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The Voice of Valor

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The Voice of Valor THE VOICE OF VALOR GEULA COHEN THE VOICE OF VALOR GEULA COHEN Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin VAIR PUBLISHERS TEL AVIV 1990 First Edition 1966 Hebrew Edition 1961 Russian First Edition 1985 © All rights reserved Yesharim Press Tel Aviv 1990 TO MY COMRADES: - THOSE WHO ALSO DREAMT DURING THE DAY - WHEN ALL OTHERS HAD MADE PEACE WITH THEIR DAY: THOSE WHO ALSO FOUGHT AT NIGHT - WHEN ALL WERE SLEEPING AWAY THEIR NIGHT: WHO FELL BY THE WAY OF AWESOME HOURS. AT A TIME THAT WAS NEITHER DAY NOR NIGHT, AT A TIME OF TWILIGHT. WHEN WORLDS ARE CREATED. GEULA COHEN WEAVES HER PERSONAL STORY TOGETHER WITH THE CHRONICLES OF THE LECHI UNDERGROUND DURING THE PERIOD OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER PALESTINE. AS A SECRET RADIO BROADCASTER, LATER AS A PRISONER AND AFTERWARDS FOLLOWING HER ESCAPE, SHE WRITES WITH SPECIAL APPRECIATION FOR THE INNER FORCES THAT URGED ON THE YOUNG FIGHTERS IN THEIR BATTLE FOR THE FREEDOM OF THE JEWISH NATION IN ITS HOMELAND. GEULA COHEN HAS BEEN A MEMBER OF ISRAEL’S KNESSET SINCE 1974. SINCE 1990 A DEPUTY MINISTER OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY. Z/K “Black,” I say again to the barber. The barber scowls at my blondeness and pours and pours from a container of dye, rubbing the thick liquid into my hair. In the mirror, from beneath the black dye, the blonde hair still flows toward me. He reaches for another container and pours and rubs and dyes. “Blacker,” I say to him. “Like the black I used to have. Like the black roots.” “Wait.” He is impatient. “Don’t be in such a hurry.” And he swivels me away from the mirror. Behind my clenched lids is a riot of color. Reds. Blacks. Golds. The barber pours, dyes, brushes; he combs my hair, rinses it. My eyes are still shut. The barber combs and brushes. He spins me around again. “It’s me,” says the face from the mirror. “It’s me,” say I to the face. It is 1948. The last time I had seen myself as a brunette had been in 1947, after my escape from prison; before my hair was dyed to conceal me from the British police. Now, in 1948, no need for disguises. I stare at myself openly in the mirror, at my black hair rising freely from the roots in my scalp. I was a member of the freedom Fighters of Israel, the Lechi or, as we were commonly called by English and Jew alike—the Stem Gang. I came to the Lechi by way of the EtseZ, and to the Etsel by way of Betar. But these are details of no importance; there really was only one way to the Lechi. In 1943 there were sixteen of us enrolled in an Etsel officers’ 1 training course. We each had a number; mine was 16. Number 16, attention! Number 16, at ease! Number 16, attention is not at ease! Number 16, hands at your sides! Number 16, eyes front, no daydreaming! Number 16, that’s •a rifle you are jiggling, not a walking stick! Number 16 ... Number 16 ...! When the course began, I knew several of the group; a few quite well. But I was immediately drawn to five strangers—a girl and four boys. They witnessed my awkwardness with lively, un­ demanding glances. Even the way they stood in line, casually ignoring the rigid ranks, distinguished them from the rest. Like all of us, they breathed in time with the marching cadence, but be­ tween one breath and the next they seemed free—rhapsodic. I was attracted, but without realizing it; they encouraged, but not too much. One evening they were gone, all five of them. No questions were asked; none were permitted. During that meeting I was particu­ larly obstinate and provoked a dressing down at every turn. Ev­ erything I did and didn’t do was wrong until, finally, we were called to attention and the Order of the Day was read: “The following numbers have been expelled from the ranks of the Organization. They have been exposed as belonging to the Faction. It is forbidden to come in any kind of contact with them. Anyone violating this directive will be tried and punished with the utmost severity.” The numbers were being read, but no one was listening. All eyes, the leader’s too, focused—was it my imagi­ nation?