lived and fought and died to save millions of youngsters from famine, to prevent the destruction of whole peoples, to bring peace to humanity, that would be an excuse. A good excuse for you and for me.  But I’m not. I ‘m a soldier in the” Service Corps”(Eng)…. At the beginning, during the invasion of Salerno I did a more or less important job. Even now, from time to time, I make a journey up high and I am conscious of the fact that I too am a bit useful in this struggle for liberty and a better world. But in general, it is over. For the most part, now, my life is bounded by routine matters whose importance for the war effort, unfortunately escapes me. “(April 10. 1944)

Yvette had evidently expected to receive a happier letter;  shocked by such introspection, she must have chided him. and in his next letter Henri explains himself: : “Sometimes you receive a sad, despairing letter from me, full of anxiety. Don’t make too much of it, Yvette. You must understand the nature behind it. You must understand that this also is the consequence of all the richness which is within in me, you and my socialist ideal.”  The “games, the zig zags, hesitations “ of the  politics of this stage of the war distress him too; the rift opening up between the Allies,  “ the fear of the leaders of the democracies for the peace which is coming” (April 21 1944)

He apologizes for not writing more happily, but: “ I have an astounding need to be always near you, to love you while caressing you, speaking to you…But because of the war it’s not possible and this makes me nervous, anxious, discontented, depressed – not a very sympathetic fellow, you see! – and then I pick up the pen and write a sad letter. But with me the sadness passes, the joy remains.”(April 21 1944)

As always, her words have a powerful effect and joy  alone radiates from his May Day letter and he refrains, he says, from personal “twaddle” and memories of his past May Days. “ I want this to be your May Day letter. So I  will tell you only this: for the first time, after more than 20 years of fascist dictatorship, Italy, working class Italy has celebrated its holiday. Those little improvised red flags made from bits of cloth that I saw on the humble little houses, the badly delivered talks that I heard on street corners, the waking from a long sleep  I saw on the hardened faces of the old workers and the astonishment that I read on the faces of the young – all that, cherie, moved me more than any other May day. Everyone here is distressed, all classes, but the working class will find itself again. I can see it. I can feel it”…

This  May Day declaration to his company, which could have been written by Ilya Ehrenburg or Josef Stalin or Australian Lance Sharkey was the one simple communist harangue in the whole bundle of 239 letters. Except for one paragraph..

“We are Jewish soldiers. And as such we know what our people expect of us.  That is why, on this May Day we can do no better than reaffirm our firm decision not to spare any effort in this war, to hasten its victorious end and also to liberate the people, our people, who groan and struggle in Hitler’s sadistic ghettos.

Because – and it cannot be said too often- the most vital interest of the Jewish people is the same as that of the working class of the world. The most vital interest of the Jewish people is identified absolutely with the interest of all people under the Nazi yoke.

…That is why our slogan on this May Day 1944 can only be “Second Front, Now!”

…The working class has nothing to fear from the future, after the defeat of fascism. It has nothing to lose and everything to win.

Is it the same thing for the Jewish people?

Is there another people in the world whose immediate national interest mixes so well with the interest of the working class?  And since the future of the Jewish people, even its existence, depends on the socialist future of the world, it is the whole people who must today cry with us- Long Live Socialism! Long Live May Day! National celebration of all free peoples! (May 2, 1944)

That’s what I said, darling.”

 Expressions of joy continued to light up his later letters.

““You often ask me to write about Italy.. For the last week I have been somewhere in the Italian mountains working with the R.E.(Royal engineers) to build a bridge. The peace which reigns here, the beauty and richness of surrounding nature, the distance from all the monkey tricks of the barracks, all this has almost made me forget that there is a war on; that men wear uniforms which give them the right to restrict their activity to a stupid children’s game and to murder (May 31, 1944)

“What wonderful news, darling! Rome liberated, the German lines in Italy completely penetrated, the second front begun …. For the last two days , with you and the rest of the world I can only think of those who are now fighting Nazism on French soil….”C’est la lutte finale cherie exhulted Henri on June 8, 1944  in the words of the Communist anthem l’Internationale , at the news of the French resistance movement  where his friends from the International Brigades were prominent fighters.

“Courage, cherie, it’s not long now”

With the end of the war in sight post war problems were in the air, among them  revenge and hatred which disgusted so Yvette that Henri picked up the issue in one of his longest letters.

