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From: Rajel Sperber, Israel
Date: 25 Mar 2003
He was an idealist and yet, at the same time, utterly realist - what you can say a dreamer too active to dream too much. Humorous and ironical and yet serious when one has to be serious. Straight, tireless, honest, utterly incorruptible and yet sensitive and gentle and haunted by the thousands images of horror which he was forced to see. I cannot call him an hero because, as his friend Edwin Rolfe put it, hero is a word for peacetime and for Harry there was not such a thing - peacetime. He fought all his life along - he fought when he was at the Jewish Orphanages and when he was a young member of YCL in the years of the Depression; when he was in Spain and during W.W.II; when he worked for TASS, and when he retired (from work, not from life). And he never, never failed to protest against arbitrariness and injustice. There is an old Jewish dictum: "In a place where there are not human beings, fight to be a human being". Thus was Harry - a human being even in moments and times where human beings were difficult to find. A perennial searcher of justice and truth. Harry, communist "with a little c", plain soldier in Spain because he didn't accept to be upgraded before leaving for home, Harry caring and self demanding, who made in his twenties from an American flag as torn as the dresses of destitute people his own banner and never betrayed it, passed away, not surprising, demonstrating for peace. He was my friend. I was one of the many who had this privilege.
Rajel Sperber
(From ALBA Forum, March 25, 2003)