Stateless (9 page)

Later the story was that he'd been found guilty of terrorism, and been hanged. And his family and friends had been dismissed, as though the rule of British law was nothing more than a joke.

The people of the kibbutz didn't speak about that day and neither did Shalman's mother, Devorah. On a kibbutz, everything was shared and the community worked and cared for all. But one member of the kibbutz never recovered from the guilt of sending Shalman's father to his death.

Dov had honoured Ari's request and treated Shalman as one of his own, though as he grew into young manhood, Shalman never really felt close to Dov's other six children. He saw his mother retreat into an increasingly thick shell, now that her beloved Ari had been taken; she still cared for Shalman but no
longer with the warmth and depth he'd known when he was part of a family, playing on the beaches as a young boy. As the months rolled away, Devorah became increasingly locked into her own world of perpetual despair, distant and cold, not just from Shalman, but from everybody.

Anger grew like a cancer in the young man's breast. Every time the British army vehicles rolled past, or the people of the kibbutz were stopped at a checkpoint, Shalman felt anger. But it was anger that had no outlet until the day Dov handed him a small, heavy package in an oiled rag . . .

Since the day Ari had been taken away, Dov – like Shalman's mother Devorah – had changed as a man. Where he had once been jovial and energetic, he became focused and solemn. And with his change in demeanour came a change in his activities. Dov was still the kibbutz's resident thief but as he trained others in the tasks at which he was so skilled, his activities took on a higher, more directed, purpose, separate from the kibbutz, and he grew increasingly distant from his
chaverim
, friends he'd known on the kibbutz for years

When Shalman unwrapped the package Dov had handed him, he found the heavy, shining, gun-metal grey pistol he'd first seen the day his father had been taken away.

‘You're old enough now to use that,' said Dov. It wasn't even a statement of intent, just one of fact.

Shalman weighed the pistol in his hand with ease, no longer fearful of dropping it as he had been the first time a couple of years before.

‘If we're to keep this land, we have to fight for it, we have to take it, Shalman.'

The teenager looked at Dov, shifting his grip on the pistol into a position ready to draw and fire. But Dov said nothing more. Just squeezed his shoulder and walked away.

Now, with the pistol, Shalman was a Jewish warrior. Weeks
after giving him the gun, Dov introduced him to some people, who seemed to like him. They bought him a beer, treated him like a man, and on the second occasion he met with them in a café in the side streets of the northern port city of Haifa, they told him that they were part of Palestine's defence force. They were members of Lehi, the gang of anti-British freedom fighters created by Avraham Stern three years earlier. The British, who called Lehi ‘the Stern Gang', hated the group, which was responsible for thefts of armaments and the assassination of British soldiers.

Shalman was surprised that the people he was meeting were so pleasant. The
chaverim
on the kibbutz hated Lehi and disparaged them at every opportunity. They called Lehi members ‘animals'. It was because the founder, Avraham Stern, had tried to form an alliance with the Nazis of Germany and the Fascists of Italy to side with them against the British, even though everybody now knew about Hitler's concentration camps and even their death camps were becoming known. Stories were seeping out of Germany, and so such an alliance would have been a pact with the very devil himself.

Stern had been shot dead by the British, and since then, for some reason, the leadership had turned to Stalin and Moscow to try to form an alliance against the British.

Dov made Shalman promise not to tell anybody on the kibbutz that he'd met with men from Lehi; within a month, the youngster agreed to join. He was trained in the use of a rifle, and covert activity, and this night, the first in his life, he was lying on a rooftop, about to kill a human being. He thought back to the details of his training as he secured the rifle butt to his shoulder and aimed down the sight to the uniformed British officer in the distance.

Shalman's hands were sweating; he was trembling. He had to blink twice because the sweat on his brow was dripping
into his eyes. Not that the weather was warm; it was a chilly night.

In his mind he envisioned what would happen, what he must do. He imagined the bullet erupting from the barrel and flying at the speed of sound across the space to thud into the flesh of the British soldier. It would tear his uniform, puncture his skin, rip his muscles to shreds and spill blood on the ground.

Shalman felt sick.

When he'd lain on his stomach in the training sessions and aimed at distant bottles, squeezed the trigger and watched them explode into a million shards of glass, his hands hadn't been shaking or sweating. So why now? Because it was dark? Because it was cold? Because he was alone? No, he'd been alone in the dark before he became a soldier with a rifle, when he'd been engaged in missions for Lehi, missions which were part of his training . . . now that he was sixteen, they'd told him to go out and get his first kill.

Shalman, at Dov's urging, was set to become a willing participant in the activities of the Stern Gang, relishing the sense of place and empowerment it gave him, helping to emancipate him from the haunting memories of his father being taken away.

Focusing again on his target, Shalman saw the face of the British officer illuminated by a brief yellow glow as he lit another cigarette. Down the rifle sight Shalman saw that face and felt a coldness within him which he had never felt before.

He'd been told by the intelligence people in Lehi that this British officer worked in strategic command and that by his removal there would be disruption. It was disruption that Lehi sought. British time in Palestine was limited, and the more disrupted it became, the shorter their stay would be. The British were already exhausted from fighting the war against the Nazis; a growing battlefront in Palestine wouldn't be tolerated by the
British public, and that should lead the Houses of Parliament in London to withdraw their troops.

Shalman knew that he had to pull the trigger, he knew he was a good marksman and knew he could hit the target when it was an empty bottle of beer. But still he could feel the sweat on his brow despite the cold air.

Then a voice in bad Hebrew said, ‘What the hell you doing? Why not shoot? Why stop? What the fuck?'