Hatred he sees as “Nazi bestiality in reverse”, arguing against it whenever he can. “My point of view only provokes general hilarity. I am aware of it and feel badly but I go on, despite people treating me as a “stupid humanist”. My heart is filled with the same burning hatred against fascism as most of our friends…And although they laugh and call me the Don Quixote of universal socialism, although they call me a romantic idealist (is there anything derogatory about that?) I will continue under the general laughter to say to them: OK comrades, where will this hatred lead…. I understand emotional hatred. I don’t sanction it, but I understand it…I understand Stalin’s order of the day “Death to the German invader” as a necessity in fighting against a cruel enemy. But I cannot go along with Ehrenburg’s slogan: “It’s not enough to kill a German, you must want to strangle him with your own hands!…  None of the serious post war problems of housing, rehabilitation, German youth and hatred can be resolved without a socialist revolution.”(July 5 1944)

As the liberating armies march on Warsaw, Paris and Milan that triumph, writes Henri , is the triumph of their love. In the summer of 1944, when the majority of his company prepares to descend on Rome for some days’ leave, he chooses to drive instead with a few mates up to green and silent mountains and an isolated farm house. ”I am sure I will spend six lovely days here,” he wrote. “All of them with you.”

Responding to her wishes he describes the farm houses and the villages in the mountains and sneers at his company members, the Roman tourists.“Some go simply to be able to say to their grand children: “I have been to Rome! I liberated Rome!” They are the far-sighted optimists. Some go to see the churches, the palaces, the museums and the Pope and also to buy reproductions of the great masters and send them home. These are the boys with artistic souls, or rather the “sabras”,  who have suddenly discovered that Michel Angelo is a great man because he sculpted the great prophets. They are moved to tears when they see the majestic beards of Jeremiah or Joshua (because it’s Jeremiah, not because of the beard!) and they feel great familiarity with this good Angelo. His perfection agreeably tickles their national spirit and they can only regret, or attribute to an unfortunate mistake, that the “Slaves” are not called “Israel in Chains” or even better “Israel breaking its chains.”  (August 14-15 1944)

Henri returned  from this peaceful and beautiful holiday  place  on the eve of the liberation of Paris to “limitless joy” at the part the French people were playing  but dismayed that  in three weeks he had received no letter from Yvette. He  was not worried, he wrote, “Because I love you”.   As autumn came round again and he at last received a letter “gently explaining” her long silence, he was not worried, though unhappy to learn that she had not received several of his “political” letters or the flowers, the “humble token of love” that he had sent her by a discharged soldier. 

”You are tired, darling. It’s a year since we left each other at the railway station. A whole year! Waiting all that time is hard and also tiring…. I know  that you are a young woman. That you are a beautiful woman. That you are a woman conscious of your instincts. That when the evening comes and you are alone under the starry sky, solitude weighs heavily on you and your young body makes you feel terrible. And the more you love me, the greater the pain. And what sort of statement could I make to you about that?” I have confidence in you, that’s to say in your intelligence and in your body. And you will know – free of all other considerations- how to follow your nature, to keep the good health of your being, of your body and of your spirit( September 2,1944)…” Is he giving her the green light for sexual relation ships?. With Dov, for example?

When Paris was liberated, Henri was too overwhelmed to write . “I was stupefied for a very long time” . Manka sent a telegram to Yvette and the Allies are charging about in Italy. Again he is nominated  for promotion to lance corporal and again he refuses ,although his CO tries his best to persuade him,“ For a whole pile of reasons. Although I know that it would mean a rise in pay which would help you a lot. I would have been able to send you 30 shillings a month more. But I could not accept. That’s why I ask you to forgive me darling and believe that my reasons for refusing are not egotistical but simply matters of principle.”(September 25, 1944)

 Loving letters from Yvette arrive and fill him with joy and confidence and when she reveals her project of returning to France he agrees heartily . He suggests she cable his Australian sister in Melbourne.  “My sister is my best friend and unless she has problems (administrative, not financial!) she will not refuse to help us. For my part, I will see if it possible to cable her independently . In any case, I will write her a letter today about it.  Besides that I would like to know, Yvette, how much money we are talking about, more or less. For I, too, will be able to contribute to this effort.” (September 30,1944)

Suggesting ways of borrowing money on her monthly payments, he reminds her of technicalities to be covered before  she leaves Palestine and repeats his approval of her going home to her country and her family, of giving her boy a French upbringing. He wrote to Manka asking for money for Yvette whose letters remained  loving and full of hope for their reunion, while his painted long and rapturous  pictures of their home life.

