Birthright

by Alan Gold

  It was left to the chief of staff of what remained of the German Armed Forces High Command, General Alfred Jodl in France, to sign the instrument of unconditional surrender and hand over power and the government of Germany to the representatives of England and America and the other allies. Soon Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel would sign a similar instrument in Berlin to the commander of the Soviet forces, General Georgi Zhukov. And then it would all be over—in Europe, at least, because Japan was too far away for the Jews of Palestine to worry about, and it was America’s and Australia’s problem, anyway.

  It had been four months since Judit had arrived by ship into Palestine and escaped from the internment camp. In that short time she had been readily absorbed into the fighting force of Lehi. She was highly valued for her ability with languages that, in many ways, united the linguistically disparate group.

  As the radio voice excitedly reported what was happening, Judit translated from English to Hebrew, then quickly paraphrased into Russian and Polish. Many in the room loved to listen to the way she formulated the words, all with her deep and melodic Russian accent, using the idioms of the language that were music to their ears.

  The overwrought announcer said breathlessly, “I’ve just been informed by my colleagues that . . . that . . . yes, General Jodl has just signed . . . and . . . yes, the instrument is being moved across the table to the British and American representatives . . . I’m informed that they’ve all now signed . . . General Jodl is standing and holding out his hand to shake the British and American generals’ . . . they’re refusing to touch his hand . . . they won’t shake . . . but now they’re turning to each other and . . . yes . . . they’re shaking each other’s hands . . . the Americans and the British . . . Jodl is looking downcast . . . they’re saying something to each other, but we can’t hear what they’re . . . now Jodl is being escorted out of the building . . . it’s over. The war in Europe is finished. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s over. It’s all over . . . grounds for celebration . . . count the dead in days to come . . . rebuild our future . . . His Majesty the King will greet the crowds gathering outside Buckingham Palace even as I speak . . .”

  People in the room began laughing, slapping backs, kissing, tousling hair, and drinking whatever alcohol was left in their glasses, shouting “mazel tov” at the tops of their voices. Everybody was hugging and kissing and jumping in the air.

  Almost everybody.

  A diminutive man sat on a stool in the corner, looking at his young charges, wondering whether or not he should bring them down to earth now or let them have their moment of happiness. Sitting beside him was another man, also short in stature but with a face as hard as granite. Not even the news of Germany’s surrender could make him smile. The two men—Nathan Yellin-Mor, head of Lehi’s political wing, and Yitzhak Shamir, head of the organization’s operational units—sat and watched the party. They looked at each other. They knew what had to be done.

  “Chaverim v’chaverot,” shouted Yellin-Mor, “brothers and sisters, calm down. Quiet. Brother Yitzhak Shamir has something to say.”

  It was as though a cold blast of air had entered the room. All the exultant young men and women turned and looked at the two Lehi leaders, their faces impassive, their bodies relaxed. The reputation of these men was undeniable. Just two years earlier, Nathan Yellin-Mor had escaped from a British detention center by digging an underground tunnel almost seventy-five meters long and taking nineteen men to freedom. Yitzhak Shamir may have been barely five feet tall, but he enjoyed a fearsome legacy as a firebrand warrior within Lehi and the mind behind their strategic attacks, bombings, and assassinations.

  “Mazel tov to us all. The war with the Nazis is over. Good. Meantime, they’ve murdered millions of our people in their death factories. This will never be forgiven. This cannot be forgotten. One of the Jews’ enemies has been destroyed. Thanks to the sacrifice of the British and their recently engaged allies, the Americans, the greatest evil ever to befall the Jewish people, Adolf Hitler and his gang of thugs, has been destroyed. Excellent. Wonderful! But let us not lose sight of our goal, and that is to make Palestine into Israel so that whichever poor Jewish bastard remains alive in Europe after this holocaust can find a place here, a home of safety and a sanctuary for the rest of his or her life. And that means that we have to persuade the British that their mission here is at an end, and that they have to pack up and go home.” Shamir paused for effect.

