Letters – 1942 – tom rigby

Some time shortly prior to the beginning of this correspondence, Henri 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”. After a passionate flurry of letters from the war trail, they had agreed by October to get married. Many of the later letters contain details of some the bureaucractic procedures that needed to be undertaken in order for two members of the British Army to marry each other.

Yvette had a son from a previous marriage, whom Henri meets for the first time in December, “moist baby lipped – [sleeping] like a little man in a little bed”. Henri declares that he adores the infant and feels toward him as though he were his real son.

The letters begin, “Sand, sand everywhere”. Most of the letters are addressed from the 650th General Transport Company, a newly founded all-Jewish brigade of the British Army. Henri would have been constantly on the move and it is likely that troops were prohibited from giving out their location. This account, from a website about Jewish units in the British Army, gives an idea of where Henri is likely to have been working:

The [650 Transport Company] was parked in Palestine and carried convoys from Haifa to Iraq. In these convoys, emissaries of Mossad L’Aliya Bet, Haganah and Hehalutz were smuggled to Iraq, as well as a wireless transmitter to Enzo Sereni, who served as Mossad emissary from Baghdad and served the pioneering underground in Iraq until the War of Independence. On their way back to Palestine, the company convoys smuggled immigrants from Iraq, most of them Jewish deserters from the Free Polish Army commanded by General Anders, who came from the Soviet Union through Iran and Iraq to Palestine and Egypt and then to the Italian front.

Although he considers himself a “civilian in a soldier’s mask“, Henri longed to be closer to the front. Enlisted as an Army driver, he was prohibited from bearing arms because of his political organising.

tom rigby – melbourne

Melbourne street photography

Letters – 1942