When Heroism Is Our Only Alternative

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Oh, how many heroes my people have had! And still do.

Long ago, I read the great Ruth Aliav Klüger’s memoir, titled The Last Escape. I wrote about it, but only a wee bit in 2007. Now, nearly twenty years later, I have just begun to read this extraordinary book again.

Clearly, I missed so much of what was important but plan to write a new piece about her daring deeds. The Last Escape was written together with Peggy Mann. I missed the incredible misogyny that, in each and every instance, Klüger deftly overcame. She did not allow it to get in her way. What an excellent role model she is. Her cool and yet passionate description of what happened at the Evian Conference is what led to the Mossad's acquisition of the ship The Tiger Hill. Thirty-two nations, including the United States, rejected Jewish immigrants--her recital still has the power to chill my blood.

Titled "When Heroism is our only Alternative," here's what I published at Pajamas Media (PJM) in 2007. It's a rather good title, isn't it? And it remains timely, or rather, it is a phrase and a truth that is timeless.

When Heroism Is Our Only Alternative

By Phyllis Chesler

Nov 12, 2007

Pajamas Media

This wordsmith-warrior has become something of a schoolmarm, a veritable Ms Manners of the raging Cultural Wars. Thus, say I, “I don’t like delivering savage soundbites nor does debate as a blood sport turn me on.” Primly, I say: “Ideological opponents should engage in civilized exchanges and they should keep talking rather than retreating into dangerous silences or into overt warfare.

Oh what fine and pretty words–but what about those moments in history in which we must either act or we become collaborators in the death of others?

Either we rescue the child trafficked into sexual slavery or she dies, both slowly and soon enough, while she is still young. Either we rescue the victims of genocide or they die. There are no second chances. Memorial plaques and Truth and Reconciliation Committees do not resurrect the dead.

And acting always means risking everything: safety, happiness, health, our own lives, and perhaps the lives of our intimates. But, at certain moments in history, heroism is our only alternative. At least if we are heroes.

Some people pride themselves on non-stop talking; they never act. Instead, they consider “talking to the enemy” a moral virtue. But if talking substitutes for and glorifies non-action, then let me suggest that talking may be better suited for safe, not perilous times.

These thoughts lead me back to a film I saw at the Israeli Film Festival. The Darien Dilemma is a haunting and powerful drama made by a father and filmmaker son: Erez and Nahum Laufer.

In 1941, 1000 Viennese Jews were stranded on the frozen Danube awaiting rescue or certain death. The Darien was the name of the ship that the nascent Mossad (Israeli Secret Service) had purchased in order to transport these Jews to safety in Palestine. The Dilemma concerns how a small group of Palestinian Jewish heroes handled a direct order to abandon these Jews to their deaths–simply because the ship was needed as part of a larger political deal the Haganah had just forged with the British; the ship was to be used to help sabotage German oil supply lines.

What does it mean to disobey an immoral order or an order with which one disagrees? Is preserving the future of the Jewish state a greater good than that of saving imperiled Jewish lives? What kind of monsters can make such decisions? What kind of monsters can refuse to do so?

In this instance, and to their enormous credit, the Mossad members debated this decision for one full month. They reluctantly voted to obey the direct military order–and then they changed their minds and decided to disobey it. However, it was too late for the Darien refugees. There was no ship for them. Except for 200 teenagers whom the Mossad spirited away to join another Palestine-bound ship, all eight hundred refugees were shot to death by Austrian troops whom Hitler had impressed into service.

The film operates on several levels at once. The historical moment is captured, not only with archival footage but by an Israeli theatre troupe whom we see in rehearsal and then as they re-enact a spell-binding dramatization of the events in Istanbul, Vienna, Bucharest, Tel Aviv, Belgrade, and Bratislava. More: Some of the living survivors of the Darien, now in their eighties, are interviewed on camera. It all works, as a dream does, and we do not know what is “real” from what is “acted.” All disbelief is suspended.

The hero of the film is a woman–Ruth Klüger. She was also a member of the same Zionist Youth movement that I joined in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a mere seven years after the Darien drama took place. Klüger was born in Kiev, Ukraine. She was fluent in nine languages, had received a law degree in Vienna, and was very beautiful (a fact she used to save other Jews, not merely to take care of Number #1).

Klüger left Palestine to re-enter a dangerous Europe. She personally commanded The Tiger Hill, the last ship to arrive in Palestine before Word War Two began and The Hilda, which arrived in Palestine in 1940 with 726 refugees. Ruth worked with the Haganah and the Mossad in Bulgaria, Istanbul, and Cairo. She discovered a Nazi-Egyptian plot and helped put Anwar Sadat into jail. Klüger also worked with the “Free French Forces” in Cairo.

Klüger was the first Mossad agent to enter liberated Europe. She conducted the first Passover seder for the survivors of Bergen-Belsen. Klüger was also part of the delegation at Lake Success when the United Nations declared Israel a state.

Yes, it has been rumored that Klüger and Ben-Gurion were more than just comrades and friends but whether that was true or not, Klüger still refused her final commission: She entered the private sector in Israel where she also excelled.

What a story! What a hero! In this lucky instance, heroism not only paid off– Klüger herself died in her bed, so to speak, and not in a Nazi interrogation cell, in Tel Aviv, in 1979.

May we, in Klüger’s merit, acquit ourselves as nobly.