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| Leon Tager (with the white shirt, center) with his comrades, 1941. |
Six days later, a massive explosion was heard, followed by flames engulfing the fuel depots of the Bulgarian port city of Ruse.
From an operational standpoint, the mission was a success. However, it also led to Tager’s capture. Having previously worked at the port, he was identified and arrested by the fascist police, who tortured him for days in an attempt to extract the names of his underground comrades. Tager endured the torture with great courage and did not betray anyone. On November 17, he was sentenced to death by hanging, and on December 15, at two in the morning, he was executed by fascist authorities in Ruse prison. After the fall of the fascist regime, during the period of the People’s Republic, Tager was recognized as a national hero of Bulgaria, and the Ruse refinery was named after him. However, in 1989, with the end of the People’s Republic, his name was removed.
Leon Tager is not mentioned on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Why? A clue can be found in the defense statement he submitted during his trial in Bulgaria, where he wrote: “The indictment deliberately ignores the fact that I was never tried in Bulgaria, and that I was expelled by the British colonial and Zionist authorities.”
Indeed, Tager—who joined the Communist Party in Bulgaria in 1933—had previously been deported from Mandatory Palestine under British colonial rule, where he had arrived as a Zionist in 1923. However, he quickly became disillusioned with Zionism and found his way into the ranks of the Palestine Communist Party, which was persecuted by imperialist authorities and by Zionist institutions that cooperated with them to expel him from the Histadrut and deport him from the country.
His father, Yosef Tager, was a well-known lawyer, a Zionist activist, and editor of the Zionist weekly Shalom. In 1921, the family immigrated to Palestine and settled in Tel Aviv. Leon, then 18, left his studies and joined his father in agricultural labor in the citrus groves. In 1924, he joined the Communist Party and published articles in its underground press. He advocated cooperation between Arabs and Jews and a joint struggle against British rule.
In August 1933, Tager helped organize a demonstration in Jaffa against the continuation of the British Mandate. The meeting point was raided by a group led by Yehuda Arazi and David Friedman, members of the Haganah acting under British intelligence directives. Tager was arrested, imprisoned for three months in Jerusalem, and subsequently deported to Bulgaria.
Tager was not alone. Many communists expelled from Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s went on to fight heroically against fascism. Leopold Trepper led one of the most important Soviet intelligence networks in Western Europe, yet no street in Israel bears his name. Yerachmiel Lukachar died defending Stalingrad, yet no kibbutz is named after him. Marcel Langer commanded the 35th Brigade of the anti-Nazi Resistance in southern France; he is honored with a street and metro station in Toulouse, but not in Israel. Zionist historiography has erased them.
This should not come as a surprise to those familiar with the forces at play. The Irgun, one of the key organizations in the uprising commemorated by Holocaust Remembrance Day, was itself erased from public consciousness for not belonging to the dominant political current. Marek Edelman, a leader of the Jewish socialist Bund and one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century, was nearly excluded by an Israeli delegation from the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. If this is how they treat even political rivals, what can be expected for those whom they helped expel to Europe?
Nothing can be expected from official Zionist historiography. What remains is to tell the stories of those it seeks to erase. One of them was Leon Tager (1903–1941): partisan, Jew, Bulgarian, communist, anti-fascist—and a hero.
