“Buy 600 boxes of 100/8 cans of Norwegian sardines” or… “Immediately ship anchovies of the best quality, boxes of 200/2 cans”.
Things like this were said in telegrams that the United Kingdom Postal Censorship intercepted in the summer of 1915.
To untrained eyes, they seemed innocent.
However, after a year of fighting in World War I, British intelligence was already adept at detecting coded messages.
They knew that terms like “buy (or embark) immediately” or “ship” were equivalent to “arrival,” “departure,” “anchor,” and “loading coal” of ships, vital information for the enemy.
But it wasn’t just the language that aroused suspicion.
It wasn’t sardine season either.
The sender, a Peruvian merchant named Ludovico Hurwitz-y-Zender who was in England, had not taken into account that ordering large quantities at that time of year was absurd since there was no fish available.
The detail would cost him his life.
After it was found that the recipient was a German living in Norway and in constant contact with his country’s consulate, Hurwitz-y-Zender was arrested, investigated and tried.
The Peruvian was one of 11 spies executed at the Tower of London during the Great War.
And he went down in history for being the last to be shot there, on April 11, 1916.
A century later, the Peruvian writer and journalist Hugo Coya received a message from a friend with the photo of Hurwitz-y-Zender that he had seen at the Imperial War Museum in London.
Intrigued, he began to investigate his life, which he would later tell in the book “The Last One in the Tower” (2022).
But doing your research, came across another forgotten story: that of Jacobo Hurwitz, the brother of its protagonist.
Two passions
While he was interviewing Ludovico’s family, his niece Anita Hurwitz commented to Cayo: “I think my dad’s story is much more shocking. and more interesting.”
“He started talking about Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Revueltas, Augusto Sandino, Farabundo Martí…”, the writer told BBC Mundo.
“My first reaction was skepticism.; “We all want our parents to be extraordinary people, and the mention of all those names so linked and so important to Latin American history caused me great disbelief.”
But it turned out that Anita had the gift of saving what others throw away and she took photos, clippings and documents out of her trunks that left no room for so many doubts.
The conversation triggered an exhaustive four-year investigation, which allowed him to reconstruct that fascinating story in the book “The Continental Spy”.
It is, he points out, “a plot that, Although it seems like fiction, it is reality itself.“.
At the center, there is a character who, although largely forgotten, did not always go unnoticed.
In fact, there was a time when his name reverberated in the Mexican press, with nicknames such as “the continental spy,” “the man of communism”, “the man of Stalin in Latin America” and “the man of a thousand masks”.
They all had some truth, and at that moment they were propitiated by a violent event: the assassination attempt against Mexican President Pascual Ortiz Rubio.
It was a dramatic episode.
On February 5, 1930, the day of his inauguration, the new president was shot in the jaw, which would leave him with serious difficulties speaking.
Although the perpetrator of the attack was quickly apprehended, the authorities were convinced that it was a international plot to destabilize Mexico, and that Moscow was behind it.
Jacobo Hurwitz was one of the suspects who were interned in the Islas Marías prison, in the Pacific, where they tortured him to make him confess what they thought they knew.
There he shared a cell with Jose Revueltaswho would become one of Mexico’s most important writers, philosophers and activists, but at that time he was still a teenager.
Hurwitz introduced him to leftist thinking during the intervals he was given to recover from the beatings.
When they took him prisoner, the Peruvian was studying literature at the University of San Marcos. He had also been involved for years in social struggles that – as Coya points out – led him to embrace socialism and communism.
In debates on issues such as the divorce law and the establishment of eight-hour work days, he was formed politically.
“Something dark”
Jacobo Hurwitz was born in Lima in 1901, 17 years after his brother Ludovico.
He was the penultimate of 11 children of Natasius Hurwitz and Augusta Zender, a Jewish immigrant couple who met and married in the Peruvian capital.
His father had emigrated from Germany to the United States and had participated in the American Civil War in the ranks of President Abraham Lincoln before settling in Peru, where he presided over the Jewish community for several periods.
“From a young age he knew that he was a carrier of an adverse sign: being part of a minority among the minority, different among the different… Being born a Jew in Peru at the beginning of the 20th century, in addition to being a poet and possessor of counter-current ideas, would force him to face a difficult destiny.. (“The Continental Spy”).
“The anti-Semitism that was experienced at that time,” Cayo emphasizes in an interview with BBC Mundo, “helps us understand why many of his ideas, his fears, his frustrations, drove him to act in one way or another.”
