Why Jews Speak of Memory, Not History

On a recent visit to Israel, I toured the Museum of the Underground Prisoners, in Acre. It is housed in the Ottoman fortress that the British utilized as their most important prison during their colonial administration of Palestine between 1920 and 1948. It was the most emotional museum visit I have ever experienced. It was at this site that the pioneering revisionist Zionist leader and thinker Vladimir Jabotinsky had been held in 1920 by the British for the “crime” of organizing a Jewish defensive response to Arab riots in Jerusalem. And it was there that Menachem Begin’s Irgun staged the prisoner breakout later immortalized in Leon Uris’s novel Exodus and Otto Preminger’s eponymous 1960 film. But we had not come to Acre to remember Jabotinsky, or Begin, but a young soldier who had been imprisoned there, a young soldier who had died there, a young soldier by the name of Dov Gruner.

Gruner was a Jew who fled Hungary ahead of the Holocaust, illegally made his way to the Holy Land, and served with distinction in the British Army. He had grown convinced that the government that had betrayed the promise of the Balfour Declaration by closing the gates of Palestine to the Jews of Europe and thereby condemning them to death had lost the right to rule. Upon his discharge, he joined the Irgun, the militia that grew out of Jabotinsky’s visionary belief in Jewish self-determination and self-defense, to fight under and alongside Menachem Begin.

Captured during an Irgun raid on a Ramat Gan police station, Gruner was sentenced to death. Given his wartime service, an international campaign sought the commutation of Gruner’s sentence. But the British, in an act that horrified even Menachem Begin’s opponents in the Zionist movement, hanged Dov Gruner in the middle of the night in the Acre prison, denying him the right to see a rabbi before his execution. His sister, who had come from America to see him before she lost him forever, learned about her brother’s death from the radio.