the survivors can’t do it. “There was always a great silence, even when they were burning two thousand people a day,” said Simon Srebnik, one of only two Chelmno survivors, who died of cancer in September 2006. “No one shouted; there was great calm and tranquility.” That sensation is relived today in the silence observed on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, when thoughts turn to the names of the dead, but above all in the silence that follows an attack in the middle of a crowd. Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, the ultra-Orthodox Jew who founded the organization that identifies the victims of attacks, explains that “after the bomb goes off everything is quiet; you can only hear the voices of the wounded. It is in those moments that you know what you have to do: make order before the hysteria explodes around you.” The silence of Chelmno and the silence after a suicide bombing, the Zyklon B of the Nazis and the explosive belts of Hamas have this in common: the total destruction of the victim.
Of the three thousand dead at the World Trade Center, one thousand have never been found—not even through DNA analysis. Three hundred bodies were found at Ground Zero. Few families have had the opportunity to identify loved ones with their own eyes. Memorial services were held without human remains. The harder task was identifying the shredded, charred and pulverized remains of the majority of victims—the most detailed and painstaking identification process. When fires rage and concrete crumbles, consuming most other tissues of the human body, only teeth survive. Israeli forensic experts pioneered the method of identification through dental records. Teams of up to one hundred dentists worked day and night shifts in Manhattan. Others performed the clinical task of extracting from cells the unique genetic recipe that identifies every human being.
In the village of Srebrenica, the site of Europe’s worst mass killing since World War II, Serb troops secretly moved the bodies from one mass grave to another in an effort to hide the crime. The murderers also ordered their victims to change clothes before killing them, to make it harder to investigate the crime. From Srebrenica to Ground Zero and Israel, the annihilation of the victim is the mark of the devil. A Jewish headstone in Ashkelon is marked “anonymous.” It is for an unidentified bombing victim who was buried in Israel in 2002. Fifteen years ago, before DNA analysis, most Jewish victims would never have been identified; they would have been buried in a common grave.
In one attack, two young Israeli women with similar features were killed. When a tearful husband arrived at the hospital, he embraced the wrong woman for several minutes before realizing his mistake and locating the body of his wife. Most of the victims in the Park Hotel bombing in Netanya, many of them elderly Holocaust survivors, were maimed beyond recognition, making it impossible to establish identity by fingerprints or birthmarks, scars or tattoos. Even dental records could not always be used, because in some cases the teeth were damaged by the scorching heat. The blast was so powerful that many relatives arrived at the forensic institute to discover that only a hand was still intact. The doctors and social workers accompanied these relatives as they went to the mortuary to touch and kiss the severed hand or leg in a gruesome and desperate farewell. Sometimes it has been necessary to use mass graves because distinguishing among the remains has been impossible. Speaking about the victims again is a form of vindication. It is the purest meaning of memory.
The hero of the Jewish resistance to Nazism in Europe, Abba Kovner, once said that “we Jews have nothing except for our blood.” The Jewish question emerged in the concrete context of genealogy, of the religious and ethnic identity of a people, the genetic identity: Jewish son of a Jewish mother. Reminding us of this are the terrorists who tie up a Jew in front of a video camera and make him say the name of his mother. Men are “accused of a crime that they did not commit, the crime of existing,” as Benjamin Fondane wrote before he was swallowed up by Auschwitz.
Just as Holocaust survivors never say “I” but always “we,” speaking in the name of the dead, the families of terror victims have found suffering to be a source of unity for a country so often torn by politics. Many survivors of attacks, the families and friends of the victims, have talked about how Israel became so much closer to their hearts when they buried their loved ones. The Talmud says that in Israel, the dead protect the living. After the devastating attack on the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv, in June 2001, it was said, “The land is won through work and blood. The more friends you bury in this land, the more it becomes yours.”
The first on the scene after an attack are the thousand-odd volunteers of Zaka. The Israelis call them “those who sleep with the dead”; their own motto is Chesed shel Emet, “true kindness.” They reverently gather every human remain, every scrap of flesh and tuft of hair, so that, in keeping with Jewish tradition, the body may be reassembled and buried with dignity. They are the God-fearers filmed at every massacre, bent over among policemen and nurses, gathering drops of blood, “because all men are made in the image of God, even the suicide bombers, and all of the bodies must be honored, so that God may smile again.” They say that their task is sanctifying the Name—of God, and of the dead—and allowing the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy according to which the dead will find their bodies in the messianic age, and the divine spirit will breathe in them again. “Son of man, can these bones come to life?” Ezekiel asked. And the bones began to move and reassemble themselves: “The spirit came into them; they came alive and stood upright, a vast army.” In the thick of the extermination, in Dachau, Rabbi Mordechai Slapobersky said, “And the flesh and the skin formed around the dried bones that we left behind.”
It was European civilization that died during the Holocaust, swallowing up all of the Jewish communities in its own nothingness; and after Passover in 2002, when the greatest single massacre of Jews since the Second World War was perpetrated in Israel, the Jewish state became the symbol of a war of civilizations. It is not easy to enter this place where suffering reigns, to remember all the victims of terrorism, the “unknown martyrs” of Israel, as Menachem Begin called them in his memoirs of the Soviet gulags. The region that is revealed to the visitor is peopled by the shadows of the dead, and illuminated by what Abba Kovner called “the candle of anonymity.”
What, over the centuries, has permitted the survival of the most persecuted people in history? What has kept them from depression? After pogroms and repressions, what has driven them to put themselves again at the center of history? The birth of Israel is the only political event worthy of joy, hope, and gratitude in a century that became a slaughterhouse to hundreds of millions of human beings—because the twelve million Jews who insist on living in this world despite the gas chambers and the terrorism are the essence of liberty. Israel teaches the world love of life, not in the sense of a banal joie de vivre, but as a solemn celebration. Israel’s national culture is like a miraculous continuation of the Jewish life that flourished in Israel until the Romans—first in 70 CE and then in 135 CE—reduced Jerusalem to ruins. The miracle was represented in the Israeli men who danced in the streets when David Ben-Gurion proclaimed that the Jewish nation had returned home after two thousand years, and right after the Nazi genocide.
What is the spirit that saves Israel from living under the emblem of fear and allows it to fight? The last protection against suicide attacks is a spontaneous form of civil defense, mainly by newly discharged soldiers and by students trying to earn a living, together with a coterie of middle-aged Russian and Ethiopian immigrants who also need a job. They are, in the words of one security guard, “the bulletproof vest of the country.” Human shields, they stand for hours in the cold or the heat so people can shop, sip coffee, and go about their business without worrying about getting blown up.
Rami Mahmoud Mahameed, a young Arab Israeli, prevented a bomber from boarding a bus, but not from exploding; Rami was badly injured. Eli Federman, guarding a Tel Aviv disco, faced the speeding car of a suicide bomber heading straight for the club and coolly fired, blowing up the car before it could enter. Tomer Mordechai was only nineteen years old when he was killed after stopping a car loaded with explosives that was heading for downtown Jerusalem. Tamir Matan died while preventing a suicide bomber from entering a busy cafe. A suicide terrorist at a shopping center in Netanya left hundreds wounded and five dead, including Haim Amram, a working student who was guarding the entrance to the mall. A pregnant policewoman,
