Photographs &
text: Lydia Aisenberg
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Haviva Reik (second from left) and her British Army
Palmach commrades training in Egypt; the compass lost over 70 years ago and
right: Yaniv Sagee, Executive
Director of Givat Haviva with compass at MORESHET presentation ceremony.
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A small pocket compass dropped
in Slovakia by pre-State heroine Haviva Reik, the inside cover engraved with
both the initials of her Hebrew name as well as that of her British Army nom de
guerre Ada Robinson, was recently presented - 72 years after her execution in
Slovakia by the Nazis – to the Givat Haviva Center for Shared Society, an
educational campus in Israel named after her.
Haviva Reik, a member of the
Hashomer Hatzair youth movement in her teenage days in the Slovakian town of
Banska Bystrica prior to Aliya in 1939, became a member of Kibbutz Ma’anit
(situated next door to a former British Army base that later became Givat
Haviva), was one of the first women to be recruited to the ranks of the Palmach
and trained by the British Royal Air Force as a parachutist together with her
close friends Hannah Senesh, Surika Braverman and some 30 men.
Reik was in Banska Bystrica’s
Zionist Federation building when a group of Freiwillige Schuzstaffel (a local
Nazis volunteer force) broke in and destroyed everything that came to hand in
the building. It was after that raid she
decided to leave for British Mandatory Palestine and join her friends who had
already left to found or join already established kibbutzim.
When chosen to be a member of
a 4 person SOE (Special Operations Executive) unit assigned to parachute into
Slovakia, Haviva’s mother and brother were still in that country as well as
many of her friends from the youth movement.
Approaching the operation Haviva told a close friend: “We must parachute
into Europe like a mother running into a burning house to save her children.” Another often used quote from the somewhat
rebellious Reik (renowned for being one of the few woman to ride around on a
motorbike in Slovakia) was: “We fought so hard for our right to be recruited
and now that it has been made possible, can I not go?” when told that she could
not join her male unit members on a certain mission to Europe as was deemed too
dangerous for a woman.
The specific mission they had
been given by the British was to help American and British pilots and other
serviceman who had bailed out over Nazi-occupied Slovakia or fallen behind
enemy lines and help bring them to Allied positions. It was, however, also common knowledge in the
British Army that the soldiers from Israel also had their own agenda, to make
contact with local resistance groups and save Jews.
Undaunted by the refusal for
her to join her comrades, the feisty fighter Reik found a way to return to her
former home, participate in the planned mission and even arrived before her all
male small unit did. She simply hitched
a ride on an American plane going to the region and even arrived before the other
unit members.
Of that unit only Haim Hermesh
survived the mission into Slovakia and of the original 33 who trained together
and went behind lines in different regions, apart from the two women, 5 men
were either killed in action or captured and executed.
At the end of October, 1944,
the town of Banska Bystrica was invaded by the Germans. Haviva Reik and her comrades in arms
regrouped in the Tatra Mountains but were discovered by the Germans, captured
and imprisoned in the very Slovakian town where she had lived before making
Aliya in 1939. She was eventually taken with
hundreds of others to the central town of Kremnica where they were forced to
stand on the edge of an open grave and executed.
In 1952 the remains of Haviva
Reik were brought for reburial in the parachutist’s section on Mount Herzl in
Jerusalem.
How Haviva Reiks initial
engraved compass was discovered after over 70 years since being lost it in a
Slovakian forest is not altogether clear but eventually found its way to the
late Benito Ronen, a member of Kibbutz Haogen who was sent to Slovakia as a
Hashomer Hatzair emissary in the 1940s.
He apparently brought the coveted item back to Israel and passed it
along to Kibbutz Ma’anit member and close friend of Haviva Reik, Moshe Gross.
When Gross passed away a few
years ago his possessions passed on to his son Danny and wife Pikki who live in
the north of the country. When Pikki was
recently cleaning her home from top to bottom in preparation for the holiday
period she came across a key chain belonging to her late father-in-law, the
small compass attached between large and small keys.
When Pikki opened the compass
and saw the initials she remembered someone saying that Benito Ronen had given
the compass to Moshe Gross at some point and that if found, thought it should
be displayed in a museum.
Pikki, the daughter of Yechial
Harari, one of the founders of Givat Haviva and member of Kibbutz Ein Shemer,
another Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz across the fields from the educational center,
was overcome with emotion when she realized to whom the small compass had
belonged and the decision was made by the family to present it to Givat Haviva.
In an emotionally charged
ceremony recently held at MORESHET, The Mordechai Anielevich Memorial Holocaust
Study & Research Center at Givat Haviva, attended by Michael and Haviva
Reik-Shlorsky the son and daughter of Haviva Reik’s brother Ephraim Reik, students
of the pre-military academy for humanistic leadership named after Haviva Reik
at Givat Haviva, Pikka and Danny Gross and other guests, the compass collected
from the killing fields of Slovakia, was presented to Yaniv Sagee, executive
director of Givat Haviva.
“The compass needs to be used
to show and guide others in the way of Haviva, to take us on to a path in the
right direction together and not that of division as in present times, that was
so not the way of Haviva,” declared Sagee, the Israeli born son of a Holocaust
survivor and member of Kibbutz Ein HaShofet, a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz founded
by pioneers from Poland and North America in 1937 and named after American
Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (shofet in Hebrew is a judge).
December, 2016
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