— menacingly on me. From that moment, emptiness be­ gan to gnaw at me: not chaos or turbulence, but an abysmal, in­ dissoluble, exasperating nothing. “The Faction” had become the Etsel label for the Lechi after the split in 1940, when Abraham Stem and a few companions resigned from the parent organization, Etsel, to start a movement of their own. “Factionalist” was a dirty word, to be spit out rather than spoken. Simply to utter it was to pronounce a sentence to oblivion. That was the sentiment in Etsel in 1943, and it was also my own. The first time I ever heard the term “factionalist,” in fact, was 2 when Abraham Stem was killed in February, 1942. I was on my way home from the teachers’ seminary which I was attending at the time, and I ran into an excited crowd. A man standing behind me asked, “So they finally killed him?” "Killed whom?” The picture staring at me from the newspaper that he held in his hand was vaguely familiar. "I wonder who got the thousand,” somebody muttered. And then I remembered. This was the face posted up and down the streets a few weeks before, with a caption promising one thou­ sand Palestinian pounds to anyone contributing to the capture of the gangster Stern—dead or alive. That evening at a cell meeting our discussion leader simply said, "A lost soul,” casually adding in the tone usually reserved for those long dead, "A factionalist.” I had entered the officers’ training course after two years of clandestine activity in the Etsel. During that time I had attended secret meetings, learned to handle arms, and stolen through the darkness—it had always to be dark—to a house in the suburbs where a small group of girls was instructed in assorted arts of conspiratoral behavior. A marvelous stealth pervaded the atmo­ sphere. To be privy to a perennial secret was a new and invigorat­ ing sensation. When one lives by a cold and covert light, a walk in the sun becomes an intoxicating experience. The whole world was shrouded in a glow of mystery. But at the very heart of the mys­ tery—within the clandestine world of the Etsel—there was noth­ ing at all to marvel at. There was nothing new, nothing strange; everything seemed right and normal. It was as though beneath my civilian clothes I still wore my old Betar uniform from long ago, one suit fitting lightly upon the other without friction or contradic­ tion. Until that evening when five numbers were read aloud and I was impelled to follow them. In a week they found me. The first issue of Lechi’s Hechazit was lodged innocently in the mailbox, and I read it. And that was my beginning and my finish and everything encompassed therein —all. It was the first time in my life that the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet had arranged themselvesona page especially 3 for me. I felt that I was writing rather than reading the words. Here, finally, was substance enough to fill my emptiness. Mother­ land, freedom, war, enemy—such stale old words seemed new­ born, and I was Adam, tasting them for the first time. That was it! Short, lucid, consistent. At that moment the barriers between me and the outside world collapsed. There was no longer any need for them. A door had been opened for me. The vacuum was stirring with life. In it, endless characters, groping question marks, were swarming, moving, converging, all together, all as one, circle con­ centering upon circle, point enveloping point, rising to form a single wand, upright, authoritative, certain. That’s it! Exclamation point. No more doubts. No more choices. No more duplicity. One line, cutting, vertical, peremptory. In this moment a spark had been touched off, a spark in which lay the power to live all at once the essence of that life I had never savored. Perhaps this helps to explain the dual process which began nebulously to take shape in me at that time, which accom­ panied me throughout all my years in the underground, and which I am now able to look back upon with a special clarity, having returned to normal life. At the same time that I was descending into the underground, shackling and repressing impulses and whims that I had long taken for granted, I was drawing up from it a whole new world full of yearnings and desires which I had been harboring unaware—a world that was spontaneous, free and unchallengeably mine. When I put the pamphlet aside, I was angry, furious at it and furious with those who sent it to me. Defect from the Etsel? Never! I would never be taken in by such words. Never! 4 2/2 “Never!” I declared a few days later to Elimelech and Dov when they came to my home with more Lechi reading material. Elimelech spoke first, hesitantly and apologetically: “We really owe you an explanation for walking out on the course without saying good-by. We simply couldn’t put up with it any longer. A group of us left Lechi after Yair’s death to hole up somewhere until the coast was clear again.
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