In his autobiography which appeared in 1957, and in another unpublished account of his police career in Palestine written just before he died, Morton gave great emphasis to the incident.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 Mandate’s 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 government’s Jewish employees. It is made up of documents secretly copied under the noses of the Mandate’s 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 Stern’s 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 didn’t 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 Irgun’s 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 Stern’s 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 Stern’s 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 Stern’s. ‘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 town’s 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 region’s 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