“Remember, for example, what happened in the Tragic Week in Buenos Aires”, a strike in 1919 that ended in a massacre, and produced the first pogrom (‘killing of Jews’) recorded on the American continent.
In 1920, Hurwitz participated in the founding of the González Prada Popular University, which offered free courses for workers.
One of the teachers was the communist leader and theorist José Carlos Mariátegui, one of the most influential intellectuals of the time, with whom he forged a close bond.
The thinker’s ideas were a great inspiration. Hurwitz admired him so much that he moved to live near his home.
In 1923, he was part of a protest in defense of freedom of expression, threatened, according to the protesters, by the project to consecrate the country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which turned violent.
The government relented, but it also punished: it shipped the ringleaders, including him, to a forced exile.
During those years, as a backdrop, newspaper articles frequently denounced the existence of a “Jewish plot” hatched from Moscow to impose communism in Peru.
Before leaving, Hurwitz warned his comrades that something dark was at hand. And time proved him right.
In 1929, the authorities carried out a raid in which even Mariátegui, who was dying, was affected. His house was brutally raided and he died weeks later.
The newspapers applaudedly reported that most of the 180 detainees were Jews.
“Diabolical recurrence”
Hurwitz went first to Panama, where he encountered Peruvian exiles and met others from several Latin American countries.
“There he became involved in the tenant movement, which was the first protest by those who were building the Panama Canal over the exorbitant rents they were charged for the miserable shacks in which they lived,” says Coya.
His next destination was Cuba.
In his travels, he narrates “The Continental Spy”, love and heartbreak visited him, “with a diabolical recurrence“.
“Women entered and left his life without leaving a deep mark, which earned him the nickname of the ‘eternal lover’.“, among his classmates, who recognized his gallantry skills and his ability to charm girls.
But he also had to leave Cuba persecuted, because “he became involved with the nascent communist movement on the island, which was against the dictatorship of the time,” says the writer.
This is how he arrived in Mexico, where he met intellectuals such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who welcomed him.
There he held important positions in the Hands Off Nicaragua Committee (MAFUENIC), whose purpose was to ensure medical supplies and military equipment to the army commanded by Augusto C. Sandino, and in the Caribbean bureau of International Red Relief (SRI), a social service who conducted support campaigns for communist prisoners and gathered material and humanitarian support in specific situations.
“He emerged as a great orator, and his figure grew within Mexican communism, which made Moscow view him with special interest“.
The USSR, led at that time by Joseph Stalin, wanted to establish communism on the continent, and the prominence that Hurwitz acquired in Mexico made him the ideal candidate to work towards that vision.
That wasn’t its only plus point.
Hurwitz “was a person with great intellectual gifts and refined ways” and spoke Russian, English, German and Polish“which allowed him to impersonate many people.”
“Thanks to his chameleon-like ability, he carried out missions from Mexico, especially in Central American countries.
In between, he taught German classes, composed poems and wrote complaints, attended meetings with comrades and parties with artists.
And he continued “charming women.” Until they conquered it.
a life
María Oynick, or Masha as he called her, was a photographer and teacher who amazed him from the moment he met her.says Gaius in his book.
He had arrived in Mexico from Poland in 1926, and, like the rest of his family, he was part of the Bund, a socialist political movement made up of Jews from Lithuania, Poland and Russia, among other countries in that region of the world.
Little by little they became inseparable.
But both traveled a lot and sometimes for long periods, sometimes together and sometimes apart.
“It was during a long trip that took them in different directions that something unexpected happened“.
One day in 1937, when Hurwitz was in New York working for The Daily Workerthe most important communist newspaper in the hemisphere, received a telegram from from Santiago de Chile.
It was from Masha and he told her that he was going to be a father..
He asked her to marry him and they decided to get married immediately, by proxy. The Spanish Civil War pressed him.
“Spain is torn apart and I have to go support the comrades. I don’t know what could happen to me there. By marrying you I will be able to move forward with greater peace of mind.”
Víctor Anteo Hurwitz was born on November 22, 1937, and in his early years he saw his father intermittently.
During the Second War, Jacobo traveled between Peru and Mexico fulfilling different functions in the fight against fascism.
In 1957, the family ended up settling in Lima.
He grew roses, sold books and started a printing press, while continuing his political work at the national and international level, and working as a correspondent for the TASS news agency.
He died in 1973 in a car accident.
For Cayo, Hurwitz’s story “somehow encapsulates many of the dilemmas and tensions that marked the 20th century in Latin America and the world.”
His life, the author concludes, is “the reflection of an entire generation trapped between power, idealism, the networks of a political struggle that despite time is still valid today“.
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