A disconsolate Haim landed once more at the Palestinian sea port of Jaffa, working there on the railway to earn some money, before moving on to live for a time with his sister in law and nephews at Richon le Zion and paying an occasional visit, I imagine, to his father and Mrs Lauffer nearby at Tel Aviv.
A few months after he had left for Spain in 1937, the British government’s Commission headed by Lord Peel, appointed a to investigate the causes of continuing violence and unrest in Palestine, had issued its report. In view of the “irreconcilable conflict” between the two national communities inside the one small country, it recommended the partition of the country into two independent states, Jewish and Arab. Opposition from both sides led to more unrest and another Arab uprising.
Energetic, anti-fascist and pro- Soviet, the leadership of the tiny illegal PKP had thrown a lighted match into the inflammatory Palestinian mixture by supporting the Nazi- Soviet Pact of August 1939 but Britain’s declaration of war against Germany two weeks later produced a temporary halt to Arab Jewish conflict as most Jews and Arabs supported the colonial government. The Jews did so either as ideological opponents of Nazism, or as its victims, or simply in the hope that their support would strengthen the Zionist position with the British government. A minority on both sides, continued to attack colonial government: those young nationalist Hebrew Palestinians who followed Stern and those Arabs who followed the Grand Mufti, in mind if not in body. Early in 1941 he had declared a Jihad against Great Britain and left to spend the remainder of the war in Berlin. One way and another Arab-Jewish conflict subsided during the war years.
The PKP in chorus with every other communist party in the world, denounced the imperialist war and, Henry told me, issued an explanatory slogan to its confused or angry anti- Nazi supporters, “Hitler is not the same Hitler.” The resignations that followed reduced even further the already tiny group and though Haim, the fighter and idealist, fresh from the conflict in Spain remained loyal, he could not in his heart agree with this slogan.
Communist and trade union leaders in Palestine had been swept up together with “enemy aliens” and imprisoned on Britain’s declaration of war in September 1939 and imprisoned in the same cell with the Arab Secretary of the PKP was a schoolboy, who with his family had left Berlin in 1933, thanks to the intuition of his Christian mother. She had argued with her Jewish physician husband, who was good, naïve and assimilated enough to believe that the Nazis with their crazy anti-Semitism would soon disappear from Germany and that in any case, a man who had served the Kaiser in war was surely safe. “But you don’t know those people!” his wife had insisted, and she had their belongings packed, including the doctor’s baby grand piano, and led them all to Palestine. It was the only country she knew of for which a doctor could get a visa without waiting for years and where he could begin to practise his trade as soon as he landed. This schoolboy’s name was Ulli Beier. His later paths would cross astonishingly with the Adlers’ in Palestine, Papua New Guinea and Australia.
When early in 1940 emergency regulations were proclaimed and a curfew was declared in Tel Aviv, Haim Adler was arrested. He was not imprisoned but held under “home confinement” by the Criminal Investigation Department as he described it. A mild restraint: he was forbidden to leave his rented room in King George street between 6pm and 6 am and obliged to present himself twice a day to the Police Commissariat, but continued , he told me years later, an active communist, serving on the Federal Bureau of the illegal PKP and continuing to meet his comrades and his family in his room.
The British governor of Palestine extended his surveillance as the war hotted up. On 10 June 1940 , when the Italians came into the war and only days before the Germans entered Paris, he had fences hurriedly raised around the large, rich German villages of Saraona and Wilhelmina , close to Tel Aviv, and interned their Templar inhabitants, settled there since the 1840s. Recent refugees from Hitler’s Germany were moved in with them, among these the same Ulli Beier, picked up again after his earlier release. Posted outside Saraona to guard the Germans were members of the Palestine Police, among them Haim’s nephew Jules, who had joined the force at the outbreak of war.
Conflict over the war simmered within the communist party. Veterans of Spain, Henri had told me, were having a hard time. There they had experienced the Popular Front of left wing parties, they had lived through Guernica; they could not accept the new slogan. Haim, though committed firmly now to the communist ideals , argued for a change in policy, to support the British against the Nazis and make a united front with the left Zionists. A delegate from his party to theirs, he argued passionately, but inside the family, so I heard, he stuck to the line and pounced on his nephew Willy who announced that he was about to join the Army. “ What for? he asked. Why fight for British imperialism? Willy exploded: ‘but I’m not fighting for British imperialism; I’m fighting Hitler, because of what he does to the Jews!”
When the British decided to ship the interned Germans away to Australia, Jules applied to go along, eager to travel abroad and excited at the possibility of meeting his Melbourne relations. But his commanding officer had need of him and rejected his application. “To Australia? I cried in amazement in 1999, when he told me this. Cousin Julek in Australia! And in uniform! How close had my school girl yearnings brushed with reality. “ Oh, what a pity you didn’t come!” “What a pity!” echoed Jules, Joe today, “I would have met you all then. Who knows what my future would have been!” And for a few moments we were silent, each of us absorbed in our “if onlies”.
During our many conversations since 1968 Henri had revealed little to me of his time in Spain but I had learnt even less from him about the four years of his second war. My talks with Yvette had revealed practically nothing about that war.
