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170 Jerusalem, May 1946– May 1948 11 When they arrived in Jerusalem, Yitzhak asked his close friends to come to hear Eliezer tell his story directly. Sneh and Hartman accepted and arrived the next day, May 2. “[Yitzhak] Gruenbaum looked like a shadow of his former self, bent, pale, gaunt,” Hartman recounted. Itche sat down with us and Gruenbaum said, “I want you to listen to him.” He explained that he had accepted the position of kapo in Auschwitz on orders of the Communist Party, in order to save comrades. Jews who heard the name Gruen­ baum in the camp thought of him as “Lord” Gruenbaum. They thought that if it was Gruenbaum’s son, that he was their “rabbi.” He didn’t even understand what they were saying to him, because he barely spoke Yiddish. Sometimes he had to hit [prisoners] to save lives. Ironically he saved the life of Pakin, who assailed him in Paris, when he beat him before the Germans. They saw the blows and left him alone, otherwise he would have gone to the furnaces. He spoke of his attitude to the Jews who went to the furnaces without resisting, and that he tried to organize an uprising, but was not able to. We sat there for eight hours and listened. The upshot of what he said was that he had acted in accordance with the principle “I did what I did to save people, because had I acted otherwise there would have been many victims, so I hit people.”1 Yitzhak then spoke with Jewish Agency treasurer Eliezer Kaplan. He told him Eliezer’s story and about the Paris inquiry.Yitzhak asked Kaplan’s opinion about whether he, Yitzhak, should resign from the Jewish Agency Executive. Kaplan did not venture to give an answer to this difficult question, suggesting that it be brought up before an unofficial meeting of several members of the Executive, who could discuss the issue and reach a resolution. Kaplan stressed the importance of making a decision in an “authoritative” forum. Otherwise, he said, “you’ll never be able to remove this stain from the story of your life.”2 Friling - Jewish Kapo.indb 170 4/11/2014 2:49:03 PM Jerusalem, May 1946–May 1948 ||| 171 The meeting took place the next morning at ten o’clock at Kaplan’s house in Jerusalem. Participating, in addition to Kaplan, were Rabbi Yehuda Leib­ Fishman-Maimon and Dov Yosef. There is no record of other participants, and we have no way of knowing whether others were invited and chose not to attend because of the subject of the meeting. One hardly needed a special political sense to understand that the issue at hand was, in the context of the spirit of those times, a ticking bomb. Yitzhak Gruenbaum offered an account of the meeting to Natan Cohen: When I arrived with my son I already knew of all the rumors about him. I knew from my own investigations what was true and what not. The French did the same thing. They investigated and ruled: there is no crime in anything we have uncovered. If there are things that have not been discovered, a man cannot be held in jail until a new investigation begins. They freed him. I brought him to Palestine. . . . I asked my colleagues to convene and wanted to tell them about my son, how and why he had been freed, and to ask: if you say that it’s not all right, I will resign. I could not remain on the Jewish Agency Executive if my son were to be found guilty. . . . Ben-Gurion did not come. I knew he wouldn’t, and it made a bad impression on me. . . . Dov Yosef, Kaplan, and Fishman seem to have treated the whole matter seriously and listened to what I said. When I told them everything, Fishman was the one who said: “There’s nothing that would justify your resignation in relation to your son’s matter.” So I remained. On Frister’s account, Kaplan advised against recording minutes of the meeting or listing it among the Executive’s official sessions. Those present accepted the judgment of Rabbi Fishman, the principal if not the only speaker, that there was no cause for Gruenbaum to leave his post.3 Frister presumes that Yitzhak turned to Kaplan largely because they shared moderate political views, but also because he thought that the treasurer was more likely than Ben-Gurion to evince understanding...

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