White nights: The story of a prisoner in Russia
Menachem BeginWhen he was young Begin and his family fled the Nazis. He escaped to Vilna and became the head of the Betar movement, a Revisionist Zionist youth movement. He was arrested in 1940 and detained in Lukiskes Prison, under the false assumption that he was spying for Britain. He was interrogated and tortured, and stayed in prison until May 1942, at which time he joined the Polish Army of Anders. Some time later, he was sent to Palestine and joined the Jewish national movement, soon becoming the head of the underground Igun (Etzl) Movement.
Begin’s most significant achievement as prime minister was the signing of a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, for which he and Anwar Sadat shared the Nobel Prize for Peace. In the wake of the Camp David Accords, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, which was captured from Egypt in the Six-Day War. Begin authorized the bombing of the Osirak nuclear plant in Iraq and the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 to fight PLO strongholds there, igniting the 1982 Lebanon War.
Depressed by the death of his wife Aliza in November 1982, he gradually withdrew from public life, until his resignation in October 1983.