After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 had swept the relieved PKP back into its natural anti fascist mode and into legality, Haim was instructed, he told me, as a former International Brigade officer to join the British Army. On January 15 1942, twenty-nine years old , he presented himself at the British Army’s chief recruiting Office at Sarafand. During the rest of the year he passed his Military training, drivers’ and gas chamber tests. His medical classification changed from B1 on enlistment to A1 in later years and in 1943 he was married to Lance Corporal Yvette Raymond,PAL/203479, a member of the ATS, stationed at the 63rd General Hospital and later living in 57 Bar Kochba street in Tel Aviv. All these bare facts I learned not from Henri or Yvette but from Haim Adler’s Service Book. Together with his father’s name and address and his own non-existent religion, these were the only true statements written in the book. In the space for religion he wrote, as he had in Spain, “Jew” . All the other personal details he was required to surrender to the army, apart from those which could be measured or observed, such as the colour of his eyes and the measurements of his height and chest, were false. This Haim Adler, PAL/30756, a driver in the Royal Army Service Corps, had been born on the fifth of January 1912 “in or near the town of Haifa, Palestine” to a Palestinian mother and father. Before enlisting in the army, he had been a teacher by trade. Even the date of his wedding was incorrect.
A communist and committed to the class nature of truth, he
effortlessly slipped on his new identity perhaps to protect his father and not surprisingly, he treated the British Army with less candour than he had the Communist Party of Spain.
As I read his Army Book I wondered why , after his artillery experience in Spain, he had become a driver in this war. Did he conceal service in Spain as part of a general covering of tracks, I wondered, or was it that some British Army commanders in Palestine, as in other Services, kept Spanish Republican volunteers out of the front line?
In 1999 I searched for answers to my questions in the British Public Record Office. Alas, I found very little. I learnt from the report of the chief recruiting officer at Sarafand that during June 1942, the year Henri joined, 942 Jews had been admitted to the ranks of Britain’s Palestine force; I read about conflicts between the Zionist parties and about the emergency regulations.. I hoped to discover more when I travelled in 1999 to Germany, home of my cousins Willy and Jules. As our combined age was over 203 years, we all knew that this could be our last meeting and the presence of the next generation but one, my fourteen-year-old grandson, Tom, gave the meeting a special poignance.
In the village house which he and his wife share with her parents, Jules vividly recalled his Uncle Henri and their war. By one of fate’s happy jokes, when the twenty year old policeman left the force and joined the British army it was to the R.A.S.C that he was attached and when he had settled in camp found himself in the same unit as his uncle. His memory of those days was wonderfully precise.
“Our company was the 179th General Transport Company” he told me.“Our CO was Major Buganoff and our Sergeant Major was Eliahu Cohen, Chief of the Haganah in Jerusalem. All, except for two Englishmen, were Jews.”
He too was puzzled to find Henri a mere driver, like himself. “We spent three or four months at Sarafand camp for basic training then were sent together to Egypt. We were in the same company, driving trucks, supplies, stationed in Ismalia. We were together every day. The last time I saw him was in the Western Desert, near Tobruk when he was stationed in Amaria before the El Alamein offensive.”
Jules, who had not managed to sail to Australia, now shared with Australians the advances and retreats of the war in the Middle East, part of the British imperial force that captured and lost Tobruk then at El Alamein defeated the Italians and Germans led by the General Rommel. His Uncle Henri shared these events..
Jules remembered best his uncle, the political agitator. Late in April 1942, he told me, their company, with several other Palestine companies, were gathered outside British –held Tobruk, waiting for Rommel’s offensive. On May 1st – May Day- Jules, in charge of his company’s police, was sent to investigate a gathering in the mess tent. “ We came there and found a meeting of men from all companies and Henri was speaking. The CO said break up the meeting. A few men from other companies were put under arrest. The Haganah decided we have to get rid of communists because they were agitating for a second front. The communists were sent back to a transit camp. Henri was with them. I never saw him again in Palestine.”
I had heard a sketch of this story before from Willy. In his version, which had no date, the provosts had arrested Henri after this May Day meeting. But had he been punished, would it not have appeared in his Army Service Book? The official record of Henri’s war was impeccable; nowhere is there a black mark against him.
Fortunately, the Army did not assess military bearing for Jules and Willy both agreed that their uncle had been “ an absolute Good Soldier Schweik”. Or, as Jules put it: “He was always untidy, never looked military”. Willy, he told me, met Henri one day on the Allenby road and Henri saluted the tall, dark, handsome smartly dressed officer without recognising him. It was after this meeting that Henri’s embarrassing baggy trousers inspired Willy’s offer to send his uncle to his tailor. “Get him to make the uniform fit you”. But Henri rubbished the idea: “If His Majesty’s government wants me to look better, they can give me a uniform that fits.”
Here was another Henri new to me. Since our first meeting in 1968 and even earlier from his photos, Henri had appeared a very neat dresser; not as perfumed and sleek as his brother Szymeck, but neither as poorly dressed as his writer friend, Arega. Certainly not a Good Soldier Schweik. Was this an army matter? Or had he once been a different man?
My notes, of Henri’s own sparse stories of his war, were almost all political. In Palestine, he told me, the PKP’s left wanted to send volunteers to Russia, but he argued against it. He told me too that the Australian Communist Party sent money to its brothers in Palestine through his brother-in-law Itzhak . That after the invasion of Italy, he was chairman of the communist organisation in the British Army which linked up with underground Italian communists in Naples, raised money and collected food for them. He could still remember the names of two: a Dr Real, who had since left the Party and a Giancarlo Pajeta who remained a member.
