Letters from Latrun
The Making of History, Haaretz, 29.04.11
Moshe Sharett, Israel's first Foreign Minister and second Prime Minister, left behind millions of written words, in diaries, memos, reports, and letters; only David Ben-Gurion wrote more. So many were the words that they both wrote - including poems and translations - that it is hard to see when they had time to build the state.
In contrast to Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, Sharett was not accorded his own "presidential library," but his political and personal legacy is well preserved, thanks to his son and daughter-in-law, Yaakov and Rina, who ardently publish his writings. They work out of a small apartment in Tel Aviv, doing nearly everything themselves, from tracking down the material and editing, explicating, indexing and laying it out, to packing the printed books and delivering them to the post office.
Yaakov Sharett is around 84 years old. Over the past 13 years he has published together with his wife nine hefty volumes of his father's writings, meticulously edited: The clarifying notes and indexes that accompany them give them a superior academic quality. They join the Sharett diaries that were published in the past, as well as a series of other books written by him. Now the 10th volume has come out, containing letters that Sharett sent his colleagues from the detention camp in Latrun, where he was held along with several other Jewish Agency leaders from June 29 to November 5, 1946. Many of these letters are fascinating to read even today ("Yerahim Be'emek Ayalon" - "Behind Barbed Wire in the Valley of Ayalon " – edited and annotated by Pinhas Ofer).
Sharett was arrested as part of a comprehensive plan of action that was designed to break the resistance to British rule; the day it was carried out became known in Hebrew as "Black Shabbat." At the time Sharett was serving as head of the Jewish Agency's political department, and was the most prominent Zionist leader in the country; Ben-Gurion was staying in
Prison conditions at Latrun were fairly comfortable. They had radios and newspapers and were allowed to receive their food from outside. The food was brought in pots with double sides, which made it possible to keep in steady contact.
"I am like an old warhorse that was taken out of line," Sharett wrote, but in fact he carried on his political work. Over the course of his 130 days in custody he wrote and smuggled out more than 350 letters, about 90 of them to his wife. These were previously published as a separate volume Imprisoned with Paper and Pencil, 2000).
Sharett's time in detention at Latrun was part of a particularly dramatic period in the history of the state-in-the-making, which included the bombing of the
