On October 5, 1952, a man carrying a briefcase containing a clock and explosives was apprehended near the Foreign Office in the government quarters of Tel Aviv.
The man’s name was Dov Shilansky.
He refused to make a statement, though it was obvious that he had wanted to protest against the reparations agreement with Germany which had been signed some time earlier in Luxembourg. He continued to remain silent during the trial and only after the witnesses for the prosecution and the defense had been heard did he make a lengthy declaration in court.
He told the story of his life. He was born in Shavil, Lithuania, where he attended a Hebrew high school and was a member of the Betar youth movement. In 1939 he joined a cell of the Irgun Zvai Leumi and planned to immigrate “illegally” into Palestine, but was not able to do so because of the outbreak of World War II.
Shilanksy went on to describe the fate of the Jews of his home town under the German occupation, relating in detail the hanging of a Jew who had been caught by the Germans trying to smuggle into the Ghetto several slices of bread for his young child. The Jews were forced to carry out the execution. One day before the execution was to take place, Shilansky and other members of Betar suggested to the leadership of the underground in the Ghetto to bomb the gallow and to kill the Germans who would come to view the spectacle of Jews hanging a Jew. This action would spell the end for the Jews of the Ghetto, Shilansky and his friends proposed that the underground organize a mass escape to the villages and the forests.
The suggestion was turned down and the young people were warned not to act on their own.
“We acquiesced with a heavy heart,” Shilansky told the court. “But to this day I cannot forgive myself for having obeyed the command.”
Shilansky spoke about the killing of the children of the Ghetto. One day the Jews were ordered to hand over their children to the Germans. The Jews tried to hide their children, but the Germans and their Ukrainian helpers broke into the houses. Mothers fought with the murderers. The children tried to resist….
“To this day I keep in my house a shirt with a yellow star which had been torn from a tot during the struggle with the Germans,” Shilanksy declared.
“Could you tell me please,” Shilansky turned to the judge, “how many Marks and dollars the Israeli government has demanded for the child who once wore this shirt? How much money did it demand for the Jewish children of Shavli , for the Jewish children who were killed throughout Europe?”
With the advance of the Red Army towards Lithuania, the Jewish underground intensified its activities. Shilansky was then transferred to a labor camp which was nearer the forests. The underground maintained close contact with the partisans and had massed arms. When the Russians were only 25 km. away and it was clear that before Withdrawing the Germans would kill all the remaining Jews , the underground planned an open revolt. Shilanksy though wounded, helped greatly in the preparations, but just as the Jewish fighters were about to attack the German sentries, the other Jews in the camp prevented them by force from doing so.
Shilansky was subsequently sent to the concentration camp of Stutthof, from there to the work camps near Landsberg and thence to Dachau. When the retreating Germans abandoned the camp they dragged the remaining prisoners with them, marching them for ten days and nights. In the night of April 30, 1945 while the starving and exhausted survivors of the death march rested a bit in a snow covered forest, the Germans made off.
After the liberation, Shilansky was active in organizing, educating and training young Jews, survivors of the Holocaust. He was a leader of Betar and a commander of the Irgun Zvai Leumi in Italy and in Germany. He sailed to Israel on the “Altelena” the troop and arms ship of the Irgun, leading a group of young people from Germany.
Bullets from Jewish guns greeted the “Altelena” on it arrival in Israel. The ship went up in flames on the coast of Tel Aviv.
(To be continued on page 46)
The Jewish Press, Friday, Oct. 14, 1977 p. 40