The operation had in fact been planned by David Raziel, the Irguns twenty-six-year-old Jerusalem commander. He was quiet, strongly religious and committed to the notion of active defence. This was presented as a military doctrine by which Arab aggressors were targeted before they could launch anti-Jewish attacks. In practice it translated into indiscriminate bombings and shootings aimed at any Arab who was to hand. After Black Sunday, as the Jerusalem outrages became known, the Palestine Police rounded up a number of suspected Irgun members. The anti-Arab campaign, now sanctioned by Jabotinsky who realized he had no means of stopping it, continued nonetheless and the tempo of operations increased.
The bombs on the train at Haifa in April 1938 appeared to be part of the campaign. But instead of murdering Arabs, they had killed Wally Medler and Michael Ward. Until now, Geoffrey Mortons police activities had mainly involved dealings with Arabs. The incident had brought him into painful contact with what was the emerging, and would eventually be the dominant, threat to law and order in Palestine the activities of dissident Jews. According to Morton the Irgun issued leaflets admitting their responsibility for the bombs but stating that [they] had been intending to kill Arabs and not British police. He was not able to derive any consolation from this explanation.25
In his autobiography which appeared in 1957, and in another unpublished account of his police career in Palestine written just before he died, Morton gave great emphasis to the incident. As well as losing his friend he had gained an enemy, a figure who would come to dominate his life. Preoccupied with the Arab uprising, Morton knew little about the Irgun, which anyway had only a small presence in Haifa. He now took the opportunity to find out all I could about them.26 In the process he heard for the first time of the man who was reputed to be the brains behind the killings. His name, he revealed with a flourish, was Abraham Stern.*
In the later memoir, completed in 1993, three years before his death, he gave a slightly expanded but no less dramatic version. Intelligence sources reported that one Abraham Stern, who was known to be their ballistics expert, was responsible for devising and setting this booby trap, he wrote. It was a name I had not heard before. I was to remember it.27
This account varies in some minor details from the earlier one. The main assertion, though, is the same: Avraham Stern was the man behind the bomb that killed Wally Medler and Michael Ward. The detail that the bombs were aimed at Arabs rather than policemen would soon be overlooked as, within eighteen months, the Irgun widened the scope of their operations and British officers came under attack.
Morton was right to blame the Irgun for the bombing. But was it true that Avraham Stern was behind it? There is no surviving official documentation on the killings of Medler and Ward. Much of the Mandates paperwork was destroyed or scattered in the process of departure.
The most complete record of activities of the Palestine Police CID the department that dealt with the Jewish underground was collected by the Haganah, who had many members and sympathizers among the governments Jewish employees. It is made up of documents secretly copied under the noses of the Mandates rulers and papers captured after the British left and is now housed in a library in Tel Aviv. The boxes contain no material about the Haifa bombings. When, later, Avraham Sterns name does begin to appear in intelligence reports, there is no mention of his being suspected as the brains behind this operation.
That does not, of course, mean that British intelligence officers did not believe Stern was the culprit. If they did, they were wrong. It was true that Stern knew something about ballistics. Together with David Raziel, he had produced a 240-page small-arms manual entitled The Gun.28 He had no known expertise in explosives, however. There was a bigger problem, though, in linking him to the killing of Wally Medler. Avraham Stern was not in Palestine when the bombs went off.
* Modern-day Chişinău, the capital of Moldova.
* British officials tended to refer to him as Abraham rather than Avraham Stern.