The only non-political Italian war time story he ever told me was the great one about the poor old Italian village woman he met who tried to sell him a holy medal. “But I’m a Jew” Henri told her, ‘Oh no” she replied, “you’re not a Jew. The Germans are Jews.” He left , but feeling for her poverty turned back and followed her offering her a packet of biscuits. “There!” she said as she grabbed them and began to gobble them up “You see, I was right. You’re not a Jew.” Henri smile at her ingrained anti semitism; and the story I repeated in my un Australian Childhood, inspired Melbourne artist Charles Aisen to make one of his fine metal painted sculptures.
The only episode he proudly volunteered from his army career was his refusal to become an officer. Jules remembered that too. “We had an officer in our company” he told me, “a German Jew named Rosenstain, a professor at the university whose job was to censor our letters. After reading his letters he interested himself in Henri and asked him if he wanted to be an officer. Henri refused. He had joined as a private and left as a private.” When Henri told me this he had added a reflection on his family: “To Jules’ father David it was always important to be a colonel. It didn’t matter in which army. To Manka and me, it was the army that mattered.”
Henri’s wife Yvette revealed a good deal more during our long talks in the 70’s. More again appeared in the pages of her memoirs, dictated to a dear friend while she was dying of cancer of the throat in 1981, and published after her death as the deeply moving and beautifully written Souvenirs in Extremis. Then during 1999 her son Ouri allowed me to read the longer transcripts from which this volume had been crafted. Here was far more rich detail than I had ever heard. The problem was that her stories about Henri – or Beni as she called him in the book – were so bitter and filled with self-justification that they aroused my suspicion. “His Majesty allowed us a week’s leave” I read,” special leave for marriage, which existed under the rules. I found a delightful little hotel in Cairo, full of bougainvillea and palms and not out of bounds for troops… In the dining room everything about it was lovely: the linen, the roses; the high-ranking officers. All this offended Beni. Immediately his face closed, he didn’t say a word at the table, he ate nothing, allowed me to finish my meal alone and we left. Outside in the garden, I asked him what had happened.
“I can’t put up with this bourgeois atmosphere… understand that I won’t eat a meal in that dining room.”
Why on earth go on with such a marriage, I had asked myself as I read. Yvette’s transcriber must also have asked because she continues:
“ Of course I should not have lasted twenty four hours in the beautiful bed room under the bougainvilleas, after the dining room incident. Such profound incompatibility of temperament! His attitude to life and social class, the place he gave to love in the hierarchy of values; all were totally foreign to me.”
What was going on here? Why had Henri spoken so little about four years of a war service, four years that included the invasion of Italy? I was perplexed as I had been with his silence about Palestine. Later I guessed that the most important event for him in Palestine , the event that changed his life forever, had nothing to do with Arabs and Jews and was as crucial for him as the fight against Hitler. The first pages of the 1942 “Desert War” bundle of those 239 Chilly Mazarin letters brought me face to face with his war time life and with a completely different man, the man he had been. The man of two heroic passions, as he put it, “strangely and tightly entwined”.
Henri had told me that while in British soldier’s uniform he had chaired the first legal communist meeting in Tel Aviv and appealed to the audience to follow him and join the army. What he had never told me was that after the meeting , when a group of comrades took coffee together, a young man, Dov, introduced Haim, the admired leader of his Party cell, to his girl friend. A petite, young French redhead , she was called Yvette Raymond. Born in the country she was raised in Don, the mountain home of her maternal grand parents, where her grandfather was mayor of their commune, a deputy and a free mason , her maternal grandmother and her own mother Helene Laguerre were Radicals or socialists and atheists all. She had moved to Paris as a young woman and there met a Jewish student from Palestine. Finding herself pregnant and determined to keep the baby, adventurous Yvette married him and had left France for Palestine at the outbreak of war.. For Haim she was- like brother David’s Miss X and his second wife Friedi – the product of a world far removed from his own . He was immediately charmed. There had passed between them a current of attraction, of “intruiging words and furtive looks” as he later described it and they had spent his last two mornings in Tel Aviv together before he left with the 179th General Transport Company for their desert camp in Egypt. . Not alone, as he would have wished, but with mutual friends. Was it weakness or strength, he wrote, that prevented him from sending to the devil all the visitors who were getting on his nerves? Ten days after he had left Tel Aviv, settled into the desert camp, he had sat down to write his first letter to Yvette. In French.
“My dear Yvette,
Sand, sand everywhere. Under the bed, in the bed and on the bed as well. Not a blade of grass, not a tree. The yellow of the sand and the gold of the sun beat constantly at your nervous system. Nothing but sand. It gets into everything. Eyes, mouth and nose are full of it. You find it in your pockets, your shoes and under your shirt. It penetrates the pores of your body and pitilessly attacks your heart. .. In these circumstances I dream of you. I am fully conscious that, much as I want to, I cannot express my feelings for you , but since hundreds of kilometres separate us, I can permit myself to be frank…. As I have already told you, I feel immense tenderness for you…When I think of you, a sweetness invades my soul.”
