Epstein Secrets

er 1939, the Germans, and then the Soviets, invaded, overran and divided Poland. Two of my mother’s three sisters fled to Moscow. Her teenage brother Avraham went underground, joining the anti-Nazi partisans. All three would survive the war. Yet in the autumn of 1940, the rest of her family found themselve

Ben-Zvi.” They were two names which I, like most Israeli teenagers at the time, knew well. Ben-Zvi 04 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011525 had been an officer in Arik Sharon’s original Unit 101, and Nachmias was one of the earliest recruits to Company A. They shook my hand and motioned me into a Jeep. As we drove out of the

have to broaden its reach, moving beyond the kind of intelligence operations we’d done before the 1967 war to become the SAS-like special forces unit Avraham ultimately envisaged. But that was not 104 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011575 going to happen soon, if only because the intelligence missions now required were

igation ditches, controlled the main transport corridor from the Sinai to the bank of the canal. Before dawn on October 16, one of the battalions in Arik Sharon’s brigade, under a veteran paratroop commander named Danny Matt, had managed to cross the canal on rubber rafts with an advance force of some 750 men a

er 1939, the Germans, and then the Soviets, invaded, overran and divided Poland. Two of my mother’s three sisters fled to Moscow. Her teenage brother Avraham went underground, joining the anti-Nazi partisans. All three would survive the war. Yet in the autumn of 1940, the rest of her family found themselve

Ben-Zvi.” They were two names which I, like most Israeli teenagers at the time, knew well. Ben-Zvi 04 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027902 had been an officer in Arik Sharon’s original Unit 101, and Nachmias was one of the earliest recruits to Company A. They shook my hand and motioned me into a Jeep. As we drove out of the