 “You speak so sweetly about my age. And of yours. And of the child that you want in your maternal womb. Thank you cherie.  Certainly cherie, we will have a child. I would like a daughter. And she will be called Helene. . I believe it with all my heart.

When I see our little house, our hearth, I see it as clearly as if it were already here.I see the big boy and the little girl …I see the furniture with simple and joyous lines, arranged tastefully by you. I feel the atmosphere all warm, gentle, happy, filled with love. Oh how perfectly I feel it, darling! …I don’t see myself leaving. But I see my return in the evening. Everyone joyful and happy. The evening meal.. Friends. Reading, discussion. We listen to music on the radio. We drink coffee. We smoke. We love each other.  We are so happy at home, the two of us and those who come to visit, that we are too lazy to go to town.  I see all that so well.  But where was I all day?”(October  28, 1944)

A man with no trade and no prfoession. And who cannot imagine one, he is overcome towards the end of the year with a lassitude that stays with him until the spring advance ..

“I am going through a strange time. And I can’t define it. But it consists in certain apathy, a laziness of the brain, a depression of spirit, something not at all palpable, but which exists and weighs very heavily on me. I feel physically fit and I haven’t read a book in two months, think about that a bit!  I still read the newspaper, but only skim quickly through the news. II am working very hard but that’s not the reason…..  The fatigue or the lassitude I feel is all moral.

I think that the enthusiasm, so essential to a man in my condition, is sick, perhaps about to die… ..

I can now tell you that I tried to leave my present service and join the commandos and even worse than that, but it did not succeed. They did not want people older than 30. They were mistaken but it was not their mistake that made the law. And besides that, when I was asked whether I wanted to go to the Jewish Brigade or not , I swiftly and resolutely refused to join. But in this case, I was right, darling. I know it. My revolutionary instinct has not left me. And although I don’t know what you think about it, or what our friends think about it, I decided not to associate myself with this new chauvinist enterprise.  Now tell me, darling, what you think of my state of mind. Is it really dangerous? (November 26, 1944)”

The gloom does not leave him as the year draws to an end and the first serious signs of post war battles for power appear in Greece. Now, he writes,  those who were “gallant fighters” while they fought against Hitler , have turned into “bandits and gangsters” when they want to lead the liberation of their country from its Allied “liberators”.  Problems that  once would have appeared  a  challenge to be taken up with enthusiasm now seem depressing

 “I don’t dare defy the censor too much,” he writes in December, “so I will say only that the war approaches its end, so the convulsions of Europe begin.  And along with them, the convulsions of my heart. Goodbye, cherie, go on loving me as much as I love you.”

Loving letters in reply arrive from Yvette filled with news and sympathetic counselling . “Thanks for your kind and helpful words about my state of mind…. I am certain that after the war, a rest of two or three months with you will put me back on my feet. The observations that I accumulate enrich my inner life but the trouble is that I am not simply a machine that registers impressions. I am living. .. I think I’m a fellow who’s a little too sensitive. Pity. . Another Christmas has passed. Let’s hope it’s the last without you. (December 26 1944)  No confidence shines from his words and the new years begins with more passionate pining.

Happy New-Year darling. I wish you everything good and beautiful, everything as you wish. A year of victory and of peace, a year when you rejoin your beloved family in your beautiful native land reconquered and free at last …. We are resting for the last days so I have lots of leisure.  Lots of time to dream about you, to think of you. To pine for you… In rare moments, I am perfectly happy. And why not? I have the right to be. I have you and I am conscious that in the moments of mortal danger to all humanity I did all that I could, given the circumstances, to help defeat that danger. It is humanity that is the victor of this war. (See Stalin’s speech on 7 Nov where he speaks of the moral victory of the idea of the USSR. See also the latest developments in Greece) So I am happy in rare moments.

But when I think of you, darling, alone, wasting part of your youth waiting for me, waiting for my return, then, oh no, I am not happy. Not at all. And I can do nothing about it.(January 4 1945)

Yvette has grown alarmed at the state of Henri’s  soul and of his finances; rebukes him for wasting his money on gifts and wasting himself in an “isolation” so dangerous for his moral state. Rise above the “black beast of depression” which seems to have overwhelmed you, she urges. Receiving love letters from his mountain retreat did not encourage her. With her friends she believed that Henri should have been exploring and reporting on the delights of Rome instead of retreating to the top of a mountain to contemplate his own passions and beliefs.