…Sex, he assured her is not the driving force of these emotions;. “sweet notes, waves of poetry and noble sentiments are hidden in every man. That’s why I wanted to hold your hands and speak with you before leaving.” As in his first war, he wrote, a woman accompanied him me on the road . His Polish love.
“ This time”, he wrote, “ it is you. Whether you want it or not- you are my mascot.” (July 1942) And he signed the letter with his English name, Henry
An encouragingly reply to his first tentative declaration brought down the protective barriers he had erected in front of himself and he confessed.
“My very dear Yvette”,
”I have read it and re-read your letter. I read it ten times, twenty times and have still not had enough of it., What I am going to say to you is foolish, but it’s true: I caressed it and I put it to my lips. What a kid eh? But how can I help it, Yvette, I love you, I love you so much… Now… you possess me entirely. You are the day and the night. When I travel with my vehicle across dozens and hundreds of sandy kilometres, it is you who accompany me. You are the refreshing trees bordering the road; you are the engine that propels me ever forward…At night, after my tiring work, it is once again next to you, my Yvette, that I lay myself. You can see how thoroughly I am yours.
Do you know, Yvette, that you have given me confidence in my body. I had been for a long time haunted by the idea that there is something amiss in my heart; that I am incapable of love. Many women in my life have made me believe it. I treated them churlishly and this churlishness astonished and saddened me.
Later, when transferred to a more pleasant place supplied with cold water and set in magnificent gardens, he cheered up and finding there his friend and comrade, Yvette’s lover Dov his yearning to win her strengthened . His letters during the next months became even longer and more passionate . And after a journey to Cairo where he searched vainly at her hospital and the Soldiers’ Club, even desperate.
Dear Yvette, my little one, I love you, I love you so much— where can I find all the words to describe it to you? I want with all the intensity of my aching heart to have you to close by me for life,
Yvette, it is not a madman who is talking to you, only a man who is dying of love for you. Tell me, Yvette; tell me once more that you also will accept me, as I am, with all my faults, my poverty, stupidity.
I feel sick, terribly sick, about those hours spent in Cairo. But I love you, and that’s all there is to it”.
In the months that followed he made love by letter, repeating his powerful love, apologising for his pathetic expression of it and for its obsessive nature. Worrying that she will be repelled and promising that he will do his best to concentrate on other, larger, matters.
“ I will try to interest you in all the problems that preoccupy me: war, peace, Revolution and France, our France that we will find again…
The sublime spirit of sacrifice of the Soviet people, which provokes blushes of shame in me, red blushes that equal those of the Don that they colour with their blood… I thought to tell you of my hatred for this rotten system which uproots young men every few years from their homes and throws them, armed to the teeth against others…. But my letter was full of Yvette.”
A passion for music pervades these courting letters. But in the end, Yvette triumphs.” Some years ago I was at a symphony concert in Brussels where I heard Beethoven’s Pastorale. You know this music, the passage after the storm which is interpreted as the paean of praise
to nature at peace, well that so profoundly invaded my whole being that I was not able to free myself of it for a long time… You are like this music….For you haunt my spirit. You are always here…You are much stronger than the sounds of the Pastorale. .. It has accompanied me during my whole life. …So it is with you; nothing will tear you from my heart. It is finished, for life. You are mine”.(August 10 1942)
On the back of the last page of one of these early letters is a note written in an awkward hand.It is from Dov. Camp comrades, united in their love for Yvette and their comradeship, Haim and Dov discussed their difficult situation. Henri then wrote to Yvette, saying that would spare her the anguish of choice. “I will disappear from your life. But Yvette, I say seriously and calmly that you will never disappear from mine…. Because I am unable not to love you. You are made like that. You can be sure that somewhere there is a man who no longer speaks to you but who loves you always more and more. This man is sad- who knows for how long!!- with a continuous unhealthy sadness a man who longs for the tenderness which by life’s hazard has always eluded him. I begin to be boring. So it is time I finished.”(August 10 1942)
Did he mean this? Or was it a desperate ploy? In any case, one day towards the end of August, after receiving the Pastorale letter, Yvette turned up at their camp. She had made her choice.
“My little one,When I parted from you, I was perched on the top of the lorry carrying me at high speed towards my camp – I was king.
A sweet musical transformation, a divine music accompanied me on my triumphal journey. A beloved voice whispered ceaselessly in my ears the most beautiful music I have ever heard. “Henri, don’t forget that I love you…” To hell with all the other music! I have discovered the Pastorale of all Pastorales and I belong to her and she belongs to me. …, dear little Yvette, there on top of the lorry I was greater than a king. For I have touched heaven.”(August 21, 1942)
Touched heaven? Can this be a revolutionary communist and Jewish atheist? Yvette’s later responses revealed some doubt among their comrades. His Melbourne communist family would have felt the same way about the clash between revolutionary beliefs and tasks and the overpowering love that resounds in all his letters. Was it right that his love consumed more thought and emotion than his revolutionary beliefs and activities? Could someone who abased himself so far before his love count as a revolutionary?
“Yesterday You tell me for the first time in this letter that you have loved me for a long time. Well, all my anguish came because I didn’t believe that. It seemed to me impossible that it could be. Inferiority complex? We’ll see! I think I knew myself. Now, I affirm that I have not got an inferiority complex… I will try to explain it to you.
