Jonathan Pollard and his fiancée,Rivka Abrahams Dunin, have more in common than meets the eye
Rivka Abrahams Dunin was already a grown adult with children of her own when her father, Stephen Abrahams, dropped that line on her one day less than a decade ago, and Rivka still remembers the butterflies in her stomach.
Her father took her to Yad Vashem to view a folder of archived documents that her grandfather, Sergeant Karl Louis Abrahams, bequeathed to the world’s most famous Holocaust museum. Until his death in 1980, Sgt. Abrahams kept that folder in an olive-colored cabinet that he always kept locked. Rivka’s attention was often drawn to that cabinet, wondering what mysteries it might have held. At Yad Vashem, the contents of that cabinet, and her grandfather’s secrets, tumbled out before her very eyes.
The archives include photographs, documents, and a signed confession extracted from Rudolf Hoess, who masterminded the slaughter of more than 2.5 million people on his watch in Auschwitz.
Sgt. Abrahams was a key member of an elite British intelligence group — the 92 Field Security Section — that was in hot pursuit of Hoess in the winter of 1945-1946 after Hoess fled to evade capture. Sgt. Abrahams, an Orthodox Jew from Liverpool, was fluent in several languages, including German and French. His unit took on missions in Brussels, Paris, and Marseille before entering Germany near the end of World War II. Tracking down Hoess would be their toughest assignment.
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