Only now, having reached the age of 80, is Tom Segev ready to admit that he was brought up on a lie. In recent years, the longtime historian and journalist who published numerous books and articles about the lives of others, has reexamined his own biography and discovered a few intriguing details. Ever since his father was killed, during the War of Independence, Segev believed that he was the son of one of the fallen in Israel's wars – Pvt. Heinz Schwerin, who was "struck by a murderers' bullet while on guard duty" in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood. That's the text that appears on the Defense Ministry's Izkor commemoration site.
One person knew the truth all those years but kept it to herself: his older sister, Jutta, who left Israel in 1960 and moved to Germany – the country from which their communist parents had fled the Nazis, in 1935. Jutta, who went on to become a member of the Bundestag in The Greens party, was 7 during the 1948 war. On February 3, 1948, her father was assigned guard duty on the roof of a residential building not far from their home. Jutta accompanied him.
When they reached the building they found the front door locked. Jutta related that her father, 38 at the time, decided to climb up the drainpipe. When he had almost reached the third floor he lost his grip and fell to his death. Schwerin was laid to rest on the Mount of Olives. His name is inscribed on the monuments commemorating those who fell in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the fighters who were killed in the battle for Jerusalem.