THREE
Let Fists Be Flung Like Stone
On 8 April 1938, Avraham Stern wrote from Warsaw to his wife Roni in Tel Aviv. My heart aches that I misled you and didnt return when I said I would but I am dealing with important matters and I must finish them. I get the feeling that for us, this trip is the most important one of all.1
Stern had left Palestine for Poland at the end of January. The visit would turn out to be another protracted absence of the sort that was placing a strain on his marriage but the excuse was genuine; the mission was indeed important. He was acting as an envoy for the Irgun, liaising with high-level Polish officials who seemed willing to cooperate with one of the Revisionists boldest and most visionary schemes. There were three million Jews in Poland and the government was keen to reduce the numbers. When the Irgun proposed a plan to encourage Jews to emigrate to Palestine they had responded positively. They had gone even further and appeared willing to allow military training for young Jewish Poles and to facilitate the export of weapons to the Irguns armouries in Palestine. Stern was effectively the Irgun ambassador in Poland and deeply involved in all aspects of the transaction. It seems unlikely that he would divert from these duties to organize an anti-Arab outrage at 1500 miles remove, even if it had been logistically possible.
Stern was a very busy man. He was also a dutiful son and during his trips to Poland made time to visit his parents in Suwalki, 150 miles north-east of Warsaw near the border with Lithuania. It was there that he had been born on 23 December 1907, three and a half months after Geoffrey Morton arrived in the world. More than a century later, Suwalki has not changed all that much. The long main street is lined with pastel-painted, stucco-fronted public buildings, shops and dwellings the sort of thing you can see anywhere in the thousand-mile swathe of territory between the Baltic and the Balkans.
There is nothing to indicate that Suwalki once had a thriving Jewish community that the large yellow-washed apartment block on the high street housed the old Jewish hospital or a smaller, more elegant structure next to the town hall used to be a Jewish high school.2 Sterns home is marked, however. Set into the wall of a building just off the main street is a tablet of liver-coloured marble. The faded lettering on it records that this was the birthplace of Abraham Stern Yair, the poet and linguist who was killed in action in Tel Aviv. The town council was persuaded to put it there some thirty years ago by Sterns younger brother, David, in return for him renouncing any claim to the house.3
The building is now a bank. In 1907 it was a bourgeois villa, the residence of Mordechai Stern, a dentist, and his wife Hadassah-Leah, known as Liza, a midwife in the Jewish hospital. Its windows look out onto the town hall and a large park. There in the summer you could take coffee, eat an ice cream, read a Warsaw newspaper, while bees buzzed over the flowerbeds and a cooling breeze stirred the leaves on the trees. Oh, the park! remembered Leslie Sherer, a contemporary of Sterns. An oasis of fresh air and tranquillity. To sit down on a bench and close your eyes and listen to the klop, klop of horses hooves on the stone pavement.4
The calm classicism of the architecture gives an impression of solidity and order. But in early twentieth-century Suwalki the fields began just on the other side of the elegant portes-cochères and beyond them lay the thick forests and vast lakes of one of the wildest stretches of north-eastern Europe.
The towns position was unfortunate. The area was an endlessly contested borderland and had at various times been part of Polish, Russian and Prussian territory. When Avraham was born it lay within the Russian empire and had done so since 1815. It was a military post and tsarist troops were garrisoned in the gaunt brick-built barracks on the outskirts. Jews began arriving in the town in the early nineteenth century and before long, according to the historian of the Jewish community Shmuel Abramsky, constituted the vital pulse of the regions economic life.5
Their energy and confidence was reflected in a crop of new buildings. In 1821 the first synagogue was built. Soon there were Jewish schools for boys and girls and Bible study centres. The elderly were looked after in the old folks home. The sick were treated in the Jewish hospital on the citys main thoroughfare and the dead buried in a large cemetery on the edge of town, near the Czarna Hańcza river.
There was little friction between Jew and Gentile, though neither community mixed outside of business. It can be said [wrote Shmuel Abramsky] that relations between Jews and Christians were generally tolerable from the founding of [Suwalki] until World War 1. There was no continuous tradition of fanatic anti-semitism. In fact there were no conflicts of interests between Jews and non-Jews.