  “While ever they are here, in Palestine, ours is not free air to breathe. How can we create a Jewish state of Israel while there are British in command of our cities and our people? How can there ever be an Israel while we can be stopped in the street by a British Tommy who demands our papers; while we can be arrested just for looking like a Jew?

  “When this happens to us on our land, those who perpetrate such crimes against us are our enemy. The Nazis were never the enemy we had to fight here in Palestine. The British were and continue to be our enemy, as are the Arabs who reject our presence. Remember that the mufti of Jerusalem is Hitler’s greatest ally; remember that the mufti spent much of the war living in Berlin, being treated like some potentate.

  “While the Nazis were destroying our people in Europe, it was the British who refused to let our people flee to Palestine. They are as responsible for the deaths before our brothers and sisters reached our shores as the Nazis. Had they allowed our people to enter Palestine, thousands, perhaps millions, could have been saved.

  “Now is the time to send the British this message: that there will be no peace until they are forced out. Now is the time for us to strike, when they’re drunk on victory and distracted; now is the time for us to intensify our fight!”

  Shalman sat in the back corner of the room watching Shamir make his speech. He knew he should have felt joyous at the news of the end of the war, but for reasons he couldn’t quite grasp, he felt a strange melancholy. The people around him were his brothers and sisters, and yet they were not like him.

  It had been his guardian, Dov, who had brought Shalman to Lehi. The Stern Gang had become his family. They had trained him and given him purpose when he felt aimless, given his anger a target and a name. But still he felt like an outsider. These people all around him might be his brothers and sisters in the struggle to throw off the British, but he was different from most of them. They were refugees and migrants while Shalman had been born here in the land of Palestine. The childhood memories of jumping off sand dunes at Shabbat beach picnics with his parents were ingrained in his mental landscape. When his comrades fought for the land, it was because of what they wanted it to be, for they had enjoyed no childhood here, no memories of this place. This made Shalman feel different from the others. What he fought for was for the homeland he loved, the landscape of his childhood. He was fighting for what he knew.

  So why did he find pulling the trigger so hard?

  These were the thoughts on Shalman’s mind when, amid the noise of revelry, Shamir had taken him quietly and conspiratorially aside and introduced him to a beautiful young woman whom others called Judita but whom Shamir had renamed Judit after the biblical heroine.

  Before Shamir walked away to leave them together, he turned to Shalman and whispered, “Be careful of this one; remember your Bible and what Judith did to Holofernes.” And for the first time that he recalled, Shalman heard Shamir laughing.

  • • •

  An hour later, in the early morning, the streets were empty and pitch-black. It was usually warm in May, but tonight in Jerusalem it was unseasonably cool, and they were grateful for the overcoats that concealed the Sten carbines with silencers that they carried beneath.

  Earlier, before they left the group celebrating the end of the war, Shamir had given Shalman and Judit a mission. The official armistice in Europe was a night of celebration for the British. With the Nazi menace now over, enlisted men and officers alike would be drunk and disorderly in the streets of the ancient city. Among them would be a specific trio of soldiers whom Shamir h
ad earmarked.

  When told of the order, Shalman had questioned it openly. Why these three men? What did they do? Why not bomb a train line, an airfield? Why three ordinary British Tommies?

  Shalman had surprised himself with the questions, which seemed to come from nowhere. Judit eyed him quizzically but said nothing as Shamir answered. Bombing train lines and airfields hurt the British military machine, killing officers fractured the British command, but killing regular soldiers was about hurting the British soul. To blow up a train would make headlines, but to kill a conscript from Leeds or Birmingham or Manchester would send a shudder of disgust through the city; everybody in the city would identify with the dead soldier, his widow, his children. And soon the wails of anguish would be heard in London’s parliament, where decisions were made. The British, Shamir told them, were exhausted from a six-year war. The idea of more deaths so far from home was more than they would be able to bear.