Then weeks pass without news from Yvette. Restless in Tel Aviv , Yvette waited for the war to end so that she could return with her child to France. Years later, she told me that she had hoped Dov would accompany her but at the time she said nothing though her letters became ambivalent and meagre.

Despite his exuberance  as he discusses the “Nazis’ last spring”  and the possibility that the Red Army will occupy Berlin, despite his joy at his own part in the Allied advance  in Italy, Henri defends his state of mind  resolutely, while apologising for his “tasteless lamentations. ”The truth is that  my spirit is pre-occupied  with a very simple but vast, complicated and incomprehensible problem .comprehension.,,…..The problem of the humble daily life of an ordinary man in relation to events of historical and global importance. Imagine an illiterate Italian peasant born and raised somewhere in the small, limited, Fontamara- world, who by the accident of history finds himself suddenly dead on the icy steppes of Stalingrad. And at the same time, for the same reasons, his hovel in Fontamara inhabited by his wife, his kids, his pigs and his goats is destroyed by a bomb. You see in that a hidden meaning too vast to grasp; too difficult to digest…Or again . Man invents penicillin, the marvellous serum,  the greatest since the discoveries of Pasteur, destined to save millions of people from sickness and death. At the same time, he invents  the V1 and the V2, destined to destroy and assassinate the greatest number of people. And now, imagine the man who invented a marvellous device capable of catching the V1 and V2 in full flight and sending them back to explode on the houses and heads of the Nazis.  That also would be a marvellous invention, destined to save millions of men from death or hideous servitude, which is worse. There also is a meaning there.. I remember that Tolstoy in War and Peace seeks this meaning somewhere…unhappily I can’t really remember  what Tolstoy concluded.  All that sometimes makes for miseries and a very sad letter follows.”(January 1945)

Yvette’s continues her assault on Henri’s “sterile”  condition and Henri continues to admire her and thank her for it. “You are good cherie to take me by the nose from time to time and bring me down to earth. It’s not that I suffer from the sickness of looking down at everything from a great height. But sometimes I fly too high into the sky of spiritual speculation, which wastes my capacity and risks breaking my neck. Then you are here to remind me of the daily tasks and I thank you for that.. From now on when the mud reaches my knees, I will quickly lie down on the green grass and so keep my heart ‘pure’ for after the war.”

Post war problems, both practical and theoretical, engrossed the communist soldiers of the Palestine force in these last months of  the war. Do we consider our part of Italy “liberated” or “conquered”?  The question was argued hotly among the comrades in Henri’s camp. Both, he believed. “It’s the dialectic. The yes in the no and the no in the yes.” (February 20, 1945) But more pressing and puzzling to Henri were decisions he read about which  signalled a change of attitude of the Palestinian Communist Party, about questions of principle. As always, he shared his difficulties with Yvette.

“The new political line of the Palestine Party, which accepts the agenda of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, has stirred up all our friends here. For my part, with the best will in the world, I can see this only as  an acceptance of the Zionist theory on the Jewish question. In other  words, we simply have to recognise now that during all those years of struggle against the Zionist movement, we were incorrect….

My analysis  invariably leads me to quite the opposite conclusion.  Historically, the fate of the Jewish people is tied indissolubly to the fate of all oppressed people. And as for all peoples,  only a socialist regime is capable of resolving the problems of the Jewish people. Other ways are reactionary and can only turn the Jewish people away from the right road… Wiping out fascism is the beginning of an epoch of great conquests for the working class. That’s the only possible perspective.

….It seems to me that the Party position is false….The new line is defeatist and as always it will pay dearly for it. Can you help me understand the situation better?…Soon darling we will see each other. Not on a ‘leave’. The end of the war.” (April 3, 1945)

“Here it is, cherie!” Henri wrote , the day after Germany surrendered on May 8 1945, “We have them this time, the Nazis. It is a great day. So long waited for, now it has arrived…and although I feel an immense joy deep in my heart, I don’t know how to express it. I am incapable.  This war which has lasted 12 years – for it began the day Hitler took power – is finished at last. In total victory, physical and moral. From the Atlantic to the Volga all the peoples have suffered the misery of war. Millions of men, women and children have found a horrible death. Whole countries are in ruins. Destruction has never been so great…. Now the political war begins. Painfully different from the one which has just finished. Peace and the liberty for the people who paid a bloody price in uprooting their most desperate enemies. That could never be defended at San Francisco. For there, as Molotov said, they had a tendency to quickly forget the crimes of fascism. Peace and liberty will be defended in the factories and fields of each people. Above all where there are men of good will. And the two of us, darling, will find ourselves in their ranks. That is in our blood and in our heads.  And we must Yvette, work hard until the day when we celebrate, as we celebrate today, the liberation day of all peoples, the German people also.. along with the whole of humanity.  It’s a hard job. It will need intelligence, patience and the spirit of sacrifice, no less than people showed during the war. We have that. And if we haven’t enough, we will forge it together.”

