Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the Making of Israeli Collective Memory

3. The Prodigals Return: Repatriating the Parachutists, 1950–1952

71 3 The Prodigals Return Repatriating the Parachutists, 1950–1952 Rafi has left us. He set out to face the Nazis in combat. Our comrades stopped him But Rafi insisted: “I will go to rescue many Jews From ruthless criminal hands.” Rafi has left us. Poem by fourth-grader Miriam Arad in memory of Rafi Reiss Introduction “My first memory of Father was actually at his funeral. I’m proud of my father, but I have no recollections of him.” This is how Edna Leshem, Rafi Reiss’s daughter, began her conversation with me on a warm summer afternoon on the shore of Lake Kinneret. From a terrace overlooking the shore she gazed into the clear water at length and then continued in a slow and restrained tone: The funeral was my first memorial ceremony. What I remember about it is actually the little details—how they brought the coffin to the kibbutz and set it down in the dining room, which was absolutely new; it didn’t even have a floor covering yet. I remember that someone fainted there. I also remember the funeral procession: how we crossed the whole country until we came to Jerusalem and Mount Herzl. [I recall] how we met Zvi Ben-Ya’akov’s widow and she began to cry. When I asked Mother why, she told me it was because they had not brought his remains back. But my strongest memory was the wailing women near Rosh Pina and the others who greeted the procession in all kinds of places. I don’t understand why they cried so much; after all, they had not known Father at all.1 $ In the introduction to his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama says historians “are supposed to reach the past always through texts, occasionally through images; things that are safely caught in the bell jar of academic convention; look but don’t touch.” But there is also an “archive of the feet,” with which a historian visits the site of an event to take in the landscape and get a “feel for the place.”2 To consult this unique archive I visited the parachutists ’ plot at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl, where three of the World War II parachutists are buried and where monuments to four others have been erected atop empty graves. By the early 1950s the parachutists’ burial plot had become a focal point of state ritual and thus a major element in what Maoz Azaryahu has called the “sociopolitical founding myth of the State of Israel.”3 This myth—actually a cluster of mythical accounts—had several functions: to establish a community as an entity of temporal and spatial significance; to create a consensus among its members; and to enable the individual to experience the political community and its existential meaning. In accordance with the secular-history tradition of modern states, the individual actors in the national myth are historical heroes. The stories of their lives and deaths are based on historical facts selected to correspond to the “mythical functions” they should serve. As we have seen, the parachutists’ stories had all the necessary elements for this purpose, namely, supreme heroism, total commitment to the collective cause, and absolute identification with the Zionist idea. Only one stage was lacking to integrate them into the Israeli remembrance landscape: returning their remains to Israel and creating a focal point for pilgrimage that would unite their valor with that of the fighters who had perished in the struggle to establish the state. This chapter will explore the creation of the World War II parachutists’ plot on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. Specifically, it covers the exhumation of Hannah Szenes’s remains from Hungary in the spring of 1950 and the remains of Haviva Reik and Rafi Reiss from Slovakia in September 1952, followed by their reinterment in Israel, and concluding with the official dedication of the parachutists ’ plot in November 1954. $ The time frame encompassed by this chapter (1950–52) was a fateful era in three arenas: the international, the Jewish, and the Israeli. Europe yearned 72 The Heroes for military calm and political stability. However, Europeans and all of mankind were now greeted by the cold war, which turned their familiar world upside down. These years were transitional in many senses. Most Eastern European countries had not yet fallen victim to internal shake-ups and had not...