Flight 777 by Ian Colvin

Author:Ian Colvin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783469598
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2013-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The Jewish Agent

The last of those setting out for Lisbon with whom we are concerned was Wilfrid Israel. He had long been an agent of the British Secret Service, thought the Germans. I found the proof that they thought this in a German Wehrmacht confidential book on Britain issued in 1940, with a chapter on British Jewry and a supplement on British spies. There among them was the pale, sensitive, slightly Mendelssohnian face of Wilfrid Israel, with high forehead, light blue eyes, and hair curling over his ears.

I have no doubt that the British too at times thought of him as their own agent; for when I recently mentioned his name to a civil servant who had worked in the Berlin Consulate before the war and was in the British Consulate in Lisbon during the war,1 the answer was sharp and significant:

“I am not going to tell you about Wilfrid Israel.”

But with time and research, the story of Wilfrid Israel can be told, and perhaps it will show that the Germans, and the British too, were not entirely correct in adding him to the lists of the British Secret Service.

I see him as an individualist, a man who was passionately independent in his outlook; but whose birth and background cast him together with strange companions to do special duties.

Wilfrid Israel was born in 1899 to wealth and influence, with ties in both England and Germany. His father, Berthold, owned the old-fashioned department store of N. Israel in Berlin. His mother was descended from Dr Nathan Adler, Chief Rabbi of Victorian England. His fortune was mainly in Germany, but his friends were in both countries. He lived during the first years of the Nazi regime in a flat in the Bendlerstrasse, a few minutes walk from the British consulate in Berlin, and held a British passport.

By the time he was thirty-five, Israel had travelled extensively about the world: to Eastern Europe, Palestine, Russia, India, and Central Asia. As a young man he had seen in Lithuania, Germany, and Poland the beginnings of the new Jewish tragedy in Europe; the segregated communities of Galicia, victims of sudden racial outbreaks; the economic problems of Jewry in the Baltic States, and the organised racial hatred of the Nazis.

As a youth he was still preoccupied with philosophy and reverie. His first love was art and his collection of Assyrian antiquities. He created his own atmosphere about him in Berlin, a world in which philanthropy, poetry, the ethics of Judaism, antiquity, and the Liberal tolerant outlook of the English were intermingled.

By 1930 the calm faces of his ancient reliefs had ceased to satisfy Wilfrid Israel. He was no longer in love with statues. The anxious and haunted look in many eyes had drawn him into the conflict of our times. We find a different Wilfrid Israel in the testimony of his friends. The wandering National Theatre of the Jewish People, the Habima, had visited Berlin, and its dramas stirred something in him that would let him rest no longer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.