Читать книгу The Reckoning: How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land - Patrick Bishop - Страница 10

‘Where to Rest My Tired Head?

Where to Hide My Shivering Flesh?’

Avraham Stern was asleep on a makeshift bed in a corner of the living room. A few feet away, curled up on a couch, lay a slim, dark woman. Rain rattled on the window panes of the tiny rooftop flat and cold seeped through the thin walls. Four storeys below, the streets of Tel Aviv lay silent, blanketed in the darkness of the wartime blackout.1

At six o’clock there was a scratching at the door. The woman stirred. Her name was Tova Svorai and she was Stern’s landlady and now his sole protector. She glanced over at him and saw he was already awake. They both knew what the sound meant. It was the signal announcing a visit by one of their few remaining contacts with the outside world, a girl called Hassia Shapira. But what was she doing here? Her instructions were to stay away, in case British detectives were watching and followed her to the flat. The clock on the cabinet ticked ominously. One, two, three seconds passed. Eventually Stern nodded. Tova rose and padded the few steps across the chilly tiles to the hallway, opened the door and pulled Hassia inside.

She was full of apologies. The police were everywhere but she had to risk coming. She was carrying a vital letter, one that might save Stern’s life. He calmed her and led her to Tova’s bed, telling her to get under the covers and keep warm until it was light and she could slip away. Then he sat down at the small square table in the hallway to read the message that Hassia had considered so important. It was indeed a lifeline. A former ally who had become an enemy was now offering him sanctuary. It was a generous and unexpected gesture, but Stern’s mind was made up. There would be no running away and no going back. In his neat hand he wrote a polite rejection. It declared: ‘I am not one of those who voluntarily give themselves up to the police.’

Dawn broke just after seven o’clock. It was Thursday, 12 February 1942.

By 7.30, daylight was showing through the shutters, painting bars of light on the drab walls. It was safe now for their visitor to leave. Tova unlocked the door and Hassia descended the staircase and stepped outside. Mizrachi Bet Street was in the middle of Florentin, a neighbourhood of small factories and workshops and cheap apartment blocks. The working day had begun. The people who lived here were recent immigrants and Yiddish, Romanian and Polish mingled in the chatter, laughter and shouts drifting up to the flat.

Tova put out the breakfast things and boiled a kettle for tea. Stern paced to and fro, from hallway to living room and back again. He was thirty-four years old, slightly built, and five feet six inches tall. His thick, dark hair was swept back from his brow in a widow’s peak above high cheekbones and grey, deep-set eyes that mesmerized his followers.

They sat down in the gloomy half-light to their breakfast of bread, cheese and jam, eating in silence. Both had much to think about. A few miles away Tova’s husband, Moshe Svorai, lay under armed guard in a hospital ward, recovering from gunshot wounds sustained during his capture by British detectives. She had not dared to visit him for fear that she would be followed and would lead Stern’s pursuers to his hideaway.

He was now the most wanted man in Palestine. His picture was blazoned across the newspapers and on billboards all over the country and there was a thousand-pound reward upon his head.* This slim, introspective figure was the man behind the wave of violence currently rocking Palestine. At the start of the year his followers had pulled off a wages snatch, killing two innocent bystanders in the process. When two of the perpetrators were caught, he declared war on the police. His men lured detectives to an apartment in Tel Aviv then triggered a bomb that killed three officers. In the ensuing manhunt, two members of the group were mortally wounded and two more captured.

These outrages dismayed Stern’s fellow Jews. The Jewish Agency, which spoke for most of them, led the outcry, offering its wholehearted support ‘in order to track down the murderous gang and free Palestine … from the nightmare of hold-ups and assassinations’. The words invoked images of Prohibition-era Chicago and were chosen carefully to puncture Stern’s grandiose self-image. In his short life he had morphed from promising scholar and poet to aspiring Zionist theorist to underground fighter. Now he seemed to think of himself as a warrior prophet, taking the name ‘Yair’ in homage to the leader of the Zealots who killed each other rather than surrender to the Romans. In the course of the journey he had formed an unshakeable conviction – that Britain was the main enemy of the Jews and the chief obstacle to the creation of a new Israel. The outbreak of the war had done nothing to change his mind. When his former comrades in the underground went off to fight alongside the British, Stern tried to undermine them by allying himself with their enemies, seeking deals with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

His ambitions challenged not just Britain but the Zionist establishment and together, it seemed, they had defeated him. His organization was in ruins. Men he had regarded as brothers had given themselves up and the rest had been arrested or had gone to ground.

They finished breakfast, and Tova cleared away the plates. Stern sat down again at the small table and began writing, as he did most mornings, filling long strips of paper in neat, scholarly script. He had been writing poems to pass the long hours. One verse, at once self-pitying and defiant, read:

Mad pouring rain

And ardent bitter cold

Where to rest my tired head?

