the manifest desire for the uprooting of Israel.”
There’s Steve, whose daughter was “too noble for this world,” and Naftali, who lost a wonderful young son whose idea of paradise was “a Talmud and a candle.” Bernice’s daughter had left her comfortable life in the United States. Their stories speak to us about sacrifice and courage. Tzipi’s father, a rabbi, was stabbed to death, and where his bedroom used to be there is now an important religious school. Ruthie’s husband and David’s brother was a great humanist doctor who treated everyone, Arab and Jew alike. There’s the rabbi Elyashiv, whose son, a seminarian, was taken from him, but who believes that “everything in life makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker.”
Sheila lost her husband, who took care of children with Down syndrome; she talks about the coming of the Messiah. Menashe lost his father, mother, brother, and grandfather in a night of terror, but continues to believe in the right to live where Abraham pitched his tent. Alex consecrated every day to the memory of his beautiful little daughter, nicknamed “Snow White.” Miriam saw her husband, a musician, taken from her after they had come from the Soviet Union. Elaine lost a son during the Shabbat dinner, and for more than a year she didn’t cook or make any sound. Yehudit lost her daughter too soon, coming back from a wedding together with her husband. Uri lost his daughter who volunteered for the poor and who studied the Holocaust, from which her family had miraculously escaped.
Orly had a happy life in a trailer in the Samarian hills until her son was killed, before he could put his kippah back on his head. There’s Tehila, one of those God-fearing but modern women who populate the settlements, who loved the pink and blue plumage of Samaria’s flowers. Dror lost much of his family in the Holocaust, and buried his son with his inseparable Babylonian Talmud. The terrorists took away Galina’s husband after they had left everything in Russia so that their grandchildren could be born in Israel, a story that began with the Stalinist repression. Norman is a rich businessman from New York who gave up every convenience imaginable in order to live in Israel; his wife used to guard Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem. There’s also the marvelous Yossi, whose son went out every Friday to give religious gifts to passersby, and sacrificed his own life in order to save his friends. Rina had created a pearl in the Egyptian desert and thought of herself as a pioneer; her son was taken from her, along with his pregnant wife.
With his hymn to life, Gabi has honored his idealistic brother who was murdered at the university. There’s also Chaya, who embraced Judaism together with her husband; conversion for them was “like marrying God.” Dr. Picard left France, where his grandparents had fled from the cattle cars of the Vichy government, only to lose a son at a Jewish seminary. There’s the devout Yehuda, who takes care of the bodies after terror attacks. Finally, special mention should be made of Ben Schijveschuurder, who lost his parents and three siblings at a pizzeria, and who likes to remember his father smiling and making the “V” for victory in front of the gates of Auschwitz.
These stories all speak to us of a state that is unique in the world, born from the nineteenth-century philosophy of secular Zionism, which brought back to their ancient homeland a people in exile for two thousand years and cut down to less than half its prewar size. They are stories of courage, desperation, faith, of defending hearth and home through “honorable warfare” in the only army that permits disobeying an inhumane order. This is the epic of a people that has suffered all of the worst injustices of the world, and is reborn time and again thanks to its moral strength.
One of the most excruciating scenes in Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece, took place in the Polish shtetl of Grabow. In late December of 1941, all of the Jews there were asphyxiated in the Chelmno gas vans, and the Poles of the village took possession of their homes. In front of a beautiful carved door, Lanzmann talks with a rural woman, toothless and with upturned nose, who tells him with complete nonchalance that she lives in a Jewish house. Lanzmann asks if she knew the owners. “Of course.” “What were their names?” Silence. She doesn’t remember. Even their name has been lost. This was the second death of the Jews of Grabow. We cannot leave the Israeli victims of terrorism to the same fate by forgetting their names. Making up for the heartbreaking obscurity of these innocent victims is one of the deepest and truest reasons for the State of Israel to exist. As Gabi Ashkenazi, chief of the Israel Defense Forces and the son of Holocaust survivors, explains it, “In Israel there will never again be numbers instead of names; there will be no more ashes and smoke instead of a body and a soul.”
Where a suicide bomber has struck, the victims are arranged near the carcass of the bus. They are placed in heavy black bags, to which are attached a Polaroid photo, a preliminary report, and a card with a number. Many of the victims still have the number assigned to them by the Nazis tattooed on their arms. If the ashes of the Holocaust have led back to the names of the millions killed, the bodies torn apart in suicide bombings have led us back to the individual destinies of Israel, to a name, to the spirit that illuminated a life—even the small, obscure life of an immigrant, dirt poor, who dreamed of living in that land of refuge. In many cases, the victims are identified by their teeth, by a watch, by DNA or blood analysis. There are mothers who go home from the morgue with just the little pieces of jewelry that had belonged to a daughter. Is there anything closer to the Holocaust than this black hole that swallows up lives with hardly a trace?
Ben-Zion Nemett talks about his daughter who survived an attack on a restaurant in Jerusalem: “Shira told me that when the explosion happened, the children were injured. They were burning. The youngest was crying and shrieking, ‘Daddy, Daddy, save me!’ And her father shouted back, ‘Don’t worry, recite the Shema Yisrael with me. Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.’ Finally, there was silence. And I, the son of my father, the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, who grew up with the Shema Yisrael that the Jews recited before being killed, I heard this same story from my daughter. The camp in Treblinka and the Sbarro restaurant became one and the same thing. A genetic code connects the holy victims of the Holocaust and those of the Sbarro. Holy victims whose only crime was that of being part of the Jewish people.”
As Lanzmann remarked, “the Nazis had to look past the dead.” In Ponari and Chelmno, where Jewish fathers and brothers and sons were forced to dig up the remains of their loved ones so they could be burned in huge open-air incinerators, the bodies were called schmattes, “rags.” Things had to be done without describing them, without naming what was being done. The members of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, the team of Jews selected to work in the gas chambers and crematory ovens, had scattered hundreds of teeth belonging to victims all over the camp, so that there would still be some trace of them left. Serious reflection should be given to this image of people sowing thousands of human teeth around the camps. In the extermination camp at Sobibor, where 250,000 Jews disappeared, the gas chambers were replaced with fir trees, planted by the Nazis who were fleeing to the West. Those trees—what is it that nourishes them?
At Sobibor, the bodies had been thrown into mass graves with their heads facing downward, like herring. Withered and dry, they crumbled like clay when touched. The Jews were forced to dig with their hands, and the Germans would not allow them to use words like “dead” and “victims”; they were called “figures,” and they no longer had names or faces. In the air, the flames turned red, yellow, green, violet. The largest bones, like the leg bones, were crushed into fragments by other Jews, and the ashes were put into bags and thrown into the rivers. Poles grew tomatoes and potatoes a few hundred feet from the death machines of Treblinka, where almost a million Jews were killed. Today, hens scamper around where the Sobibor camp once stood. The history of European Judaism did not end with a grave where Jews can now go to pray; the only pilgrimage possible is to contemplate a stormy sky, in pain, anger, and sadness. Likewise, the families of terror victims often have no chance to weep over the bodies of their loved ones. They rush to the place of the attack, only to find a carpet of human fragments.
In Chelmno, 150,000 Jews disappeared
