Between Yom Hashoah and Yom Ha’Atzmaut

The days between Yom Hoshoah, the Jewish date for Holocaust Memorial Day, and Israel’s Independence Day are always poignant.

I immediately think of my father. He came by ship from Trieste to Haifa in the autumn of 1937, fleeing Nazi Europe. Just a few days ago I found a letter giving him a place to study at the Bezalel Academy of Arts in 1936. He never was able to take up that offer. At the age of 16, in the impoverished Palestine of those years he suddenly found himself the main bread winner. His own father had managed a timber mill in Germany, not a transportable skill. He never could find serious employment in Jerusalem; it fell to my father to support his sisters, and the family. But the future Jewish state had saved their lives, as it saved millions more, from Europe, Arab lands, and later Africa and Eastern Europe. My father died on Yom Ha’Azmaut; for the first time this year I will be in Israel for his Yahrzeit.

I think too of my friend Aaron Barnea, whose son was killed by a roadside bomb near the Beaufort fortress in South Lebanon, one of so many thousands for whom Yom Hazikaron, the day of mourning which precedes Yom Ha’Atzmaut, never becomes less poignant. The Parents Circle, in whom he was active for many years, now brings together bereaved families, Israeli and Palestinian, to mourn with one another and share the pain of loss, but above all to affirm the value of life and to work for a different future.

Like so many of us, I have thought about Israel in so many ways: with love, wonder, worry, fear, dismay, frustration, appreciation and admiration. In my many tens of visits, in the times I have taught there, and the innumerable times I have learnt there, I have looked out at the country through numerous windows.

I have looked through the windows of the Egged bus as it climbed the road to Jerusalem, past the burnt-out trucks left as a reminder of the terrible losses in the siege of Jerusalem. I have seen with joy the green of the forests and fields. I have loved wandering around the campuses of the Hebrew University on Givat Ram and Har Hatsofim, taking out books in the National Library. I have watched the ringing of tiny birds on the reserve in the Hula Valley, and the passing of storks and cranes. I have looked for the different coloured anemones in the spring, and admired the wild cyclamen, Israel’s national flower.

I’ve listened to the stories and viewpoints of family and friends, of the left and of the right. I’ve been out with many groups devoted to building bridges, between rich and poor, religious and non-observant, Israeli and Arab. I’ve looked at the same landscape from the living room of Israeli friends, and, from the opposite side of the valley, through the windows of a Palestinian home. I’ve stood on the roof in an Arab village and watched the house next door being slowly demolished, and seen the school children returning home, and wondered what questions they will ask and who will answer them and how.

I’m dismayed by the reception the Israeli Ambassador received outside SOAS yesterday, the hatred, the prejudiced assumptions, the singling out of Israel for abuse. But I’m also troubled deeply by those who ignore the reality in which so many Palestinians have to live, behind the wall where our thoughts, imagination and empathy usually find it easier not to follow. A country which limits the freedom of some, risks over time compromising the freedom of all. I’m frightened by the mire of intransigence, breeding hatreds.

I’m left with affection, anxiety, hope and prayer. The hope, Hatikvah, rests in the immense courage, creativity and moral imagination with which the country was built, and in witnessing the similar courage with which so many defend the values of its founders and seek to develop it for the good of all its citizens, for justice and compassion, in spite of everything.

The prayer is that, despite the violence and hatred with which not only the Middle East but so much of the globe is riven and divided, the spirit of humanity and generosity, the spirit of God apprehended by the prophets of Israel in the very hills and valleys of this land will prevail and that there shall one day be ‘Tranquillity and harmony, and none shall be afraid’.

Letters from the dead

About a month ago, in a café in Emek Refaim, my one and only cousin Michal handed me a small plastic bag, the sort you wrap gifts in. ‘I found some more letters’, she said, ‘I wanted you to have them as soon as possible’.

I began to look at them there and then. I took out the first couple of pages, the writing turned blue-black with time, the paper thin as tissue, still strangely strong, though no doubt fragile. I looked at the dates, 1938, 1940, 1941. There were photographs too, mostly of Arnold, my father’s cousin, as a baby, as a little boy in a sailor suit. His young life would end in Treblinka. I put the pictures away.

Only now, in these days of Passover, of liberation, have I had time to study most of those letters. They do not add new chapters to the account I wrote in My Dear Ones, my book about the fate of my father’s family during the Holocaust. But they fill in gaps, confirm surmises, add painful details.

There are the last letters sent from Berlin in December 1938 by my great-grandmother and her eldest daughter Sophie who was helping her pack away her things and send them ahead to Palestine, before taking her across the border to her own seemingly safe home in Czechoslovakia. Sophie wrote:

Hopefully everything will go smoothly with the passport, the Unbedenklichkeitsschein (required to prove that one had no debts to the Nazi state), the documents, and – that’ll be the most difficult thing – if dear Mama still has no English visa for here.

