Page 6 - Kol Bogrei Habonim - October 19

spectacles meant non-eligibility for the army. Anybody’s soldiers club?
They were looking for the lame and broken-down,
in fact anybody who could be a soldier. In October
1943, the army finally caught up with me and
invited me to wear the king’s uniform, the
representative uniform. Meanwhile, the hostels
embodied the concept of trying to prepare a group
that would possibly, if Hitler didn’t invade, be
able to carry on and maintain the fact that the
Jewish community still existed. In every one of
these hostels we had 40 children and we treated
each hostel as if it were a kibbutz. We taught
Hebrew and other Jewish related subjects, such as
Festivals, customs, etc. The children went to local
schools in the mornings. I went into the army in
October 43, into the Reconnaissance corps. Later,
I was transferred to the Intelligence corps. I was
assigned to a denazification project. When I was
on the boat to Italy, the war ended. In Italy, there
were instructions to fly me up to northern Italy
and then to be taken by command car to Austria. I
was detailed to do the work of denazification in
Austria. I was stationed in a city called
Klagenfurt, the regional capital. The news got
through to the shaliach in Vienna. I managed to
persuade my bosses to have me go to Vienna
where I found a message in Ivrit to contact “so
and so.” There, I found the headquarters of the
“Breicha,” which was the organization for
gathering people together in camps under the
aegis of America, France and Britain and then, via
the Mossad and Aliya Beth, getting them to Italy
and the South of France, then on to Palestine.
This, before the State was established.
From Marseilles and from Italy there would be
boats. The first boats were from Italy. I worked for
the Breicha and they trusted me because here was
a Jewish soldier who spoke fluent Hebrew. The
first job they gave me was to set up a Jewish
soldiers’ club as there were four delegations,
Vienna having been divided into four zones. The
British, the French, the Americans and the
Russians came, before the cold war intervened. I
ran the soldiers club as a cover for the Breicha
movement.
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Only Jewish soldiers. Another job they gave me to
do was to perform wedding services. The local
Jews wouldn’t have anything to do with the
eastern Jews and some of the eastern Jews, who
had lost their spouses, wanted to remarry. They
wanted a proper marriage. I knew the whole
service as I had also been conductor of a choir at a
synagogue in east London. I married two couples
and they’re still going strong. We also did some
other secretive work for the Mossad. I say we,
because another British Jewish soldier and an
American officer who had a jeep, helped us a
great deal when we had to remove or lighten the
burden of the various armies in order to deal with
what we needed.
If you go in late to the army, you are discharged at
a later date so, after four years, in May 1947,
when I was discharged, I returned to my home in
London, I went to see Niumka (Nehemia
Levanon), the shaliach to Habonim. He told me
that we had lost a lot of leaders who had gone on
Aliya. He went on to say: “You come to ask me to
send you on Aliya. Give us one year and then you
can go,” which is what happened. I worked with
the executive in Habonim in London in charge of
a “shichva,” the youngest shichva, and then
exactly a year later, I was secretly told to prepare
myself “as you are going today.” I crossed over to
France, gave my passport to be forged with a visa
for Palestine and then went to a camp for DPs in
Marseilles and waited for my turn to leave.
Do you remember which camp?
Not St Dennis, the other one. I can’t remember.
When we arrived in Palestine we were
immediately conscripted into the army. A few
weeks later an order came through (probably
initiated by Baruch Tal), transferring me to Kfar
Blum, which was my target, the first Habonim
kibbutz. I went to Kfar Blum and saw some action
at Manara where a few people were killed by a
gang of Arabs and then at Kfar Blum itself. After
working in all the different branches, the kibbutz
asked me to become an English and Music
teacher. I conducted the children’s choir as well as
the kibbutz choir and I myself went and sang in a