hall - sections 25,26, and 27 of the Irgun. When I go in, discussions are raging everywhere.
"That Rasiel ofyours is a disgusting fellow!" the little blond-haired boy from the Montefiori School is shouting. "Definitely an agent of the British secret service ..."
"You ass!" snaps Joske. "How dare you talk like that?"
"Didn’t he send us out to inform on Jewish communists? Yes or no? Didn’t he deliver these Jews into the hands of the British military? Yes or no?"
"What are you getting excited about? These communists are ene-mies of Zionism and Russian agents. And your Yair7 too is a foreign agent, not of the Russians this time but of the Nazis, the fascists!"
"What do you know about it, you stupid donkey? The Germans have conquered France. Do you know what that means? The Germans will win the war! And we can make a deal with the Italians. They are not at all anti-Semitic and they support the idea of a Jewish state."
"Aha! Avraham Stern wants to set himself up as a little Mussolini, eh?"
"Idiot! Jabotinsky8 said that he would make a deal with the Devil himself if that would help us."
"Atten-tion!" Joram calls out. We jump up automatically, line up, stand to attention.
Ehud, the company commander, receives the reports. His hand-some face looks confused and sad. The way I imagine a commander after a defeat. He informs us that he has handed over command of the company to someone else, who will be named by the leadership of the new organization - the "National Military Organization in Israel." We are to go to the room next door where we will be addressed by a leading member of the new organization.
We sit there in the darkness on school benches and whisper to one another. Suddenly a voice emerges from the darkness. It is the deep-est voice I have ever heard.
"We follow our commanders into battle, as long as they really lead us into battle..."
The voice makes a speech. The depth of feeling is unbelievable, and I can feel how the speaker slowly gains control of those sitting around me, hypnotically dispelling their doubts. For some reason