It is not often that a youth movement has to mourn its founder's death within the space of eight short years. Yet that is what has occurred to Habonim through the murder of Enzo Sereni in Dachau on November 17-18, 1944. Together with Ben Zion Ilan of Afikim who was then an Eretz Yisrael delegate to the youth movement, and together with American haverim, it was primarily Enzo Sereni, as Hehalutz delegate, whose energy and imagination made Habonim possible. Today, through a search conducted by Ben Zion (now a sergeant in the Jewish Brigade), we are finally beyond any question of doubt certain that Enzo is dead-dead at the age of thirtynine, when the best part of his contribution to Zionism surely lay ahead of him.
A letter from Kieve Skidell tells the following story which ends all hope that Enzo, missing in action for over a year, might still be alive:
On the streets of Paris I ran into Sgt. Ben Zion Ilan, one-time halutz from America, Eretz Yisrael delegate to the American Habonim, and now a sergeant in the Second Battalion of the Jewish Brigade, and he told me the story of his search for Enzo Sereni by whose side he had once worked in America:
I was a member of one of the Jewish Brigade's search teams, engaged in the search for prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates in Germany, about whom relatives in the Allied countries had made inquiries. Together with another member of the team, I obtained permission from the British army bureau in charge of these searches to institute a search for Enzo Sereni. Sereni, as you may know, was dropped by parachute into northern Italy in the late spring of 1944 in the uniform of a British captain under the name of Shmuel Barda. His mission was to work with Italian partisans behind the German lines. The details of his capture are not known, but traces of him, after his capture by the Germans, led to the concentration camp at Dachau. We had heard that he was at one time known to have been together with a Dominican pastor by the name of Roth, who had been in the same block with him in Dachau. We started to look for the pastor in the monasteries in Cologne and Munich and learned that he had gone back to Dachau to help the inmates there and become the confessor of the SS troopers who are now imprisoned there, his own tormentors no doubt among them.
When we came to Dachau, we turned immediately to the card index of all those who had ever been in the place, and there we found a card with the following information on it:
Prisoner No. 113160, Block 23, Born 22 June 1905 at Jerusalem, Resident at Tel Aviv, V3 (code for member of the British forces). Barda, Shmuel. Entered 9 October 1944. Taken to Special Punishment Cell for interrogation, 17 November 1944. Died 18 November 1944.
One can only surmise from this information that he was brought to his death by torture. His body was cremated at the local crematorium.
We then looked up the pastor. It turned out that he had been the secretary of the block Sereni was in and he remembered him well. He remembered that he was usually together with one French and two other British officers, all of whom have disappeared without a trace. Sereni impressed him as a man of extremely high intellectual acumen, and he couldn't forget how even in the environment of Dachau, he was bubbling with energy and intellectual curiosity. He remembered well the long discussions they used to have on philosophical as well as world political and Jewish topics. Of his end he knew nothing since he had been taken away from Dachau before it came.
" 'Before leaving Dachau, we filled an urn with ashes from the crematorium. Those were not his ashes alone but they were sacred. When the projected memorial to the Gola is erected in Jerusalem, those ashes will be placed there together with those of our other martyrs.
" 'For us the search seemed ended, when a report reached us that Sereni had been seen alive in the concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, only a few months ago. We were skeptical because some Brigade boys had been there around that time and had said nothing about it, but to make sure, we went out there and got permission from the Russian commandant of nearby Linz to visit the place. But there is no one there today but a number of Russian troops who are billeted there, and there was no trace of him whatsoever. There is no longer any doubt.' "
To those who knew Enzo there is no need to define our loss. Everywhere he went, he left an indelible impression. Soon after his earliest appearance in America, it became a current story that Sereni spoke the best broken English anyone had ever heard. We who worked with him in the office of Hehalutz were consumed with envy and despair at his incredible energy and tirelessness. Apparently he never slept except for forty winks occasionally on buses and on railroad coaches-and every morning when he was in New York, he, would appear at the office bright and early to greet the firstcomers and shame the others. Even those who lived with him at that famous Bet Hehalutz on Riverside'Drive probably never knew when he awoke. One day, I remember, I came back from a trip out of town in the wee hours of the morning. I determined not to go home to clean up but to get the rest of my sleep on a bench in the office. In this way I hoped to find out when Enzo did come in. I woke up, as I recall, between 7:30 and 8:00 A.M. to find Sereni sitting opposite me at his desk, going through the Eretz Yisrael press. I never did find out when he arrived.