  “On this night, when they are thinking themselves invincible, we need to show them just how personally vulnerable they are. Rot them from the inside,” Shamir had told them.

  Now Shalman and Judit lay on the low roof of a closed and empty shop, surveying a narrow alley, preparing to cause that rot. It was a precise location where Shamir seemed to know the three men would be heading at this particular time. A direct route from their barracks at the end of the duty shift to the enlisted men’s recreation hall at the end of the alley.

  Shalman and Judit had gotten here by skirting the shadows of the nighttime streets and avoiding the King David Hotel, the epicenter of British control in Jerusalem.

  The spot where they were lying was ideal because the flat roof joined three other roofs in easy stages. When they’d completed their assignment, they could scamper across the rooftops and disappear into a street behind that would take them far away from the shooting. By the time an alarm had been raised, Shalman and Judit would long since be gone.

  Shalman glanced at the young woman next to him. The mixture of beauty and focus in her face turned his glance into a stare, which soon drew her attention away from the street below. Shalman quickly stammered a question to explain his gaze. “Have you ever used a rifle before?” It was a stupid question. The look Judit gave him told him that she had. Nervously, Shalman elaborated. “I mean like this. To kill . . .”

  In the moonlight, she was quite lovely. She wore no makeup, as was the habit of young Jewish women in Palestine, but her skin, her cheekbones, her deep-set eyes, her lustrous hair pinned beneath the dark brown scarf she wore, almost made the young man forget the reason he was there.

  She smiled at Shalman and gave him a reassuring nod. “I’ll be okay. Thank you for thinking of me,” she said with a liberal hint of sarcasm to which Shalman was oblivious.

  He continued to dig his hole deeper. “But if you become frightened or nervous—”

  Judit cut him off, more with a look than what she said. “I’ll be fine, Shalman.”

  Shalman retreated, feeling somewhat foolish. Judit sensed this and her voice softened. “They’re not innocent, Shalman. I know men like these. Not enlisted men, maybe, but the officers commanding them. You don’t know them like I know them. And what they’re capable of doing.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  She thought back to the time she’d landed in Haifa, when the awful little British nonentity of an officer had tried to rape her. But she kept quiet. At that moment there was a distant sound of several men laughing and talking loudly. Shalman and Judit heard the men walking nearer, their voices becoming more distinct. One was even singing.

  Suddenly, the men stopped moving, even though the sound of voices continued. Judit strained to hear and then turned to Shalman. “I think they’re pissing against a wall. Men always grow quiet when their dicks are out. Why can’t men piss and talk at the same time?”

  Shalman looked at her in astonishment, having absolutely no idea what to say. He turned back to look at the road. The noise of the men started up again and came closer to where they were stationed. Then, around a corner, they saw three men weaving on the pavement. They were carrying bottles of beer, drinking and stumbling and falling and laughing and shouting and singing. Shalman and Judit had been told that the Tommies would be on their way to drink, not drunk and leaving the barracks. Everything was out of kilter because of the end of the war. The news had prompted early celebrations, which would make their task all the easier.

  Judit and Shalman readied their Sten guns for when the Tommies were close enough. They peered through the sights and held their breath. The noise of the men, fracturing the silence of the early-morning city under curfew, grew closer and closer. They slowed and swigged from their bottles, threw their arms around one another’s shoulders, then continued to walk. They ambled closer until they were opposite the low rooftop where the two young Jews were lying.

  Shalman drew in his breath, squeezed his left eye shut, and looked down the barrel of the carbine. At the end of the sight was a British soldier who reminded Shalman of the day his father was taken away, of his mother’s grief. He reminded him of Dov and what he had said to him two years ago: “If we’re to keep this land, we have to fight for it; we have to take it, Shalman.”