The voice came from a man sliding up on his belly in the dark to lie next to him. It was a distinctly Polish accent. The man had been assigned as Shalman's supervisor and acted as lookout for the operation, though Shalman was yet to learn his name.

‘Fucking shoot or go away. If you can't, I do.'

‘I'll do it,' whispered Shalman defensively. ‘I'm just waiting for the right shot.'

‘Bullshit!' said the aggressive man. ‘You fucking coward. I been watching. Plenty shots. You scared. Yes?'

Shalman turned his attention back to the gun sight.

‘You never kill man before. First kill difficult. Next kill easy. Now you do first kill.'

Shalman shook his head.

‘Okay, give me rifle. I kill. You take credit. Then others don't know how you coward. Tomorrow you grow balls. Tomorrow we talk. I teach you how to kill. Today we must act. Yes?'

The man took the rifle from Shalman's hands, aimed, and within moments, the quiet of the night was pierced by a sharp crack as the bullet tore out of the rifle and penetrated the officer's chest. And then before the body of the target had even hit the ground, the Polish man said, ‘Quick. We go. Now!'

He stooped and ran with the rifle back to the vehicle. Shalman followed.

The following night, Shalman and the man with the Polish accent met in a café on Ma'alot Ir David, close to the centre of Jerusalem. The older of the two, though himself only twenty- two, nodded without smiling to Shalman as he entered the café. It wasn't until he stood near the table before sitting that Shalman realised how diminutive the man was. Not that Shalman was particularly tall, especially compared to the British soldiers, but this young man only reached up to Shalman's shoulder. And Shalman knew that it was probably the difference between the healthy life and food on a kibbutz, and the dark, claustrophobic and sunless world of a European ghetto where Jews were locked into walls like animals in a pen.

They looked at each other, not speaking a word, the man's face a mask of indifference. A waiter came up, and the Pole said curtly, ‘Wodka. And felafel.' The waiter looked at Shalman, who said, ‘Just a felafel, thanks. Oh, and a black beer.'

Shalman was unsure what else to say. The Pole had asked to meet for a drink and Shalman could find no reason to say no. As he pondered what to say, the man took the lead.

‘Last night. Big problems caused by you. Disobey order. Bad for you, bad for comrades. If this were normal war, you'd be shot. But this no normal war . . .' He shrugged casually and threw back the vodka the waiter had just placed on the table.

Shalman made no response, though his hackles rose at the idea of being thought a coward.

The Pole pressed on, not waiting for Shalman to reply. ‘I could report you, but you're a kid.' Then he looked around the room before leaning forward and lowering his voice. ‘Why are you doing this? Why not stay school or kibbutz? Why join gang?'

‘Same reason as you,' Shalman said, adjusting to the Polish
man's awful Hebrew. He looked around the café to see if anybody was listening to their conversation, but all the other people seemed to be eating and drinking, or engaged in intense conversations. He then said, ‘To kill British.'

‘Hmmm,' said the Pole. ‘Not for country, not for people? Just for killing?'

Shalman wanted to object, to explain his nationalism, but instead said, ‘Your Hebrew is terrible. Would you prefer to speak in Polish?'

Shalman's kibbutz was made up of people from all over the world and he'd picked up a workable command of Polish as a kid.

The Pole nodded his head. ‘I've only just started to learn Hebrew. It's very difficult.'

‘You didn't learn any Hebrew in Poland?'

‘I went to school in Ruzhany before the Soviets came. But I liked girls and other things too much.' The diminutive Pole gave Shalman a wry wink.

As well as languages, Shalman had acquired knowledge of many other things from life on the kibbutz, especially the stories of escape. Everyone who came to the community had a story. Some were full of adventure and funny circumstances that would have everyone rolling with laughter in the evenings over dinner. But most were dark and full of despair. So when the Pole said the simple words ‘before the Soviets came', Shalman knew what that meant without the short man having to elaborate.

At the start of the war the Soviet secret police deported hundreds of thousands of Poles to the gulags in the frozen north. It wasn't the forced labour that was so terrible as simply the cold. Many lost fingers, legs and arms to frostbite and many more simply died of exposure. Shalman recalled a story of a man who wrapped his fingers and hands and feet in straw
and horse shit so as it rotted it warmed the flesh. Shalman involuntarily looked down at the hands of the Polish man in front of him, saw the fingers intact and wondered if he'd done the same.

Such stories and images were the intimate personal details of much larger political manoeuvrings. When the Nazis broke their non-aggression pact with Russia, Stalin was desperate for allies, knowing that the German war machine was about to be unleashed toward Stalingrad. He signed the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement and overnight all those Poles who had been rounded up into forced labour by the NKVD suddenly found themselves soldiers in the service of the Soviet Socialist Republic and were formed into a ragtag Polish army some 25,000 strong.

‘Some of us were made officers, given shiny uniforms and extra food. But not me. I couldn't be bothered. I just wanted to kill. Russians, Germans, Arabs, British. I didn't care. Everybody was my enemy,' said the Pole as he washed down the felafel with another shot of vodka.

Shalman wanted to ask questions but he held back, still unsure of the intentions or motives of his companion. He didn't even know the man's name. So he asked.

But the Polish man merely looked at him, and said, ‘Names are for the bourgeoisie. No better than lord or earl or sir or mister. A man should be identified by his deeds. I'm known to my comrades because I can kill without blinking an eyelid, not because of what I'm called. So you call me comrade, or in Hebrew,
Chaver.
'

Shalman shrugged. He'd find out from the others. In the meantime, he thought of what his new comrade had told him about the life of Poles in Hitler's Europe and Stalin's Russia. He found himself connecting this man's stories to the flood of Poles into Palestine in recent years.