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A life of adventure
By SHERYL KAY CITRUS PARK -- She was born Marianna Freund on Aug. 12, 1913, in Berlin, the daughter of an internationally recognized jurist and historian, Dr. Ismar Freund.
Today she is 88-year-old Miriam Lengyel. She lives in Weinberg Village, the assisted living facility in Citrus Park that sits on several acres of tranquil, shady land, just beside a small pond. Mrs. Lengyel stands 4 feet 8 and breathes steadily as she speaks from her neat two-room apartment. But her surroundings and unhurried appearance today should fool no one. From her earlier years when she escaped Nazi Germany to her service in the Israeli underground army, called the Haganah, and the British Army, Mrs. Lengyel has led anything but a calm, quiet existence. "My life has been one adventure after the other adventure, with very brief intervals between the adventures," she said. Her early days in Berlin were privileged; she and her two brothers traveled extensively with her famous father. But neither stature nor money could change the course of the coming events. Marianna was bored with traditional studies in high school and transferred to the Kunstgewerbeschule, a highly respected art school in Berlin. It was there that she first encountered Nazis. One day she arrived at school to find half her classmates missing: her Jewish friends. She presumes her family name had protected her from the same fate. Within a few days she was approached by a member of an underground resistance movement, who took her to a building on the outskirts of Berlin, where she found that most of those classmates had been murdered or were close to death. Weeks later, while walking the hallways of her school, Mrs. Lengyel found a small black notebook in the stairwell. "It belonged to someone from the SS," Hitler's brutal auxiliary police force, she said. "It was a hit list, and my name was on the list. They knew I saw what they did to those kids. "I was a witness, so they had to kill me, too." Now her father's prominence could no longer protect her, and Marianna had to leave Germany. "My father paid a great deal of money, and I was able to catch a train to Marseilles and then to leave by ship," she said. She could have escaped to many places -- England, South America, the United States -- all of which would have offered the comforts of home for someone with money. Instead, she pursued a lifelong dream in the more dangerous and largely underdeveloped Palestine. "When I was a young girl, we studied the Bible, so I knew it was my homeland," she said, recalling her mother's prophecy that she would live up to her historic birth date. "Then I started having dreams of Jerusalem, the countryside, the mountains; and I had never even seen the place before." From filigree to guard dutyArriving in Palestine, Marianna changed her name to Miriam, moved into an apartment with several other immigrants and started working for Yemenite jewelers, doing filigree work. After several months, she once again was approached by strangers, this time to join the informal Jewish army that was protecting new settlements in Palestine, called the Haganah. She quickly enlisted. "We were strictly a defense army," Mrs. Lengyel said. "There were some Arabs that we were friends with, but many of the others attacked Jews for no reason, even as far back as the 1920s, when there were horrible riots and hundreds of Jews were murdered. We were not going to let that happen anymore." During her years in the Haganah, Mrs. Lengyel served as an armed soldier performing guard duty for Jewish villages. She also was a quartermaster and accepted various undercover assignments. She says she was adept with her pistol, and she learned to throw grenades. She also was schooled by the renowned dog trainer Dr. Rudolphina Menzel, and enlisted her own boxer, Tino, as a bomb sniffer. "He was a natural," Mrs. Lengyel said, recalling a time before training when he stopped during one of their walks and would not let her walk any farther. "There was a vegetable can in the road and he was growling at it," she recalled. "I went behind a boulder off the road, and called to him. When he came, I shot the can, and it exploded. There was a bomb inside. "I said to him "Tino, how did you know it was there?' and he smiled at me," she said. "You know boxers do that; they smile." While in the Haganah, Mrs. Lengyel served alongside David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister; Ariel Sharon, its current head of state; and the legendary, one-eyed Moshe Dayan. She never doubted the legitimacy of the young nation that continues to be a lightning rod for Arab resistance a half-century later. "The Jewish National Fund had bought this land from the Arabs. This is all in the land records," she said. "So here we were, living on land that we paid for, that was ours beforehand from the time of the Bible, anyway, and the Arabs were trying to kill us. Of course we had to defend ourselves." During the early 1940s, when the British were still administrators of Palestine, the Haganah assembled an elite group to join the British army. Despite their differences with the British, the Jews were eager to help them fight the Nazis. Mrs. Lengyel was assigned to the group and eventually became a British sergeant. "We wanted a Jewish battalion going into Europe to look after those left in the concentration camps, and who would help (the victims) get onto boats to come to Palestine," she said. After four years with the British army, Mrs. Lengyel rejoined the Haganah. May 14, 1948, Israel's Independence Day, found her on guard duty in Jerusalem when word reached her that her longtime boyfriend had been shot and killed. "I think his name was Meir, but we never really knew because we always used different names so that if one was caught, all of our names would be different the next day," she said. Mrs. Lengyel was never quite the same. Having spent more than a decade in the military, she had had enough. Her parents and one brother eventually escaped to Palestine. But her other brother, and most of the rest of her family had died in concentration camps. "When you leave the war, you want to put behind you all of the miserable things," she said. "I try to remember only the funny things, but I don't want to dwell on who was shot and who was killed." A citizen of two landsShe spent the next decade working for the Israeli government setting up various offices. Then she received word from the United States that an old family friend, Joseph Lengyel, had lost his wife to cancer and needed help. She immediately left for America, eventually married Lengyel and never lived in Israel again. "I have no regrets, only that I left," she said. "It's not that I don't love America because I do. But I feel myself as much of a citizen of Israel as I do of being an American." Today Mrs. Lengyel goes to classes at Weinberg Village, receives visitors and reads the newspaper every day. "I've suffered five heart attacks," she said. "I have bad feet; I have terrible legs; I don't hear that well, and the hearing aids won't fit in my ears; and I have terrible allergies. "Other than that, I'm in pretty good shape." When she thinks about the Middle East today, she is incensed. "I am very angry," she said. "This has nothing to do with religion. This is history. Israel has always belonged to the Jews as a people. Since the early 1900s, the Arabs didn't let us live in peace with them. We tried and tried; and every time Israel has stretched its hand out, every answer from the Arab side is always aggression. "If I lived there today, I would actively join the defense of Israel," she said. "I would not sit at home and do nothing. I would still do whatever I could, even at 88 years old." -- You can contact Sheryl Kay at skreporter@hotmail.com.
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