You see, darling, in my eyes or better according to me , you are a perfect woman, a woman for whom my heart yearned unhappily throughout the long years of struggle, of suffering and misery. Don’t smile. And don’t contradict me. I said a perfect woman and I stick to it. Moreover, I believe you will understand. What is perfection? Is it an absolute truth, an immutable fact, a notion that has remained fixed throughout the ages? No, since perfection is born in human imagination and that is influenced by outside circumstances, Leonardo da Vinci saw perfection differently from Picasso.”(August 221942)
Their meeting, though brief, caused Henri’s passion to move into a higher gear; new aspects of his love, new observations about life and self appear from then on throughout his letters. Somehow his passion and her warm, intelligent and sometimes critical responses unlocked a self he had longed for but never before recognised. Yvette’s mental and physical otherness placed her high on a pedestal.
“You are my other half. … You complete me. Without you, I am only an invalid. Oh Yvette, I swear to you that you have never been loved as I love you. I loved you before I knew you. I loved you before I perceived the sparkle of your glance. But now I am yours body and soul, when I at last plunged my eyes into yours I saw your lips tremble and I touched them with mine, and I will touch them for ever….
At last I was able to bury my face in your red hair and its perfume made me drink for life. I love you, I love you. Let me tell you that for ever, and, oh Yvette – never become weary of hearing it. Say it to me, I beg you. Repeat it a thousand times, millions of times…
I am writing these lines as my friend Dov is close by. It would be a lie to say that this doesn’t affect me. On the contrary I am excessively moved by it …I know that at this actual moment a cruel, painful struggle, a struggle which makes me profoundly sick and leaves me quite queer- rends his soul. Don’t try to deny it. I knew it since I glimpsed him in the hospital corridor. His pallor, his voice, his gestures- all told me, nothing clearer,…For the rest, during the whole morning that we were together I was witness to this struggle. During the whole morning, except for two or three minutes, where seated in the most beautiful corner of the world I held your head close to mine and you cast on me a loving gaze, a gaze where all memory was wiped out and you saw no one but me. Precious minutes! …(August 21 1942)
Yvette’s admission of her love for Henri increased the power of his declarations, but not his uncertainty. Yvette , he feels, has still to choose between her two lovers. He asks her to repeat her choice.
“When the hour of departure came,an immense sadness invaded my soul. It was much stronger than at Tel Aviv where the bus tore me away from you. This is the first time darling, I have understood that to leave is also to die a little… There is a strength inside me, darling, that prevents me from acting irrationally. It is that revolutionary consciousness which has forged my soul. That necessary iron discipline which, through the years of struggle, has many times saved me from black despair, supports me now through the immense suffering caused by the sad impossibility of my resting in your freshness for a long time to come…
I am faithful to my ideal- the only just and beautiful one and I am sure that you love me for that too. It’s true, isn’t it, that from now on we will march side by side, heart against heart- bound by the ties of the most profound love, the most noble friendship, bonds that merge our two bodies into one, our two souls into one – along the narrow, steamy roads of human misery to hold high the flag of revolt and salvation? It is more than a gentle hope. It is the source of my courage..
Three days before my passage through Cairo, I had a painful but dignified conversation, with our friend Dov. I also received a short word from you. I understand you and share your suffering. For the two of us the situation is clear and I call on all the gods that it might be for him also.I said to Dov, as we talked, “It is hard, I know. But let’s try everything we can to prevent our friendship from melting away under this great sun….I love you, you are my life, I cannot do without you – that’s why all analyses, all ethics are useless. I want you for myself even if that produces unhappiness in others…You are going through a profound crisis. I hope with all my heart, darling, and with the same ardour as I hope to see myself on the victorious barricades of the triumphant Revolution, to find you mine again, mine alone.”(September 1942)
While awaiting her decision, he is camped in the vast, flat desert. where the “earth is truly dead. Nothing moves, nothing grows. Everywhere you see the same desolation. The same monotonous colour”. A fitting landscape for his anxiety.
At last, even the desert blooms with a “magnificent line of telegraph poles tied one to the other with steel wire that cuts across my desert as far as the eye can see. They are beautiful”…Consider, darling, that I left for the Desert with the sad little word that Dov passed on to me. My heart yearned sadly for the certainty of your love. I was fearful. You could have killed my heart. But you saved it. Not only did you save it, but also you cured it of all its old maladies.
In three days, dearest darling, darling, Yvette, I have received two letters from you. Oh Yvette,… I feel at last your love for me… I took the letter, which saved me, and I ran into the desert. I threw myself on that burning earth and tears flowed from my eyes. I lay like that, without moving, without thinking; mingled with that sad earth. Then I returned to the camp and hugged the first comrade I met. He took me for a madman, but he was the madman.
Yvette, you love me. You are mine. You will be at my side all my life….. I am happy. They can carry off my telegraph poles; the mountains can disappear and my eyes can look out on a desert even more cruel – I couldn’t care less! I couldn’t care less since I learnt that I would be seated with you, between the pillars of Notre Dame and, pressed close together, we will silently and lovingly contemplate the multicoloured rays of light falling from the ancient stained glass windows. Since I have known that we will go, one evening along the Seine, we will look at it and think only that I am yours and you are mine…You know Yvette, that with you, my life begins and without you, I die. But that’s finished now; I will never again be without you, will I? Our love is the culmination of our life. Our glory. We will never rise higher…Thank you, Yvette. I kiss the ends of your fingers with love and recognition and swear to do everything to make myself worthy of you. Always.”(September 1942)
From henceforth she is his “beloved wife” and the boiling emotions of this six page letter included also a loving and generous reference to her son ,to his fondness for children in general and this one in particular. Because he is hers. And a mention of the Soviet heroes of Stalingrad whose brave deeds hovered over him always.
