that the Jews had gone ‘like sheep to the slaughter,’ I felt the courage of the millions who faced infinite suffering in the ghettos, in the forests, in the cattle cars. Representing their memory was a great honor for us. We understood the enormity of our responsibility, in guaranteeing the immortality of our people and bearing their greatness upon our wings.”
On the occasion of Israel’s fifty-eighth anniversary, Eliezer Shkedi, then commander of the air force and a man with a contagious smile, had his father, a Shoah survivor, get aboard his F-1. “For me it is clear that my duty is to restore value to human history,” Shkedi said, “and for this reason I followed the path of my father, and my father today is somewhat compensated.” The chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, a survivor of Auschwitz, said that Israel represents a special form of revenge: “The revenge is that we are here, the revenge is that we are home, the revenge is that we have a country, the revenge is that we are here in this place with the blue and white flag and the Star of David.”
For Jews, the fact of the Shoah is a justification for Israel’s existence. For the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denial of the Shoah is reason enough to pursue a war of extermination against Israel. According to Ahmadinejad’s logic, Israel was created after the Shoah (a historical fallacy); Jews have used the Shoah as an excuse to reclaim their nation (another historical fallacy); and therefore, since the Shoah didn’t happen, Israel may consequently be obliterated. This is why, when a Holocaust survivor is killed by a suicide bomber or loses a relative in a terrorist attack, the entire country reads the story with anguish. It is a perfect murder—the conclusion of a project begun sixty years earlier in Europe. The aim to annihilate the Jews has left a long trail of darkness down through the generations.
George and Anna Yakobovitch had gotten on the train to Auschwitz together. He was able to get away before they reached the gate of death. She came to the ramp of Dr. Joseph Mengele, along with her father, mother, and siblings. They were gassed immediately, but she made it out alive. Thirty years later, George and Anna met again by chance and got married. At a Passover supper in 2002, a suicide bomber killed George on the spot, together with twenty-seven other people. “Sons of pigs and monkeys,” the terrorist had called them before blowing himself up.
Another victim of terrorism was Mendel Bereson, from Saint Petersburg, who had lost all his relatives in Europe; today his family in Israel says he was “a true Zionist,” someone who “said that the Jews have only one state.” Leah Levine had just found out that her brother, the only other member of their large family to have escaped the genocide, was living in Russia. She is remembered as “a wonderful wife, always happy, and the mother of four boys.” Leah Strick, a survivor of the massacre in the Bialystok ghetto in Poland, was blown up in a bus on a Sunday morning while she was going to visit her sister in a geriatric clinic.
“We came here by ourselves because our parents were killed in the Holocaust,” said the brother of the artist Miriam Levy, who was killed in Jerusalem in June 2003. Her grandson noted that his “elegant and intelligent grandmother had emerged from the abyss of the Holocaust aboard the ship Exodus.” Miriam had come to Israel on the legendary ship that in 1947 defied the British blockade by trying to reach Palestine with 4,515 Holocaust survivors. “We swore to them then: never again another Auschwitz,” Commandant Yossi Harel would say later. “I like to think that Israel was born then, on those ships crammed with refugees considered illegal immigrants.” The Exodus 1947 was fired on by the English in the Bay of Haifa, and with dead and wounded aboard, Harel had to surrender. One girl on the ship had escaped being killed by the Nazis because she was buried under a pile of corpses; she could no longer close her eyes because her eyelid muscles had contracted.
Elsa Cohen and Bianca Shichrur, also victims of terrorism, had much in common. Both had survived the Second World War, and both had a mentally disabled son living in the same area of Jerusalem. Bianca, born in Italy, had come to Israel forty years earlier. Elsa had lost her whole family in the Holocaust, and was one of the children of Kinder Transport in London after the outbreak of the war. About ten thousand Jewish children were sent to Great Britain, without their parents, from Austria, Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Elsa made the journey with one of the children of Robert Wasselberg, who had to decide which of his three children would take the last spot available on a Kinder Transport.
Arno Klarsfeld is the son of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, who dedicated their lives to hunting down Nazi war criminals. Arno said that he “broke intellectually and morally” with France in September 2001, after the attacks on the Twin Towers. He moved from Paris to a small apartment in Tel Aviv, refusing the subsidies provided for immigrants and taking up the study of Hebrew. He was outside the Mike’s Place pub in Tel Aviv on April 30, 2003, right after an attack by a suicide bomber with an English passport who had come from London to massacre Jews. Those charred bodies, those human remains lying there on the pavement, gave Arno the last push toward enlisting in the Israeli army. One of those lifeless bodies was that of Yanay Weiss, the son of Lipa Weiss.
The saga of Lipa Weiss is emblematic of how much the survivors of the crematory ovens have suffered from Islamic fanaticism. He was fourteen years old when he was deported to Auschwitz, where in a few hours he saw his entire family vanish in the gas chambers—his parents, his grandparents, his brothers and sisters. After the war, he joined a kibbutz in Israel. Two years before his son Yanay was killed at Mike’s Place, Lipa had lost his granddaughter Inbal in a suicide attack.
Lipa’s story, recounted here at length for the first time, began in Zdeneve, a tiny village in the Carpathians, in December of 1924. “Mine was a classic Jewish family,” he says. “As a child I studied in a cheder; I learned Hebrew and the Bible, translating our sacred language word by word into Yiddish, which was spoken at home. Up until the age of fourteen, I studied at both the Jewish school and the public school. I learned the stories of Adam and Eve, Isaac and Jacob, about how Joseph was sold by his brothers, about the captivity in Egypt, about Moses and the liberation and the conversations with the Pharaoh, the Exodus, the desert and the Ten Commandments, about Joshua at Jericho. These stories were the origin of my faith. Hebron, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem were my homeland, and I wanted to see them in person. This was the origin of my faith in Judaism, my faith in God and Jewish values. When I got older, my father questioned me every Sunday morning about the previous week’s reading from the Torah. All this was done in a kind and respectful way, and this instilled in me a profound respect for my father and mother. She cooked my favorite dishes for me when I came back from school.”
Until 1938, under the democratic Czechoslovakian government, the Jews were not discriminated against, and those years had a very strong impact on Lipa’s personality: “Respect for Shabbat, the prayers in the synagogue, strengthened my faith in a merciful God, and this would give me the strength to confront the horrific period that would follow. I believed that God would save us.”
The Weisses went through years of dire poverty. “Farming was the way of life in our region, growing potatoes for domestic consumption, and working in the forests. There were no industries or businesses. The Jews sold basic necessities to non-Jews. When Hungary came back to power in 1939, new economic laws were imposed on the Jews. The men, including my father, were conscripted to work on the fortifications, because we were on the border between Poland and Hungary. My family was not able to support itself, and since I was the oldest child I went to work in the forests to permit my mother to buy oil, sugar, and salt. We had two cows, and they gave us about a gallon of milk a day. We also had the potatoes that my parents grew in a little garden plot. Over time we were even able to buy clothes, which were mended and passed from one child to another.”
With the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Nazis and the Soviets, the Polish region on the border with Hungary was put under Soviet control. And the Jews were accused of being Communist spies. “The most difficult