But followed a wistful PS. “I’ve had no news from you for 15 days. I would like to attribute that to our formidable advance in these last weeks.” (May 9, 1945)

His army’s formidable advance brought Henri and his army to the shores of Lake Como and Yvette’s departure from Palestine meant  that Henri’s letters were now written  into the air. Vividly he describes the luxurious palace on Lake Como where “there are so many bed rooms and drawing rooms that I have not managed to count them”;  tells her of two boys who came down from the Alps, two French boys who had been  prisoners of war since 1940 and escaped from German concentration camp just before the war ended. Before they left for home he helped them  with clothes, cigarettes and money. “They told me a heap of things about the terrible destruction, the ruin almost to oblivion of Germany. We ate, drank and sang and when they found to their amazement that I am not French, they pronounced me ‘honorary Frenchman’”(May 28 1945).

As the first  weeks of peace go by he concentrates wholly on his own demobilization and  Yvette’s fate. How soon will he be out of the army?  And where? Can it be in France?  News of Yvette’s departure provoked  him  to send her more money . Altogether he sent 28 pounds. But had she received it? He could not say as he had received no letter and did not know why. The distance between them lengthened and deepened when at last in September a letter arrived, but  so short and cold it was that he would, “have to be a complete cretin not to understand its real significance…, I am no longer just nervous or anxious, Yvette ,I am only sad. Sadder than I have ever been… in all my life. . Yvette my love, you are silent, without doubt there are reasons. And very powerful reasons. So powerful that even you cannot express them. I feel worse for you than for myself. I know well that your face would express the profoundness of your silence. But I am so far away and I cannot see your face.”

He began to see it when her first letter from France arrived in mid September and anxiety was transformed into certainty. “I feel very strongly that you are the prey of grave material problems and still more of moral ones.”

He would go to her.  Her letter had been posted in the Alps at Grenoble, where she stopped en route to join her grandmother and mother at Belmont in the Jura. “Your letter arrived too late for me to join you in Grenoble. But I will certainly come to Belmont,. Legally or illegally. And then you will talk to me and I will listen to you” And with an intelligent discernment, he added:” I am, deep down, a little afraid of our meeting….  Yvette, my darling little wife, why didn’t you tell me in your last letter that you love me?

Her next letter ,written from Belmont four days after his own, must surely have reinforced his fears, if it arrived before he left camp. She had received no reply to her earlier letters, she wrote, but now: “If you are still on the shores of Lake Como you must be very close. Can’t you come? I am waiting for you with much to talk about .Unhappily  it will not be easy.”

A brave man and a fighter overflowing with love and desire,  a man who believed he could better express his feelings through his “muscles” than his words, Henri set off,  without permission, for the short train journey  across the Alps to nearby Virieu where  Yvette  was at the station. “You didn’t know if you would kiss me”, Henri wrote to her afterwards, “but you threw yourself around my neck and kissed me. Oh yes.”

In Belmont he confronted Yvette’s  family; her formidable mother Helene Laguerre and her father M.Raymond, who lived close by  with his second wife. His first experience of  Yvette’s “pretty, gay and warm” house  filled him with delight and wrapped, as he wrote, in her warmth, beauty and her love, his own love flowered  and his confidence appeared to return. “Darling I love you so much.” he wrote some days after he departed Belmont to return to his company, “Without you my life is colourless, sad, brutish and useless.. your daily love gives me strength and confidence in the future and in myself.” (November 11,1945)

