By Dan Williams
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s Holocaust commemorations this 12 months have a searing significance for six aged survivors now deeply scarred by the Hamas assaults of Oct. 7 that sparked the continued Gaza warfare.
The killing and kidnapping spree by Palestinian infiltrators on a Jewish vacation morning shook the sense of safety of Israelis – not least, those that had witnessed the state emerge as a secure haven after the Nazi genocide.
For Bellha Haim, 86, the upheaval is particularly profound.
Her grandson Yotam – like her, a resident of a village close to the Gaza border – was taken hostage by Hamas and managed to flee, solely to be by chance shot lifeless by Israeli troopers.
The trauma drove Haim to return to her native Poland, which she had fled together with her household as a toddler throughout World Battle Two, and the place she is going to on Monday take a part of the “March of the Living” on the website of the Auschwitz demise camp.
The annual ceremony is timed to coincide with Israel’s Holocaust memorial day.
“I never went back, and I wasn’t convinced to go back,” she stated throughout a gathering with different survivors forward of the journey.
“But this time, when they told me that they were connecting the Holocaust and what I call the ‘Holocaust of October 7’ – because then in the Holocaust we (Jews) were not a united people, we didn’t have a country, and suddenly this pride of mine that has been broken, my pride in my people and my country that was shattered in front of my eyes – I said, ‘This time I will break my oath and I will go out.'”
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As a young person, Yotam had taken half within the annual Auschwitz vigil and Haim stated she noticed the occasion as an opportunity for communion with him and different victims of the Hamas assault.
“I will go out in the name of Yotam, who marched there when he was in high school, and I will go out there to shout out the cry of the slain, of the babies, of all my good friends that I will never meet again,” she said.
ARABIC YELLING AND GUNFIRE
Among those joining her will be 90-year-old Daniel Louz, whose hometown Kibbutz Beeri lost a tenth of its residents to the Palestinian attackers.
In some ways, he said, that ordeal was worse for him than the European war, when he escaped Nazi round-ups in his native France although half his family perished in Poland.
After he awoke to the sound of Arabic yelling and gunfire, “I used to be consistently busy with surviving and determining what to do,” Louz said. “In France, as a toddler, I suffered every kind of post-traumas that I’ve realized to deal with. However in Beeri, it was the primary time that I felt the concern of demise.”
A neighbouring house was riddled with bullets. Louz’s was untouched. He says he imagined the souls of the six million Holocaust victims steering Hamas away from him. “They most likely needed me to be right here to inform this story,” he said, weeping.
Other Holocaust survivors participating in the March of the Living include Smil Bercu Sacagiu, 87, whose home was hit by a rocket from Gaza, and Jacqueline Gliksman, 81, whose home was torched by a Palestinian infiltrator.
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“What was left, and luckily the terrorist didn’t see it, is my grandchildren,” she stated, referring to gold collectible figurines on a necklace she was carrying. “That’s the only thing I have left.”
Earlier than he was seized, Haim’s grandson left a textual content message: “They’re burning down my house. I smell gas. I’m scared.”
She stated that reminded her of a Holocaust-era track in Yiddish, invoking centuries of pogroms, with the chorus “fire, Jews, fire”. A veteran campaigner for peace with the Palestinians, Haim stated she would now not pursue that activism.
“I’m not able to,” she stated. “Now what pursuits me is just my individuals.”