Another blow to my own pride was the way he went through the Hebrew press-or any other reading matter, as far as that goes. I had been rather vain of my speed in reading but Sereni was insufferably superior. Whatever the language, he would sail through texts like a swift Italian breeze. We all harbored dark suspicions about how thoroughly he had read; but after a half-hour with a huge batch of literature, Sereni would be able to deposit it all on my desk, efficiently marked to indicate the essential items for digesting or writing up. Then afterwards, in conversation, he always knew something about the material we had just covered which had escaped our more plodding attention-and never could we find anything he had missed. I noted in the comments on Sereni's death, which have recently appeared in the Eretz Yisrael press, that the German youth-Enzo had a great share in the creation of Hehalutz in Hitler Germany during the early years-were equally flabbergasted at Sereni's mental speed. In fact, the flashing play of his wit and thought, his paradoxes and rapid-fire patter, even made them rather suspicious. I was a witness to the same phenomenon here. It was not only the Germans with their gruendlichkeit who were uneasy at his mental athletics. Sereni was so clever that slower minds distrusted him. They were inclined to worry about his most innocent proposal for fear of some ingenious trap. ZD
Sereni was, of course, a fighter in a certain sense. He had a firm viewpoint, and a strong sense of the direction in which he wished to go. He threw himself with unlimited devotion-perhaps the proper word is abandon-into the cause he wished to serve. He never counted costs-one of the things, perhaps, which set him apart from many comrades was that in certain things, he had less need than they to count costs. A scion of a rather wealthy, prominent Roman Jewish family, with roots in Italy as far back as 70 A.D. according to repute, and with assured status in the academic and professional society of contemporary Rome, Sereni enjoyed many elements of ultimate security which enabled him to be not only daring, but one might even say a daredevil, in all his dangerous missions for the Histadrut. Others smuggled Jewish money out of Nazi Germany but I am sure no one ever did it with as much assurance and enjoyment as Sereni.
The same lusty combativeness marked his fights for his ideas within the Histadrut. Opponents often mistook his vehemence for vindictiveness; never were they more wrong. In the most furious argument, Sereni remained detached and capable of appreciating an opposing view. This, indeed, gave him another formidable advantage in debate which only increased the confusion and unfounded suspicions of many opponents. In the utmost heat of contention, Sereni was basically cool. He boiled rapidly but only on the surface. It is true that he used his opponents' lower resistance to fire deliberately. He was indeed a man whom an opponent had to know to love.
Rabbi Joachim Prinz tells this story of Sereni, which it seems to me must represent an unsurpassed peak in Sereniana: Prinz and Sereni one day were both pulled in by the Gestapo in the course of a routine raid on Hehalutz quarters.
Prinz's wife learned of the affair and tore the town apart trying to locate the two and obtain their release. After a while she found Prinz and he was released. In spite of a frantic search they could not find Sereni until midnight. At last they discovered the prison where he was kept and were permitted to see him. They found him in the midst of a lively discussion with his guards, covering the theory and practice of both German Nazism and Italian fascism, and they could not get him to leave until he had made a few last points. I can well believe that he sustained an intense mental activity in his last days at Dachau.
Sereni's fundamental open-mindedness, the product of a scientifically-trained mind, was almost fantastically reflected in his volatile whims and witticisms. He was capable of the most astounding self-contradictions and mental flexiblity, because in the most opposing statements he could appreciate the grains of truth. He was also capable of using an argument largely for its effect.
Shlomo Grodzensky tells this of his first encounter with Enzo: He met a sturdy little Italian, just off the boat, who at once asked whether it were true that there was a current vogue for Marxism in America. Reluctantly, Shlomo admitted that this was the case. Practically rubbing his hands with glee, Sereni said: "Excellent! You know, I'm a first-rate expert at arguing Zionism from a Marxist basis." Said Grodzensky: "Do you believe in Marxism, then?" Outraged, Enzo shot back: "What do you think I am, a simpleton, to believe in such vulgar banalities "
But there are other instances I remember of Enzo's elasticity of ideas which cast quite a different light on the whole matter. Enzo was always a strong adherent of the idea of a Jewish-Arab collaboration. But he was an extreme realist as well, and often went to practically fantastic lengths of logic in this matter. I remember when he was in this country, he used to argue that only in the framework of the Arab Federation would it be possible to come to an understanding with the Arab on Eretz Yisrael. He also noted the basic and obvious fact that one element in Arab-Jewish conflict was the great difference in the economic level of the two communities. He therefore argued that the Jewish worker must have the idealism to come down to the Arab level in order to meet him and, of course, raise the standard of living by cooperative methods of consumption and mutual aid. He felt that talking of economic solidarity between the Arab and Jewish worker while keeping the Jewish economic sector at a price and wage level far higher than the Arab's, on the theory that the Arab's must be raised to the Jewish level, meant either deferring such solidarity to an indefinite future if one took the Mapai view, or simple self-delusion if one took the Hashomer Hatzair view.