He had torn himself painfully away on a cold Friday morning, waved off at the station by Yvette’s father, in whose house he had found more sympathy than at her mother Helene’s, and began a roundabout journey to camp, via British Army Headquarters in Marseilles. Here again he was received sympathetically and instead of the AWL charge he had expected was handed a movement order that would return him to Italy via Nice. “I have not stopped thinking of getting back to you since Friday morning”, he wrote and at Nice asked for and was given  three days leave. He rushed to the station intending to get back to Belmont, but  found there was no seat on the bus from Grenoble so could only again commit his love to paper..  “I know one thing more than anything else: I want to return to you. To return and stay forever with you. And never leave you. Do you want that too little one? Oh, say yes! I know I have no trade. That it will be difficult, even painful. But you know there are so many men without trades. Say yes, darling. Say that you don’t give a damn about anything else. Say that you only want to live with me. All your life. And oh darling, I will do everything to make you happy.” (November 11,1945)

Their imagined child made a vivid appearance in the first of two long lyrical letters Henri wrote on November 11, the first from a café in Nice, the second begun in the Italian Riviera village of Borighera and posted at the NAAFI in Milan.  “The idea of returning in your direction has not left me, and since Friday morning I have thought of nothing but that. Because I want to have a child and because I want to have it with you…I want to begin my life, that’s to say with you, to live with you. And since I am not there to influence you,  you can study yourself  tranquilly and decide whether you love me as I love you. II yes, help me to return legally. IIf that is impossible and if you really want it I will desert…  Think about all that darling. Take your time and write to me. I love you Yvette. You are my wife darling….You, my wife, my loved one, my sister – the mother. We must make a child, darling. Listen to me, I swear we must make a child.”

Back with his company, after a month outside the Army, most of it in Yvette’s company, he feels the atmosphere changed: “No more camaraderie. No more society. Each man thinks of himself and his discharge, each is enclosed in is own dreams, fears and unhappiness.” He cannot support another 8 or 9 months without Yvette and his passionate letters packed with reminders of the joint pleasure of their bodies become more and more anguished. “I have already walked up to Belmont a thousand times. And I dream our

loves. Our loves at Belmont, the fields, the mountains, the walks and the bridge. Of our loves in the night and our afternoons.”

I wonder now whether these optimistic reminders of their physical passion were aimed at supporting  himself or was he persuading her that really she still loves and wants him. Even more than in 1942, when he was competing with Dov, his desperation now shows. “Oh Yvette darling, my sweet dearly beloved wife, don’t you feel when, with our bodies locked together we soar into the infinite blue, don’t you feel my heart enter you and beg you: Yvette darling, love me, know me stay with me for ever, no one but you”  Did  he know, deep down, or did he only suspect that this time he was not going to win .

       ********            ***********                                    

The blow when it came early in the new year was  a cruel one.  Several blows in one.  Yvette wrote to say that she had decided on “moral freedom” and no longer wanted to be his wife;  also that she and Dov had resumed their relationship in Tel Aviv and she expected him soon to join her  in France.

His first response to her news , at least on paper, was utterly self-denying

“My little one,

You have really never asked for moral freedom. You have  quite simply  taken it. We  never thought, dear Yvette, that questions of duty, or other bourgeois notions could ever arise  between us.  So what now?  Clearly I am quite ready as far as “official” freedom is concerned. You must just let me know what you mean by “official” freedom and what I have to do about it. If you want a divorce, must  I  approach my Company or what? Let me know. In any case, darling, I will do everything to facilitate it.

I must repeat that I want to know you are happy in your life; overflowing with love, happiness and peace.  I will guard very preciously and jealously, that crowd of memories of you who helped me discover the beauties of the world and of man .  My love will remain intact; as powerful and beautiful as on the first day and the last. I write you these words, cherie, with a splendid calm in my heart, conscious of the ugly  and uninteresting new life opening up in front of me. Tranquilly, I go towards it You are the last woman that I will love and I am happy with that. By chance, quite recently I came across an unknown poem of Verlaine.

Here it is:

“Ah! Ni les flots des oceans

Ni les campagnes et leur ombre,

Ni les cites aux bruits sans nombre

Qu’edifierent des geants,

Rien ne reviellera ma vie

Tant endormie….”

I would only change the last sentence: Rien n’effacera ma vie

Tant cherie.”

(- Ah! Not the ocean waves

Not the fields with their shades,

Not the noisy cities without number

Where giants were built,

Nothing will awaken my life

So lifeless..

Henri’s adaptation. Nothing will wipe out my life, so much cherie)

Be happy; with the beautiful healthy and joyful smile, like the one imagined by Franz Hals. The smile that I love so much and which, you know, was never mine.