Plans for their next meeting absorb the next two weeks..
Tension mounts as a rumour sweeps through his unit. All leave is to be postponed. “I am a little bundle of sensitive nerves and everyone well appreciates it”.(October 1942) General Montgomery’s offensive would begin on October 23 but before their planned meeting time arrived, she arrived.
: “I saw you again, arriving, walking towards my vehicle, your coat and your bag in your hands, your red hair blown by the wind, a marvellous smile on your lips and in your eyes. And me, all gauche, confused and stupefied, stammering hello, my words pale and stilted. Oh what a shock it was for me, to see you. It took the wind out of my sails. You expected something else, didn’t you? But I felt nothing any more, darling, and I didn’t know what to do or what to say”. And then, the two of us in my tent. I could not tear my eyes from your head, and they caressed it before my hands did. Oh it was difficult there in the tent, where a powerful desire urged me to clasp you strongly to me but I was still dead. And all those stupid people who suddenly began to gather around the tent to see with their own eyes the woman with the red hair who had suddenly fallen from the sky into the desert. How they got on my nerves! The one time that my soul would have found peace in the desert solitude, the comrades filled it with people….
And then, the town. “The best room in the best hotel”. And you, Yvette. Oh darling, darling, how beautiful you are, sweet and loving! My little wife, tied to me for ever, for ever and ever! I have so feebly evoked this moment of absolute happiness that I would like to throw away the pen, tear up this deceitful paper and take my head in my hands, close my eyes and relapse into a dream, to see and re-live each detail, each word, each gesture. “The best room” and you. But when you are there, Yvette, everything is beautiful and touching.
(No problems here, it seems about the Cairo hotel]
“Yvette, my love, what sweet words your whispered in Cairo, the intoxicating promise to be always mine, in spite of distance, time, painful separations caused by our common struggle. That evening, when the stupid train took you off and left me all alone on the tumultuous platform, I was as stupefied as I had been on the morning when they announced your visit. Suddenly all of me was dead…Like a machine out of gear I began to drag myself in the direction of the city.–. I drank lots of coffee and smoked lots of cigarettes. I stared for a long time at the shop lights from the front, then my dull and indifferent glance strayed on to the disgraceful street. I saw that most “modern” Egyptians are rather corpulent and wear glasses. I saw that here the children don’t even take the trouble to chase away the flies that entirely cover their beautiful eyes. I saw that the street is filled with men but that not a woman finds herself among them. Seated high up, near the windows, behind the curtains, they watch their husbands enjoying life. I saw my comrades watching me from afar, as though I was a curious animal. I bought a newspaper. It had a pile of showy headlines in thick letters. I unfolded it fairly quickly refolded it again. Nothing there to awaken my vanished spirits…
At four o’clock in the morning I was woken to drive 400 kilometres into the desert. It was awfully cold. I was shivering. And it was only then that all my senses returned All of them to you, My first thought was for you. I have begun to live again, darling……Yes, to live. Intensively and passionately. 400 km = 8 hours driving! I often now make this journey, escape my surroundings and shut myself away with you. And that’s when I really live. An air-force officer was seated at my side. He tried in vain to start a conversation. I flatly refused. Let him go and pester someone else with his cultivated spirit. I have nothing to say to him. I have my little Yvette who I love and who loves me. In her, and no one but her, are concentrated all the intelligence and all the beauty in the world. And she has offered them to me. Oh darling, thank you, a thousand times thank you!…How beautiful you are, darling! And how good it is that you are so beautiful. And that you belong to me! “… Tell me, my dearest dearest darling, isn’t it true that in that cab we approached the divine? Isn’t it true that there was enough love and sweetness there to save the sinking world?( October 1942)
From then on he recalled their meeting as “our lovely marriage day”; and as here, never a shadow of a problem mentioned..
During the next eleven days, while General Montgomery led his British troops on an advance that would force the Nazis under Rommel back from El Alamein, he was silent. And then..
“Four days ago we began to move and today is my first stop.
I have travelled 800 beautiful but tiring kilometres. Such marvellous things have passed before my eyes. The colour of both earth and sky has changed. After leaving my rocky desert I found myself all of a sudden in a green valley. Greenery, water, cattle, villages filled with kids, in rags and tatters but with lovely faces and happy smiles – all that, like the telegraph poles on the desert roads, was only the background, the depth of a painting that my eyes were contemplating. For the painting itself was a miserable cab and the two of us, arms intertwined, eyes on each other, lips murmuring those words that came from the very depth of our joint love. “(29 October 1942)
War time censorship prevented him disclosing his location or his activities ; his position behind the wheel of a truck instead of at the end of a machine gun or driving a tank encouraged his complex passions to over flow into his pen. Erratic war time mail deliveries meant that letters crossed each other, letters were lost and anxieties mounted. We will never know the order in which Yvette received these letters.