Sophie wrote ‘here’, but she meant Palestine. Perhaps at that critical moment she imagined herself there too in the Promised Land, with her brother and sisters who had already made the journey to Jerusalem. She visited them in ’38. ‘We couldn’t persuade her to stay’, my father recalled with sorrow.

Almost exactly a year later the two of them wrote again, from Czechoslovakia. To their immense relief they had just heard from Trude, Sophie’s younger sister, another of my great-aunts. Trude had been living in Poznan, which was occupied by the Wehrmacht only 10 days after they invaded Poland. Within weeks Trude and her family were deported, together with thousands of other Jews:

Trude and her family travelled for 48 hours and then had to walk for 12 hours. They overcame all this in good health. Their suitcases (can’t read the word, but think it means ‘robbed’)

They included her new address, in the small Polish town of Ostrow Lubelski, where thousands of Jews were dumped when the Nazis cleared the Warthe region in the west of Poland of racially undesirables to make way for ethnic Germans. Had I had that address when I went there with David Cesarani and Mossy, I might have known which of the small wooden houses had been Trude’s temporary home for almost three meagre years, until they were all taken to Treblinka.

It’s strangely moving to be back with these letters, with their breath, I do not want to say from the dead, but from the living, – the living, who had such hope and so much love for one another.

A new question has been puzzling me, one of which I somehow failed to think before. My cousin found these letters in a previously unopened cupboard. A cupboard, an old suitcase, a trunk: what part of the memory do they represent? What does it mean to live with such a history in a dusty drawer or unopened compartment in the travelling bag of one’s consciousness? Does one put the contents aside, out of mind, in order to build a new life? Do the dramatis personae of that half-buried past nevertheless inhabit, bodiless, the new landscape of one’s existence? Do they step out at night and enter one’s dreams, or nightmares? Do they say, ‘Remember my fate’? Do they say, ‘I bless your new lands, new lives, and the new work of your hands’?

Or is it we, the now living, who shape the meaning of the words of our dead, our histories?

The most basic freedom – life

There is something more basic even than freedom, – life itself.

I have in front of me a picture of the graves in Khan Seihkun, where more than seventy people including many children died a horrible death, probably from the nerve agent sarin. Assad’s regime is almost certainly responsible, protected by lies from Moscow.

The rough concrete stones in the sandy ground remind me of the cemetery I saw on Lesbos, where lay so many anonymous dead, among them babies, drowned during the crossing from Turkey.

The most basic freedom of all is the freedom to live.

Judaism is categorically on the side of life. From the first moment of human existence, from when God breathes the first divine breath into the first human being, life is sacred. The barest, simplest High Holyday prayer is Zochrenu le’chayyim, Remember us for life. Love of life underlies the Jewish determination to survive in times of persecution, bring healing in times of illness, and celebrate in times of joy. Where life becomes unbearably painful, when life comes to a natural end, it is a matter of sorrow, humility and, if we can manage it, acceptance.

Perhaps the most radical rabbinic re-interpretation of the Torah was to render inapplicable all references to the death penalty. Any death demands accountability. Any killing, except in a just war, demands specific, thorough and impartial investigation, whoever the victim. Any breech in this fundamental law is an offence against humanity and God. God’s image has been destroyed in a unique individual; there is less God in the world.

Life is not just under threat from direct physical violence but from the rhetoric of hatred and contempt. We live in a time of rising xenophobia and incitement, against women, foreigners, Jews, Muslims… One must never say ‘It’s only words’, especially when it comes from public figures. Religious, media and political leaders carry responsibility not only for what they say, but for how it leads others to act. One person’s words legitimise another person’s deeds. That is why the brazen speech of President Trump and the shameless distortions of truth by Ken Livingstone* are so dangerous.

The speech of ISIS and its like is terrifying. The greatest blasphemy is when God’s name is evoked to justify hatred and violence. Where regimes, whatever their professed ideology, instigate policies of calumny, contempt, degradation, and collective deportation the road for some will end in death.

The border between respect for life and the acceptance of killing is a boundary humanity cannot afford to cross. Any civilisation, regime, cult or individual which legitimates and glorifies killing, terror and murder thereby renders itself an enemy of humanity itself and of all living being.

As we celebrate freedom on Passover, we celebrate life: its variety, creativity and potential; its need for liberty, opportunity, compassion and nurture; its beauty; its capacity for wonder, generosity, tenderness, love and joy.

Where we honour life, we honour freedom; where we love life, we love liberty too.

*For a superb analysis of his appalling conduct see this piece in Ha’artz by Colin Schindler

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