No qualifications, no explanations, no analysis, and no numbers — just a note that today is the day that the Holocaust is remembered in Israel.
At 10:00 am, sirens sounded throughout the country for two minutes. The nation came to a standstill, in respect. Traffic stopped on the streets, drivers emerging from their cars to stand at attention in respect.
Radio stations broadcast special musical and other remembrance programs, people listened to these in the background during the day, as life went on. There was a calm and sober remembrance of an extended event in human history that is so horrifying — partly because its planned cruelty was so calculated and deliberated — as to be truly incomprehensible.
Amir Mizroch, an Israeli writer and editor, wrote a post published on his blog here, and entitled “If you don’t understand the Holocaust, you won’t understand Israelis”, saying that he viewed the Holocaust as “the purposeful, single-minded continuation of an ancient, worldwide hatred which seeks to exterminate the Jewish people” … and, he wrote, “Until and unless you have been in our shoes, when it comes to our lives, we don’t really care what you think”.
Ok. This is not unusual, here. It is a bit belligerent, and that is not unusual either.
But how effective is it to say: “we don’t really care what you think”? [ It’s not even true — they do care what we think.]
What happened during the Holocaust was individually and collectively tragic, on an immense scale.
The residual experience has affected people down through three generations, so far.
Meanwhile, human beings being as unpredictable as they are, an interesting story emerged for the first time, this year, as AFP reported from Um al-Fahim in the Galilee region: “For more than five decades, Leila [Leah, also known as Helen, of mixed Hungarian and Russian descent] Jabarin hid her secret from her Muslim children and grandchildren — that she was a Jewish Holocaust survivor born in Auschwitz concentration camp. Although her family knew she was a Jewish convert, none of them knew of her brutal past. It was only in the past week that Jabarin, who was born Helen Brashatsky, finally sat down and told them the story of how she was born inside Auschwitz, the most notorious symbol of Nazi Germany’s wartime campaign of genocide against Europe’s Jews … The family were finally freed when the camp was liberated in 1945 and left for Mandate Palestine three years later. At first, the new immigrants were put in camps at Atlit, some 20 kilometres (12 miles) south of Haifa, but two years later, they moved further south to Holon and then to Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv. Ten years later, when she was 17, Helen Brashatsky eloped with a young Arab man called Ahmed Jabarin, and they moved to live in Umm al-Fahm, which caused a huge split with her family … ‘She ran away with me and she was 17 when we got married’, her husband says. ‘The Israeli authorities used to come to Umm al-Fahm and take her back to her family in Ramat Gan, then she would come straight back here’. Initially, her family did not speak to her for two years, but later they were reconciled … ‘I hid my pain for 52 years and the truth about my past from my eight children and my 31 grandchildren. I hid the fact that I was born in Auschwitz and what that painful past means. I was just waiting for the right moment to tell them’…” This story about being actually born in Auschwitz is a bit hard to believe, but it is possible, and can be read in full here.
Haaretz yesterday published another story, here about the survival of two young Hungarian brothers torn from their family at the ages of 3 + 4, and a documentary recently made about their story.
Haaretz republished a speech in commemoration of the Holocaust by Knesset member Ahmed Tibi, from the Galilee. Tibi apparently made this speech two years ago in the Knesset [Parliament]. He said that “The forces of evil sent tens of millions of people – Jews, Soviets, Poles, Gypsies, and political rivals – to an awful death. This wasn’t a simple death, but an industry of death, which was borne of an ideology of hate, racism, and ethnic cleansing. This is the place and the time to cry out the cries of all of those who were and are no longer with us, the cries of those who have remained and who are struggling, justifiably so, to unburden themselves from the scenes of death and horror. I will once again repeat that I am full of empathy for the families of the victims of the Holocaust wherever they may be around the world, including those with whom I live on the same land, in the same country. This is the moment in which every individual must relieve oneself of all of his nationalist or religious hats, relieve oneself of the otherness and wear just one robe: the robe of humanity. One must look at himself, look around him, and be human. Only human … I, Ahmed Tibi, a tall, proud Arab, is happy to be on the same side as prominent Arab intellectuals who came out forcefully against Holocaust denial in the Middle East and other places around the world – men such as Mahmoud Darwish, Samih Al-Qassem, Elias Khoury, Edward Said, Elias Sanbar, and others. This is the time to send a special greeting and encouragement to my colleague, Mohammed Barakeh, who is currently in Auschwitz. He was joined, as a guest of the UN and acting on explicit instructions of President Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian ambassador in Poland. This is the place to declare that the Holocaust should not become a tool of a political, populist argument. It should not be commercialized, nor should it be ridiculed. The Holocaust, Mr. Speaker, is the most heinous crime against modern humanity, and Nazism is the coldest, most calculated instrument which led to this crime. Racism was the tie that bounded them together, the tie that bound the ends of this awful ideology. Here and now we need to stand up and confront, with a loud voice, all instances of discrimination, racism, and the politics of hatred. Racism and hatred for anything that is different, including Arabs, have raised their heads here in Israeli society. Racism has long become ‘mainstream.’ Those who were victims of that horrible death, which is a byproduct of a malicious exercise of power – a destructive, absolute power – must be attentive to the cries of the bereaved mother whose home was destroyed and whose children were buried underneath it; to the pain and cries of a doctor who lost his daughters; to the victims of the other, even if the other is his victim, the victim’s victim. The good must let their voices be heard, and not their deafening silence. Because from that time we will not just remember the misdeeds of the evil ones, but in particular the silence of the good. Lately I have not been able to find those benevolent ones who have lost the strength to utter courageous words in order to stand alongside the weak other…” This speech by Ahmed Tibi to the Knesset to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, two years ago, was published today in Haaretz, here.