Word: gruner
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Soon after midnight, guards at old Acre Prison, near Haifa, entered his cell and shook Dov Bela Gruner until he woke up. Sleepy-eyed, bewildered, he was taken to a large, dimly lit room. There stood a gallows. There also stood three other men of Palestine's Irgun Zvai Leumi terrorist organization. This was their first notice that death had come for them...
...prison official asked the Jewish prisoners if they had any final requests. Yes, they wanted a rabbi to be with them in their last minutes. Said the officer: "You'll have to do without; we can't get one for you." Dov Gruner then asked if he might sing Hatikvah ("The Hope"), the Zionist anthem. The four men's voices rolled the mournful words of Zion...
...they did, Gruner's "martyrdom" would undoubtedly increase world pressure on Britain. If they did not, law enforcement in Palestine would be at the mercy of pressure groups using terrorism. This week a military court sentenced three Jews to death for complicity in the flogging of a British major...
...propaganda battle over Gruner's sentence mounted last week to a pitch of frenzy, with ads in U.S. newspapers (paid for by the League for a Free Palestine) asserting that Gruner was still alive only because the pressure of U.S. opinion restrained the British from a "pogrom which will write finis to the Hebrews in Palestine." Amid this hysteria the actual crime in which Gruner had been involved was almost lost from sight. It contained in miniature the chief elements of the Palestine crisis...
...Gruner, a 33-year-old Hungarian refugee, was found wounded in front of the police station at Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel-Aviv, after an Irgun raid last April. The British said that he and his pals had held up and disarmed the police, were about to seize the arms in the station when other cops on the roof opened fire, forcing the raiders to withdraw. An Arab constable was killed in the Skirmish. Gruner made no defense, refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the Palestine Government, insisted that he be treated as "a prisoner...