Suddenly life changed for PAL/30765 and his next letter
was headed not 179 Gen Trspt Coy, but 68 RST Coy. Henri’s explanation to Yvette was fervent but censor proof.
“My most beloved wife,
I have spent a week of fierce struggle against men who ingeniously used all their meanness in order to send me away from my unit. That’s the fact of the matter. But why, how and with what means, those things I will tell you one day and you will see that I reacted in a dignified way and that I held high the flag of our ideal”.( November 8 1942)
This may be the event Jules was remembering when he told me that the Haganah, led by their own Sergeant Major Eliahu Cohen, was determined to get Haim out of the company and back to base in Tel Aviv. But this is long after the 1st of May meeting; Jules’ memory may have blurred two occasions. The kibbutz based defence force against Arab attack in the 1930’s, the Haganah had turned itself into a fighting force for a Jewish State, against which Henri continued to argue in camp and in his letters.
Though they succeeded in moving him away from his company, he considered they had not won the theoretical battle. His Marxism,reinforced by his love, made him “ stronger than ever.They don’t know that I have you, darling. Yes, my sweet one, my strength that they feel, the Cohens, I derive wholly from you, my beautiful dear.”(December 2 1944)
Earlier, back in the “stupid, characterless town” of Tel Aviv.”, awaiting his next attachment, he had reported his fate .comfortinghimself with outpouring of poetic love and arranging the formalities of their marriage.
“When that is done, we can ask for marriage leave as we decided in Cairo…….. Thank you for being beautiful, good and intelligent. Thank you because your love causes me to be better, more patient with things and people. Thank you, finally, because no one but you has known how to create that perfect harmony between my body and spirit which has been lacking throughout my life and which now makes me strong and sound as never before. Listen, most beautiful and most loved of women, the nature of my love for you surpasses all that thinkers across the ages have analysed… It’s a sentiment unknown until now. ..When I had to quit my company after low intrigues, I reacted violently, as I have done more than once before during my past activity, when I ran up against the intrigues of opponents. To confront pettifogging, meanness, dirty tricks is something that happens in a world torn by political passions and by huge economic antagonisms that brutally wipe out any notion of humane morality. When I reflect calmly, I know that there are situations where only low intrigue can get results. It may be sad, but it’s a fact….But this time, my reaction was stronger than ever before. ..…For this time, darling, I had within me, much more deeply within me, another feeling, another reason, and I don’t care if this feeling is more powerful than the others and I am not ashamed of it and I don’t hide it. It is that horrible sadness of knowing that I had to go far away from you without you knowing about it..
The news is good. The Allies have taken a serious step towards the opening of a definite front in Europe, which will lighten the burden on the Soviet people and hasten victory. Stalingrad is still Soviet. France, -cherie be patient and indulgent towards that noble people, your people – she will live. I see that the day is not far off when the people will begin to move and nothing at all will stop them in their bloody triumphal march. Soon I will come again to you. I have in my pocket my papers, lovely papers, .for our marriage.You see, everything is going well. ….But I am cold, stupid and depressed. Because without you I respond to all these victories like a machine….
Darling, you are my darling and I have never had any others. And I never will have any others.” ((November 1942)…
Later in the month, now with his new company and somewhere in camp, he writes again. Most of his friends had departed camp on eight days leave, but he had refused. “ What would be the point of a leave without you, darling?” Besides, he added, he was deeply sad. In page after page, he explains his emotions.
“The cause of this ceaseless and pitiless sadness and the continuous nausea which tears at me, forcing me to think painful thoughts that lessen my manhood, must be that I am not a soldier, fighting in my war. Mine, as I am a rational socialist, as I am a Jew and above all as I am quite simply a man. … I am a civilian, darling. Oh yes! of course I wear a uniform, but I am is a civilian just the same , in a soldier’s mask! This painful thought torments me day and night and transforms me into an automaton. I wander among these men as a foreigner. I don’t know how to cope with this inertia, this aimlessness while men are working, fighting and dying to the save the world from the worst pestilence that humanity has ever known…They tell us how men fight heroically for each room of each house in Sebastopol and Stalingrad. They tell us how men covered with a layer of sand and blood chase the cruel ones from Tobruk and Benghazi and Stalingrad. They tell us how throughout this miserable European night starving men, hunted and beaten, resist and fight heroically and with the little strength that remains to them hold high human dignity. And me?
I am signed up in a transport unit because the other, more vital branches were prohibited to me.….Instead , here I am playing the part of the little soldier in company with a band of young people who have a fixed idea that they are something very special indeed.
I consider that the Palestinian Jews are those who are contributing least to victory. On all sides, in the whole world and in Europe above all, there are Jews in the first ranks of the struggle. But not here. They have turned away from the true way, the only way, the way of the open struggle, breast against breast, against the brown plague, they have been turned from this struggle by their political leaders whose ideal is about to collapse like a house of cards under a dear little wind. Instead of being in the same fight, instead of demanding their right to contribute directly to the reconquest of their dignity scoffed at by the fascist criminals, to be out in front, they lose themselves in useless speculations on the future of Palestine, speculations which would have been stupid at any time, but now at the time of the decisive struggle against the worst enemy of the Jewish people, are quite simply shameful!