All these, of course, were in reality tentative statements, experimental hypotheses, so to speak, in Sereni's mind, and we never knew how seriously to take them. What particularly upset the assurance of some of us was that Sereni delighted in the forceful paradox as a method of presentation and loved to shock his youthful audiences out of their received doctrines, if only in order to make them think on their own. But these hypotheses were also formative elements in his own thoughts, and what he thought, he acted. Even the most fleeting adherence to an idea, even to a notion of provisional, one might even say heuristic, value in his life-course, entailed serious consequences in action for Sereni.
I remember an instance by which I was particularly impressed: In America, Sereni argued that the disturbances of 1936-38 were a good thing in the history of Arab-Jewish relations. As a member of a kibbutz which, during the period of my own stay in Eretz Yisrael (1939), suffered its casualties like any other rural settlement, Sereni knew very well what the costs were of Arab terrorism to the Jews. Be he was considering the hypothesis that no basic change in Arab-Jewish relations was possible until the Arabs were convinced that the Jews were unalterably bent upon establishing themselves in Eretz Yisrael and that their will was a factor to be reckoned with. It was brought up in discussion that bloodshed between groups had historically tended to implant mutual hatred that long outlasted the fighting. Sereni had obviously considered that factor already for he promptly replied that there were also instances, notably the British-Boer case, where peace and mutual forbearance had ensued between groups after a decisive measuring of strength.
But this was no final stand for Sereni. When I came to Givat Brenner, I was astonished to hear that Enzo was not allowed to stand his turn at guard duty because, as I learned, the first few times he had gone out without a rifle. However, though the kibbutz would not assign him to stand watch, it could not stop him from breaking the rule against walking through certain officially designated dangerous areas between Rehovot and Givat Brenner. He would never wait for a bus to take him home and he scoffed at the danger from Arab neighbors whom he had known. Later, when I spoke to him, I learned the basic intellectual reasons for these new ineshugassen of Sereni's. He told me that having had long conversations in America with Hayim Greenberg, he had swung towards pacificism.
This was the man who, approaching forty, volunteered for sabotage and underground work behind the lines in Italy.
In a late picture taken in Eretz Yisrael and published in the memorial issue of Hapoel Hatzair, Sereni presents an altogether different aspect from what was familiar to us. He always had a childlike look. We saw him as the "happy warrior" child, if I may abuse a phrase, full of fire and sparkle, taking delight in the explosive effects of his intellectual gunfire, moving mountains of apathy and mental torpor with a logical witticism. In the recent picture, ~ he looks like a lost child, bravely but with solemnity, confronting unforeseen and portentous immensities. Solemnity was a look I often saw in him at Givat Brenner. There was high seriousness in the devotion with which he cared for the small group of Italian halutzim whom he had assembled there in 1939. Products of fascism, deracinated Jews-yet under Sereni's ministrations their success as kibbutz members was, and I can attest to it, outstanding and phenomenally smooth.
But what was it which put those omens of fear into Sereni's eyes in his latest pictures? We can only guess. I remember Sereni loved to propound this question: "Tell me, if you loved a woman, and another claimed her-her husband, let us say-would you give her up? " If you answered, No, he would acclaim you a Zionist. Far deeper than his intellectual constructions was a deep, childlike, romantic strain of love in Sereni. He was completely aware of it; for this reason he would often mock us by declaring himself nearer a Christian than a Jew in religious sensibility. But he took his bearings by love.
These things he loved: Italy-Italian art, Italian philosophy, even Italian historiography, and the Italian people; Jews-Eastern European Jews, German Jews; the Yiddish language, which he barely knew; the Histadrut; Mapai; the Kibbutz Hameuhad; his own kibbutz, Givat Brenner; his friends, Lithuanians and Germans alike; his own home and family. He used to say that everywhere he went-to Eretz Yisrael, to Germany, to America-he invested his money in the Histadrut, and never had he failed to realize what he risked. He had invested far more than a lifetime of labor; he had invested his love, his metaphysical moorings.
We know from writings that reach us from Eretz Yisrael how deeply the split in the Mapai affected Sereni. From his latest picture, we see that it was able to put a reflection of fear even into those eyes.
Ben Halpern
Furrows, December, 1945