Henry”(1946)

Despite the “ugly and boring life” opening up before him, he wrote, his own love would remain intact  “as powerful and as beautiful as on the first day”. The words of Verlaine, final stanza of a poem called “Lamento”, with its epigraph from an old poet of the XIVth century “Ma mie est morte/Plourez mes yeux – (My love is dead, my eyes are weeping) could have been written for Henri.  Adapted to his own sad situation, they  brought his sad letter to its end with a calm  stoicism.

From her new home at  nearby Villard de Lans in the  mountainous Department of Isere, where she had found work in a children’s colony, Yvette continued to correspond with Henri. She urged him to be strong, not to disappear from her life  and begged him “ to stay at least in Western Europe if you refuse categorically to come to France”(April 10, 1946). She received his reports on divorce procedures,  about his future and the state of his mind. “I have already in fact left my army and my war and I already know the moral terror of this discharge since I have nowhere to go back to. Returning now is much harder than leaving. I suddenly imagine myself demobilised in Honolulu or Kamtchatka or even the Congo..”(February 8,1946)

Another blow, which he shared with Yvette, was the news  that Bernard, one of his brothers living in Belgium, had been killed with his wife in a gas oven. “He left a little girl, Annette. She is five years old and now lives with another brother. The news bowled me over. He was the best man in my family. A simple worker, not at all Jewish- save for his papers and his appearance.”(February 8 1946)

Divorce remained on Yvette’s agenda and Henri tried everything  to make it possible but found the Army had no power to grant divorces especially as neither of them lived in England. Tracing the difficulties, Yvette wonders whether it wouldn’t be best simply to ignore their marriage and with remarkable prescience suggested that  the stupidities of the law “will probably oblige us to re-marry in order to divorce.”(Villard March 15,1946)

He was still in Italy, when a new spring approached but in the south now, again near Naples and in sight again of Vesuvius but “sound asleep” this time without the continual flame pouring from its entrails: as he had seen it earlier. A state he compares with his own. Here in Naples fate struck again.  Bands of brigands roamed the country and attacked roads at night. One night, on a deserted road when he had stopped  “to tell the finale to the same tree I had once told my life story” they took everything from his vehicle, his case filled with her letters and photos and his papers from Spain. “Now I have left only one letter of yours,  about the divorce , and one photo of you, the one I carry with me…. I have only the Rimbaud with your dedication.

‘Elle est retrouvee,

Quoi?

L’Eternite.

C’est la mer allee

Avec le soleil!..

Non. C’est toi, Henry”

Ton Yvette.  (March 30, 1946)(It’s been found. What? Eternity. It’s the sea gone off with the sun.)

That’s all I have left. I was completely destroyed. It was the last blow[…](March 30, 1946)

It really was and his remaining few letters from Italy abandon the stoic calm. He is seized by a turmoil of emotions. Grief that he was not able to give Yvette her “official freedom” ; confusion about his future abode; sadness that, because  of her, he will not be living in France “the only country that I love with a patriotic love and would have liked to live and assimilate myself “ (April 22 1946); hope that the French consul in Palestine will grant him a visa to go to France for the divorce; depression at the prospect of being demobilized in Palestine and certainty also of leaving the country soon after.

He collapsed further into despair and horror after his return in May to Tel Aviv, the town where his love had begun and where now even the warm welcome from their friends and comrades  distresses him. They keep asking him when he is leaving to join Yvette . “I tell lies and that makes me feel bad too and I want to escape and cry and cry”. He wonders whether their questions  are sadistic and confesses to being “a finished man”. “Tomorrow I will be discharged from the Army. I will leave Palestine very very quickly. I don’t know where I’ll go. It’s all the same to me. Here too I am a stranger. The whole world make me vomit and will make me vomit until the end. But when, my God, when will  that end come! It is terrible how alone I am in the world”. (May 1946)

 “I am entirely liberated….alone,”Yvette wrote in the middle of the year, “ Dov will not come to France. He does not love me any more. The thread was broken after I left Palestine… He didn’t know that I spent some time with you in France, That could have been a melodrama if I’d wanted it… The blow is violent for me.”(June 8 1946)

Again and again during the year she urges him to abandon “this repetitive drama which is Palestine”.From Belmont she aksed, “ How can you regain a little stability and equilibrium in this country with dead earth, where the sky and the people  brutalise and hate each other continually?” She  will help him  receive a  French visa, “I would like you to come back to France; I don’t think your feelings would be more depressed here than in Tel Aviv Quite the contrary”.  “I am entirely at your disposal and will do all I can for you.”(September 11, 1946)

He must try to be calm and let her help him.