It is truly shameful to see thousands of Jewish soldiers, strolling along the streets of Tel Aviv, with a haughty and super-intelligent air.’We others, oh we are saving our skins for the holy war’ that’s their slogan…. I am ashamed. I feel sick”
The year draws to its end and as he becomes involved in the new Allied campaign his spirits rise .
“At last I am getting close to the front, and you know what that signifies for me. To become a man again. To no longer be ashamed. To fight. For you, for myself, for both of us. For those who they are slaughtering and those they want to slaughter. For the Jews and the Poles. For France and for Dniepostroi. For liberty. For socialism. For humanity. Oh darling, I feel as though you understand me perfectly! Thank you. I will stand erect again on my two legs… How. I love you darling, how I love you!…“.(December 2, 1942)
His spirits rise even higher after he received six letters from Yvette in one day and contemplates their approaching marriage:
“I can’t wait to get all the formalities over so that I can address my letters, “Yvette Adler”.This name Adler, embellished by you, will now become richer more alive and fresher, little one. And stronger too. It will receive again its real meaning: Eagle. You certainly know and admire the power of an eagle rising irresistibly on the great spread of his open wings into the pure blue sky. With that same power I rise and tear myself away from this stifling milieu as my thoughts and my heart fly towards you. And I will do it forever and ever and ever”.
The year ended, still without their formal marriage, but with a meeting.
“Yvette cherie, I have never been as happy and blissful as I am now. And that began on the train from Cairo to my camp….A magnificent and happy certainty suddenly illuminated my spirit and soul and it was as if we two were made for each other, that we two are the sublime reflection of divine harmony found only in nature”.
…Thank you darling, cherie you, thank you for all the joy and happiness and the peace that you give me.”
Another blissful Cairo meeting. Again without problems ….
A New Year with still no marriage leave produced long letters filled with love and impatience, anguish and generosity. And on Januray 5, a plea.
“ Cherie, don’t ever leave me. For what would I do without you?
Preparations for the battle of Tunisia demanded weeks of difficult and dangerous driving. “ And you saved me three times” he wrote on his return. “I wanted to sleep, my God, to sleep! ….. At my steering wheel, three time I was overcome, my eyes closed, I dropped off, I saw nothing of the road, only a dark blotch in front of my eyes as I let myself go towards the night, an accident and death. And it was you, my dearly beloved, Yvette my wife, who saved me. Three times, and every time the same, sudden thought “ Take car, mon vieux, you are likely not to see Yvette again- Wake up, quickly, quickly! That’s how I was, that’s how you save me.”
In pages and pages he describes the terrible desert with its occasional oases of greenery and wondrous mountains; he talks of the war in Europe and yet again the battle of Stalingrad: “Certainly, the Red Army is one of the greatest possessions of the Russian people, one that they have built in twenty-five years of labour and sacrifice. The victories – so costly, darling! – of the Red Army cause a great flow of technical discussion among the top people…..We two, in the desert, we thought about the man, Soviet man. Isn’t that the greatest achievement of the Russian people? And in its historical perspective, it is also the greatest achievement of all humanity. ..What other regime, what other social order could produce the man we see now, in the Russian factories and fields and in the ranks of the Army at Stalingrad!”
But nothing is expressed with as much passion or at such length as his avowals of love and beatitude tangled with anxiety and insecurity.
“ A crowd of questions invade and torture me. None concern our love but all concern our marriage… I tremble at the idea that you could one day regret this step. Don’t be annoyed, cherie, I am speaking seriously to you and we love each other strongly enough to be able to hold such a serious conversation without it altering our feelings in any way. You know how I love you. That will be absolutely the same after the marriage. Besides, you know what tiny significance I attach to the solemn act. I am 32 years old, cherie, sixteen of them lived at a greater intensity than the average man. I know what I want; I want Yvette. I know it as I know that the sun will rise at dawn and that I am at the peak of my life. That never again will another passion find shelter in my heart fully occupied: my struggle and you. It is complete. To live without you would be to half live… There can never be in my life another “you”. But you, Yvette darling, sweet little wife, will you be happy? Am I the one who can make you always happy to be alive?”( March 8, 1943)
When leave finally announced and they were married, it was on March 24, not as in the Service Book where the date is January 12th. Another puzzle.
On the day he returned to camp, Henri sat down and re-lived his marriage leave on paper. “I see the whole week again, in its entirety. It’s a unity. My arrival. Happiness mixed with a vague fear, a vague indecision I saw on your face. The two of us carried away by the events. The bedroom. The complete love, the beautiful love, that we dominated, that dominated us, that transformed us into on single living being. We loved each other in looking. We loved each other in talking. We loved each other in eating. We loved each other in sleeping. …We are so much part of each other now that if we are separated a little, we die a little. Isn’t that so, cherie, do you agree little one? In the bedroom, have you ever felt on your body arms as tender and as loving as you felt there, that night, when my head reposed on your breast? The sweet wakenings – oh my God, my God!” (March 31 1943)
Heightened passion, evidently the result of splendid sex, radiates from the two long letters he wrote on the day he returned to camp after the ten days marriage leave; it burns as brightly in those that followed in the weeks before his departure with the troops massed at Alexandria for the invasion of Italy. Not a word of doubt or difficulty. Here is another puzzle: How could Yvette have painted such a different picture? And why?
9398 words
tom rigby - melbourne 