Where to hide my shivering flesh?

He sat hunched at the table, thin, dark and lonely. The pen scratched over the paper. All he could do was wait.

Three miles away, on the north-east outskirts of Tel Aviv, Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton of the Palestine Police was setting off to work. He lived in Sarona, a cluster of attractive stone villas and bungalows on the edge of the city. He walked down the pathway to the waiting car, dressed in plainclothes detective’s civvies: tweed jacket, grey flannels and trilby. His wife, Alice, a strong, intelligent woman, who taught at the Jaffa High School for Girls, was at his side.

Morton and Stern were almost exactly the same age. Physically they could hardly have been more different. Morton was over six feet tall, slim and well muscled with big, size-ten policeman’s feet. He had blondish hair with a long face and a cleft chin that hinted at stubbornness. His eyes sloped down at the corners, giving him a slightly melancholy air. They were, however, quick to light up. He looked upon the complicated scene around him with dry amusement and the almost equine face split frequently into a grin. Stern and he nonetheless had things in common: they were both ruthless, ambitious and utterly convinced of their own righteousness.

The saloon carrying the Mortons hummed southwards along the highway on the six- or seven-minute journey. To the left stretched a landscape of palm trees and low stone houses, through which camels and donkeys and Arab men and women in long, loose clothing made their unhurried way. To the right gleamed the white Bauhaus-style apartment houses and office blocks of Jewish Tel Aviv, a brand-new city, whose streets and boulevards were already choked with traffic.

Morton’s reputation at that time was at its peak. He was intelligent, hard-working, famously brave, and to all appearances heading for the top. Since late 1939 he had commanded the Tel Aviv area Criminal Investigation Department, charged with countering Jewish and Arab political violence. With the start of the war, this work had taken on great importance. Britain was on the defensive everywhere and in the eastern Mediterranean the situation was getting worse. In Egypt, a hundred miles to the south, British forces were bracing for a renewed assault from the west by Rommel and the Afrika Korps.

Morton believed he was only a few steps away from removing one cause of concern. The Stern group’s rampage was an affront to law and order in Palestine. If it managed to get backing from the Nazis it might develop into a more serious threat – a fifth column operating in the rear of British forces as they prepared for the next German advance.

Thanks to Morton, though, the group was on its knees. Sixteen days earlier, he had led a raid on a flat in central Tel Aviv where some of Stern’s most dedicated followers were holed up. He had burst through the door and shot down three of them, including Tova Svorai’s husband, Moshe. The raid had convinced some of the group to surrender and others had been rounded up. Without Stern, however, Morton’s victory could not be complete. But where was he?

The big saloon stopped outside police headquarters, a bleak three-storey concrete block on the main road between Arab Jaffa and Tel Aviv. The couple got out and Alice set off for the high school, to give her first lesson of the day. Morton headed for his office, to await what he hoped was vital information.

The big prize was within his grasp. Some days before he had laid a trap which, if it came off, would complete the destruction of the Stern Gang. Two of the men he had shot in the raid had since died. The survivors, Moshe Svorai and the group’s master bomb-maker Yaacov Levstein, were recovering in the detention ward of the Government Hospital in Jaffa. They were in the charge of Sergeant Arthur Daly, an Irishman who spoke good Hebrew. Soon after the prisoners arrived, Daly had come to Morton with a plan. He proposed offering to act as a go-between with the detainees and their families. He had succeeded in winning Levstein’s confidence and had been running messages to his mother. Disappointingly, the letters revealed nothing. But now Svorai had decided to make use of the sergeant’s services. Might he perhaps provide a clue that would lead to the leader of the gang?

Morton had barely had time to settle behind his desk when the news he was awaiting came through. Shortly after ten o’clock his car pulled up outside 8 Mizrachi Bet Street. His big feet clattered up the fifty-nine steps to the door of the rooftop apartment. The details of what happened next would be endlessly contested. There were, though, two undeniable facts. Minutes after Geoffrey Morton entered the flat, Avraham Stern was dead and Morton had shot him.

At the time, the exact circumstances of the shooting scarcely seemed to matter. For the British, a dangerous enemy had been taken out of the game and a difficult case was closed. For the Jews, a gangster whose activities had brought shame on the community had been eliminated. Morton and his men were deluged with praise. But what seemed like an end was only a beginning. In death, Stern would prove far more menacing than he had ever been in life. The shots Morton fired would echo down the remaining years of British rule in Palestine and reverberate through the titanic events that shaped the birth of Israel. If you listen carefully, you can still hear them today.

* The equivalent of a thousand pounds sterling and a very substantial sum.