From the very depth of his misery his unhappiness  became volcanic, fuelled by her letter from Belmont and the memories of his visit the year before, when he expected his future to begin

“ I was at the centre of the world, at Belmont. I see again the red mountains, the fields, the coloured rectangles stretched out at our feet and where, on one of those days, a new life should have been born. Then… my first day. In a field you told me that you did not love me. You loved me no more. That field, I can’t bring myself to recall it. There are miseries that nature cannot diminish.  I ran away— I am still running..”

“It was at Belmont that I wanted the sky. Madness.. From the lighted capitals of Europe, displaced, a social failure, raised without heart- what a cheek, my God…. Belmont is the place of storms. …Tell me, is there one sole Belmontais who has known the storm of his countryside as I did? Who knew better the human value of those fields? It’s rather droll, all that. Me and the Jura!….

Now it is  bitterness that darkens his picture of that visit.

“ I see grand mother’s ground floor apartment. And all of us in there. .. A little self-contained group, prey to the cynical games of the soul. Everything, torn by memory, blame, regret, fear and incertitude. 

As he had written before, the whole world made him vomit and Palestine, most of all. “Terror reigns in Palestine. There are the Arabs, there are the “native” Jews; there are the English, champions of human civilisation. The Zionists have one ambition: to be the preferred slave of Johnny.  And he loves them both.   The poor no longer know what to do. And there you have a brawl.  The fascisation of the Jewish youth is formidable. But then, you know all that very well. The most talented journalists fill the press with sensational reports, mentioning all the bombs, assassinations, curfew and the heart-breaking humanitarian appeals. But even without that, you, yourself, knew very well Eretz Israel.” (October 6,1945)

He wants to leave and he doesn’t. He wants to go to France and he doesn’t. He insists he wants Yvette to be happy but doesn’t want to disturb her. He is floundering in the river, trying  and not trying to reach the bank.

Yvette’s last words to reach him in Palestine  were written in Villard de Lans and meant to be bracing.” Have you really tried to reach the bank?  Have you been swimming while thinking of what you are swimming towards? Have you worked on the land as a man and a communist?…I well understand your wounded love, and your life destroyed in a certain measure. But a man who has fought all his life cant let himself be defeated in this way. Henry, my friend, I beg you, in the name of our very love  it is unworthy. Don’t despise yourself. […]Illegally, since you choose it, come to France, come to do useful work. I will calm you, I am sure of it…You must make that effort all alone. You must, believe me, Henry, my dear, dear. Courage friend, the bank is not as far away as you believe, and you will rest there on the bank. Like so many others. Like me. You will find again many things that you believed lost forever when you reach the bank.”(November 28 1946)

           *****                                                                                      *****

Yvette’s accounts of the great ruptures are another matter altogether. While  staying with her mother  and ninety one year old grandmother in Belmont , although “so far removed from him ideologically and emotionally,” she wrote Henri a note saying“ I thought it useless for us to resume our married life, which was only a passing mistake, and that it would be better if we never saw each other again.”

In her earlier account to me the story had a different resonance again. According to my notes after she left the Army and returned to Tel Aviv, she had, fallen again into the arms of her ex-lover, Henri’s friend. This was it.  Both agreed it would be inhuman to tell Henri while he was in Italy. They agreed, too, that Yvette would leave for France with her son, before his father returned from the army and prevented his removal, and that her lover would follow as soon as he could.  Yvette wrote to tell him that their marriage had been a mistake and she was about to set up house with D and

 Two days later, Henri was at her side, publicly threatening to kill himself,  shouting and crying in the field outside her house at Belmont. She was so alarmed at his threats that she agreed to rekindle the marriage. In 48 hours Henri left to rejoin his unit but after he had gone Yvette wavered  between the two men , writing to each and finally deciding on D.  But she had taken too long and he had opted out.

Readers of the letters can  judge her accounts for themselves.

The torn photo adds another dimension to the story. During Henri’s visit to Belmont, he  had it seems visited Yvette at her children’s colony in Villard, carrying the photograph and  hoping to present it to her, but left with it in his pocket.  From Tel Aviv, after a year he finally sent backed by the  loving and renouncing inscription. Who was it that tore the photo clean in half ? And who stuck it together again?

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