<<Links to letters, by year, are in the process of being posted here.>>

1942

Beginning in July.

Henry and Yvette met in 1942 at a Communist Party cell meeting in Tel Aviv, chaired by Henri. Yvette was a French woman who had migrated to Palestine with her Jewish student boyfriend and their baby. At the time they met, Yvette was dating a comrade named Dov, and Henri had a reputation as a “Don Juan”. But after a passionate flurry of letters from the war trail, they had agreed by October to get married.

1943

The letters begin with Henri a wishing happy new year to Yvette, who seems to have been working in a busy field hospital, seemingly outside of Palestine.

1944

Beginning in January, Henri writes from the 650th General Transport Company – en route to liberating Italy with the British Army – to Yvette, in Tel Aviv. The 650 Gen Tpt Coy used the Zionist star around a clock as its insignia. Meanwhile, Yvette, having achieved the rank of Sergeant, has decided to resign from the Army to focus on parenting her son from her first marriage, Ouri.

1945

1946

1947

These letters span a period during which Henri and Yvette mostly lived apart. In February Henri was in Palestine, organising the Communist party there, and Yvette was in France. In June, Henri moved from Palestine to Poland, for more “political” work. He wrote from a devastated Warsaw to Yvette, who had taken a French government job in Vienna, assisting in the regulation of the continued postwar flow of displaced people. Yvette visited Warsaw in late July and a baby was conceived. Yvette, declaring that the baby must be born in France, returned in September – first to Belmont then to Paris – visiting Henri along the way. The letters for the rest of the year presage a reunion in France. Yvette finds an apartment and enrols Henri in a university course.

1980

Letter from Henri to his daughter Hélène accompanying archive of letters.

About