All About Harry

To attempt to  write a biography of a man  like Harry  is an act of faith. Faith that somehow out of the recollections of those few who still recalled his passage and, more prosaically, out of some active archival research, would emerge an accurate picture of a man whose life was far from mundane. In relating the   exploits of "Freddy" Fredkens, David Ben Gurion, in his Diary of the  War of Independence, quietly revealed the  existence  of a Haganah agent, whose true name  turned out to be Henryk [Harry] Grzegorz Tursz-Fredkens, an ex-RAF pilot. Harry , as he was generally known, was a Polish Jew whose  appetite for life was unbounded, sometimes reckless and even amoral, but always fascinating. He was a man driven by  the lure of new adventures and the opportunity of financial success. These aspirations  were not always fulfilled and Harry had to cope with  many disappointments over the course of his remarkable life.