Zionism had taken root early in Suwalki. In 1881 a prominent local businessman and Talmudic scholar, Eliezer Mordechai Altschuler, set up the first Zionist foundation, Yissud Hamaala, to raise funds for a colony in the Promised Land. The following year he set off on an exploratory mission. He left behind a land of woods and water on which the industrial age was rapidly encroaching and landed in a parched, backward world, sunk in medieval squalor. The collision with reality failed to a dent Altschulers enthusiasm one of the essentials of Zionist belief was a contempt for mere facts. He wrote home that, on the journey from the coast to Jerusalem, I descended from my wagon many times and fell to the ground and embraced it, and kissed the stones with burning lips.6 Eventually, a colony was established and Suwalki was linked to the Promised Land.
It was in this society, invigorated by prosperity and the stimulus of new ideas, that Avraham Stern passed his early childhood. His father Mordechais days were spent in his surgery on the ground floor. Liza went to and from the hospital a few blocks away, where she oversaw the births of most of the citys Jewish babies. According to her grandson Yair Stern, she was the powerful force in the family.7 Avraham was known as Mema, a nickname he used in letters to those closest to him for the rest of his life. In 1910 a brother, David, was born. Their upbringing seems to have been a stable and contented one and Davids daughter, Amira, remembered her father talking fondly of the early days in Suwalki.8
In August 1914 came the first tremors of the earthquake that would destroy old Europe. By the following June, Suwalki was in German hands. When the Germans arrived, Mordechai was in the East Prussian capital, Königsberg, either receiving medical treatment or seeking supplies for his practice according to different accounts. He returned home to an empty house. Liza had fled with Avraham and David across the Lithuanian border to her fathers home in Vilkomir. Mordechai was arrested and sent to a detention camp.
The flight brought to an end the longest period of stability that Stern would ever know. For the next six years he was a refugee, reliant on the charity of a succession of relations or, after his mother decided to return to Suwalki, more or less having to fend for himself. He spent some of his exile with an uncle in Petrograd, which was still in a state of revolutionary ferment. Twelve-year-old Avraham worked for the local student cooperative in return for food. He made extra money selling cigarettes. He enrolled at a school and learned to play the piano. He also joined the Pioneers, the Communist Partys version of the Boy Scouts.
He lived beyond the control of adults, hanging out with young revolutionaries and visiting the Mariinsky and Alexandrinsky theatres. When his parents wrote demanding his return, he played for time, asking to be allowed to finish the school year. In the summer of 1921 he could stall no longer and made his own way home. Without money or documents he was reduced to hopping freight trains, and arrived in Poland illegally, smuggled over the border in a sack on the back of a farmer.
He was barely out of childhood yet he had already had great adventures and witnessed historic events. At first family life was strange and restricting. Father, mother and son found it difficult to reconnect. According to Sterns biographer, Ada Amichal-Yevin, Mordechai Stern was a distant figure who sat alone reading and never found a path to the heart of Avraham.9 Avraham Sterns son, Yair, formed the impression from conversations with Liza that he was not a father who [cared] a lot about his children.10 Liza, too, seems to have been too preoccupied with work and a busy social life to engage very closely with her son.
Avraham went to the Jewish Gymnasium on Kościuszko Street just down the road from his home. He had to learn Polish anew, but he had a gift for languages and was soon impressing his classmates with his eloquence. He had his own way of building sentences, one of them remembered. He had a captivating way of speaking.
Avraham Stern stood out from the start. He was a show-off with a compulsion to perform. He organized amateur theatricals and took the best parts. In 1925 he played the title role in his own production of King Lear. He thrilled the Gentile girls at the Polish high school with a poetry reading, and managed to conduct a protracted flirtation with three of them, wooing them with examples of his own poetry. He preferred the company of girls to playing football or swimming in the Czarna Hańcza river with his schoolmates. He seems to have set out to be special. According to his biographer, although he did not behave towards his friends arrogantly, they felt a distance a certain secret and unexplained space between him and them. This was seen in the way he dressed sharply, as observed by the beady-eyed headmistress of the Polish girls school who noted disapprovingly the ring that flashed on the young Jews finger as he read verses to her impressionable Christian charges. It also showed in the way he froze out anyone who displeased him, behaving as if they did not exist.