  The Tommies were close now, the line from his gun sight to their chests clear and steady, and the presence of Judit seemed to slip away, leaving Shalman in his own world. He lifted his finger to the trigger and could feel his hand twitch and shake as it drew close to the thin strip of metal. All he had to do was press it, and it would unleash hell. As he held his breath, Shalman remembered the night when Yitzhak Shamir had shot the British officer after Shalman hesitated. Shamir had been true to his word, telling others that Shalman had done the job. The Pole had given Shalman a wink and never mentioned it again.

  Shalman wanted to kill. He had every reason to kill. But something inside weighed him down and slowed his response. And it was in this delay that Shalman heard a series of short, deadened pops in bursts of three. With his eye still down the barrel, he saw the bodies of the men twitch like puppets whose strings were pulled by some monstrous kid, then begin to fall to the ground. First to fall was the one that he had in his gun sights and who he was yet to shoot. His gaze and his rifle sight shifted to one of the other men, but even before his eyes focused, he saw that man, too, stumble forward in the instant of the metallic bullet pops. He shifted his gun sight immediately to the third man and found him already facedown in the alley.

  Amazed, he scanned the three bodies again. They were all splayed like animal carcasses on the ground or against a wall; two were twitching, while one lay still. Shalman hadn’t even had time to squeeze his trigger, and Judit had shot each and every one.

  He turned to face her, but she was looking down the barrel of her gun. She squeezed the trigger once more, firing into the body of a soldier on the ground, then the other two a second time each.

  She turned to look at Shalman staring at her, his mouth open. Judit said softly, as though discussing a recipe for a cake, “Always make sure the job is done. A sniper must never be satisfied with the first shot. You can’t tell from this distance whether you’ve wounded somebody or killed him. Best to shoot once or twice more, just to make sure. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

  • • •

  Shalman sat drinking orange juice in a café, waiting for Judit to arrive, and pondering the events of the night before. But it wasn’t the bullets or the mission that was exercising his mind; rather, it was the young woman who had been with him and who, truth be known, had surprised him with her attitude toward her job. Since joining Lehi, he’d killed a couple of British soldiers, but each time it had made him feel sick to his stomach. When he killed, it was always with the greatest reluctance; Judit killed with the clinical approach of a surgeon performing an operation.

  Shalman still felt guilty about the night Yitzhak Shamir had covered for him, so he had been the first to tell the Lehi operations leader how she’d killed three Tommi
es before he’d even had a chance to squeeze the trigger.

  Shamir simply laughed out loud and slapped him on the back, saying, “She’s quite something, isn’t she?” Shalman had been expecting a reprimand, but evidently, Shamir saw the news as evidence of Judit’s prowess rather than the young man’s failure.

  The café door opened and a draft of air blew into the room. Judit sauntered over to where he was sitting. He looked at her closely. Her features were fine, her face slender, her eyes deep-set and sparkling and as black as night, and she had a radiant smile.

  “Shalom, Shalman. How are you?”

  Before he could answer, the waiter appeared and Judit ordered food and drink. Shalman joined her, ordering a plate of dips and pita bread.

  “So, what have you been up to?” she asked, as though they were on a date. In fact, they were on a date of sorts. Returning from the mission the night before, they’d settled into an animated and easy discussion about history as they passed under the white stone walls of the old city. It was the history of ancient Jerusalem that had fascinated Shalman ever since he was a boy.

  His father had fostered this love in him from an early age, and Shalman had since filled his nights with every book he could scrounge to feed his thirst for knowledge about Israel’s past. For her part, Judit was an enthusiastic audience and encouraged him to tell her more as they walked the long way back, steering clear of British soldiers. She was evidently intelligent and understood much of the world, and Shalman found himself wondering how she knew so little of the city’s history. Or was she just being polite?

  Whatever it was, it filled him with a confidence he rarely had, and before he knew what he was saying, Shalman found himself asking this mysterious young woman to have lunch with him, to continue their discussion.