Simon Lavee

Jewish Hit Squad Simon Lavee

My father's personality was shaped by his struggle to survive, and his soul was tortured because he could have tried to save his family, but he did not. But there were ways to avenge their deaths. As a partisan and member of the UB, he followed his drive to pay back the Nazis and their collaborators. Jewish Hit Squad is about a small band of fighters who not only tried to survive German brutality during WWII, but actively fought back against the Nazis. The author tells of his father, Mundek Lukawiecki, who led a Jewish partisan group in the forests of southern Galicia. They operated under the umbrella of the Polish underground movement the Armia Krajowa (AK). Mundek's group was an AK hit squad that assassinated German soldiers, as well as Polish and Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. The group also sabotaged Nazi operations and attacked strategic German targets such as fuel trains and military installations. At the end of the war, Mundek enlisted in the Polish Communist Secret Police (UB), where he continued to exact revenge on Nazi collaborators. In 1946, after the UB discovered that he was simultaneously supporting the Israeli underground Etzel in Palestine by sending them Jewish fighters, he was forced to flee Poland. He arrived in Israel in 1948.