Although Begin does not discuss this event further, we may assume that for both prisoners – the Pole and the Jew – the recited lines were a symbol of a secret understanding and solidarity, shared in poetic code, serving as a kind of prison slang. These lines half-jokingly suggest participation in a conspiracy against the enemy and stoke hopes for revenge, which, in those trying moments, must have been uplifting to both prisoners.
In 1941, on the wave of amnesty, Begin managed to leave the Soviet camp. Through the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement he joined the newly-formed Anders Army, with which he then crossed through Persia from the Soviet Union. In Palestine he left the Army and joined the work of Irgun, an armed underground organisation fighting the British administration in Palestine, often using terrorist tactics. Begin was a fiery adherent of their often radical and controversial fighting methods. They ultimately led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1947. What was the role of Wallenrod in all this – the hero of Mickiewicz’s poem, of whom it is said that the end justified the means?
These readings of Konrad Wallenrod by Jabotinsky and Begin cap off the long history of the reception of Mickiewicz’s work and Polish Romanticism by Jewish readers. The tie between the book and Zionist political radicalism – involving armed conflict with methods seen as terrorist – is, of course, a hypothetical one. Yet in it we can see a manifestation of wider and deeper links between two forms of nationalism. There can be no doubt that in the process of their intermingling, Mickiewicz had a central role to play.
Author: Mikołaj Gliński, September 2023. Translated by Mikołaj Gliński.
Sources: Ryszard Löw, Mickiewicz w kręgu hebrajskim, 1999; Menachem Begin, White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia, trans. Henryk Szafir, 2010.
