Dov Landau (1930-) was a Polish-Jewish Irgun fighter who served in the First Arab-Israeli War.
Biography[]
Landau joining the Irgun
Dov Landau was born to a Jewish family in Poland in 1930. At the age of thirteen, he was captured during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was sexually assaulted by the Nazi German camp guards and was forced to serve as a sonderkommando, blowing holes in the ground with dynamite in order to bury thousands of Holocaust victims, burying the corpses, and removing their gold teeth. Landau's experiences traumatized and radicalized him, and, after the end of World War II in 1945, he attempted to emigrate to Mandatory Palestine. He was interned by the British at the Karaolos internment camp on Cyprus, where he became close with the younger Karen Hansen Clement. Landau acquired a hatred of the British and all other gentiles and sought to join the Irgun with the objective of destroying every British installation in Palestine. While Hansen tempered his anti-gentile views by recounting the solidarity with the Jews shown by the Danish gentiles during the war, Landau still attempted to join the Irgun on his arrival in Palestine after taking part in the escape of the freighter Exodus from Famagusta to Haifa in 1947.
Landau defending Gan Dafna
Landau was arrested at an Irgun meeting place, but, on his release from prison, he was contacted by Irgun agents and interrogated by Irgun leader Akiva Ben Canaan, who forced him to admit his role as a sonderkommando during the Holocaust. Afterwards, Landau was initiated into the Irgun and brought his explosives expertise to bear by carrying out several anti-British attacks. After Akiva and several other Irgun leaders were arrested during a British crackdown, Haganah agent Ari Ben Canaan persuaded Landau to turn himself in so that he would be sent to the Acre fortress; there, Landau would be his inside man for a jailbreak. In the ensuing Acre Prison break, Landau helped to blow open the gates and enable the imprisoned Jewish rebels to flee from British captivity, and, after this operation, Landau returned to freedom at the kibbutz of Gan Dafna. There, he was posted on sentry duty after reports arrived that the Army of the Holy War was preparing to attack Gan Dafna, and he killed a Palestinian soldier in the process. He was also visited by Karen, who confessed her love for him, and Landau made plans to marry her when the fighting was done. However, on being relieved from his guard duty hours later, he found that Karen had been shot and killed by a Palestinian on her way back to the kibbutz, and, at her funeral, he could not bring himself to help bury her.