In Our Own Hands

Friday November 27, 1998

     The Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel have been so assiduously covered on film that it would seem that every possible aspect of the story has been examined. "In Our Own Hands" proves that supposition wrong.
     A thorough, well-researched documentary by filmmaker Chuck Olin, "In Our Own Hands" uncovers one of the last untold stories of the period. A tale that is intricate, fascinating and even shocking, it illuminates a hidden corner of history not fully explored before.

     The film's subject is His Majesty's Jewish Brigade, a British army unit made up of men from what was then Palestine and the only all-Jewish fighting force in the war. (Paul Newman played a member of that unit in "Exodus.") "We broke a taboo," one veteran says now, half a century later. "We proved to the world that Jews can fight, and that Jews can win."
     Though both the film's voice-over narration and the score that accompanies it have a reverential tone, the eight veterans of the Jewish Brigade who reminisce on camera (including Shlomo Shamir, who later served as both commander of the Israeli air force and admiral of its navy) are anything but soft and sentimental.
     Silver-haired but unbowed, these men exude a formidable air of presence and purpose, the sense of having lived through historical times. And their fury, their anger at what the Nazis had done, is undiminished. "I have to go out there," said one, describing his sense of purpose, "and kill as many Germans as I can."
     Though the film begins with a reunion of veterans of the brigade's major combat victory, a battle against German troops in northern Italy's Senio River Valley, the narrative that unfolds is more complex than old war stories.
     "In Our Own Hands" goes back to the migration to Palestine by Zionists from Europe in the 1930s and does not neglect, as other films have, the presence of Arabs on the land. It was the bitterness of an Arab uprising, in fact, that caused the British, who ruled Palestine and feared an alliance between the Axis powers and the Middle East's Arab leaders, to put a limit on Jewish immigration.
     Jewish settlers were eager to fight the Nazis, and the Haganah, their underground militia, was eager to see its young men get superior British military training. But Britain's War Office, fearful of alienating the Arabs, was against the idea.
     Finally, late in 1944, Winston Churchill overruled the bureaucrats, and the Jewish Brigade took its wrath to Europe. Veterans tell stories of a man with a leg blown off, still screaming, "Revenge, revenge, revenge," and of the soldier who attacked a German encampment with a furious "Out you pigs, the Jews are here."
     The war ended soon enough, but the Jewish Brigade's story was only warming up. Initially, just the presence of these men kindled the imagination of the Holocaust survivors they encountered: "You cannot imagine what it meant," one survivor says, "to see the Star of David on the arm of a soldier."
     But serving as inspirations was hardly enough for these hard and determined men. They formed clandestine hit squads to find and assassinate Nazi officers still in hiding ("Perhaps it's not a nice word, but that's what we were, executioners"); they established an underground railway that moved refugees across Europe and closer to Palestine; and they amassed weapons for potential use in a future war of independence. "We cheated, we lied, we stole," one brigade member says bluntly. "What didn't we do?"
     It is, as noted, the opportunity to see these unusual men (some of whom have died since the film was made) speak for themselves that is the primary lure of "In Our Own Hands." They are survivors of a time when things not only seemed simpler and more straightforward, but probably were--and when a kind of idealism was in the air despite, or perhaps because of, the devastation caused by the war. Judging by the situation in the Middle East today, those days seem far off indeed.

Related topic galleries: Massacres, Cinema Industry, Armed Forces, The Holocaust, Civil Unrest, Religious Conflicts, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill

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