Читать книгу A New Shoah - Giulio Meotti - Страница 10

A Clock Frozen at 2:04

Arnold Roth traveled from Jerusalem to The Hague so he could hold a photograph of his daughter, Malka, in front of the International Court of Justice as it began its deliberations over the legality of Israel’s security fence. Malka was killed along with fourteen other people by a suicide bomber while enjoying lunch in Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001. “Do I feel bad about the destruction the fence is causing? I do,” Roth said. “But do not compare the murder of my daughter to the inability of a Palestinian to get to work by 9:00 A.M.” Since construction of the security fence began, the number of terrorist attacks has declined by more than 90 percent, and the number of Israelis murdered and wounded has decreased by more than 70 percent and 85 percent, respectively.

Avi Ohayon brought a bullet to The Hague. He had found it under a pile of toys in the bedroom corner where his two sons huddled with their mother when a terrorist shot all three to death. Ohayon held it up before a crowded room a few short blocks from the International Court, where a panel of fifteen judges in black robes ruled that Israel’s security fence was a violation of humanitarian law. Israel was on trial for protecting its citizens.

Fanny Haim had the presence of mind to write an open letter to the judges: “Today, in The Hague, you will sit in judgment. Today, I will bury my husband, my heart—which has been cut in two. I am not a politician. I am appealing to you as someone who has lost her husband, a woman whose heart has been silenced—and a woman whose tragedy the separation fence could have prevented. Today, as you begin your deliberations with open eyes, think, just for a moment, about the ordinary people behind this bloody conflict. Think for a moment about the golden heart of my husband, Yehuda, and about our young son, Avner. Maybe you can explain to him—he’s only ten years old—why in God’s Name he doesn’t have a father anymore. This evening, you will go home, kiss your spouses, hug your children—and I will be alone. Today, I am burying my husband; don’t you bury justice.”

Creating a river of faces, Israeli supporters and families marched through the Dutch city to the triangular plaza near the courthouse, holding posters of victims. Already parked there was the bombed-out shell of the No. 19 bus, in which eleven people were killed in Jerusalem. The organization Christians for Israel had helped bring the bus to The Hague, and held a silent march in front of the court with portraits of 927 terror victims. Paramedics from Magen David Adom read out the names of the dead. Some of the demonstrators were holding up a sign with a picture of the bodies rapped in plastic, and a banner saying: “The people who used this bus in 29.1.2003 were on their way to work and to school. Some of them never got there.”

When the suicide bomber blew it up, the Sbarro restaurant had its usual crowd of families and office workers on their lunch break; there were children, teenagers, mothers with infants in strollers, elderly couples. A clock on the wall froze at 2:04, the time of the explosion. For hours, a bitter odor of explosives and burned bodies hung in the air. “I saw a man lying on the street shaking like he was being electrocuted and a child that looked dead in another man’s arms,” said a survivor. “A woman soldier sat motionless in shock inside, with the table that should have been in front of her gone.” Blood pooled on the floor and stained the pitted plaster walls. Two strollers were overturned on the pavement amid broken glasses, blood splotches, fragments of tables, a charred chair back, a half-opened purse with a small teddy bear as a good-luck charm. There were clots of hair everywhere, and a splinter from a victim’s arm. From the ceiling hung electrical wires, shattered signs, the chimney from the oven. Outside, the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Zaka, the guardians of Jewish piety, picked up even the tiniest scraps of the bodies. Beneath a blanket was the torso of a woman without legs. “The most striking thing I saw, which I will never forget, was a child sitting in a stroller outside of a shop: he was dead, and soon afterward his mother came out and started screaming,” said Naor Shara, a soldier who was passing by the restaurant. All that remained of the building facade was the red, white, and green sign reading: “Sbarro: the Best Italian Choice. Kosher.”

Today there is a plaque in Sbarro that reads: “In memory of the shadows that have fallen upon us. From the Sbarro family, the city of Jerusalem, and the entire Jewish nation.”

Before going to lunch, the last thing Malka Roth and Michal Raziel did was decorate the room of a friend who was returning to Israel later that day. By the time the friend came back, the girls were no longer alive; they had made a date for Sbarro. “Malka was an extraordinary young woman; her life was an act of beauty,” says her father, Arnold. She took care of handicapped children, and her sister was also disabled.

“We were old-school Zionist—we wanted to raise our children where the Jewish life could be truly lived,” Arnold explains. He met his wife, Frimet, in New York, and they moved to Melbourne. “Before getting married, we promised each other that we would emigrate to Israel in a few years. We both believed in the centrality of Israel for the life of Jews. We are both devout in the Orthodox sense. In 1988, we went to live in an apartment in Jerusalem.” Asked where he found the strength to go on after the death of his daughter, Roth replied, “Living a ‘normal life’ and rebuilding it after the death of a daughter is not an end or a result. It is a process—a process that has dominated our lives for seven years, since Malka was taken away from us. There are times when the battle gets the better of you. Each person is different from the next. It is so abnormal to bury your children, victims of an act of barbarity and hatred.”

Roth has nothing rhetorical to say about Israel. “This is no place for angels, but a fascinating place with a unique history. The people of Israel are very similar to others, neither better nor worse, ordinary like all the rest. But the spirit of Israel and its history are special. We don’t live here for the weather. We came here to raise our children where our nation was formed and where its ethical and religious traditions were created. To Jews, Israel is unique, and we live here because we believe it is the natural and normal place for Jews.” The land is part of this hope. “The other members of the Jewish people who have come to live here also give us hope. The education of our children and the religion in which we are raising them give us hope. Nonetheless, nothing changes the sadness and remorse that we feel over the death of our daughter. No culture, hope, or tradition can comfort us over the tragic loss of her wonderful life.”

We ask him what the victims of terrorism represent. “Jewish history is full of tragedy. It isn’t easy to understand. But the questions that families like ours ask are questions that have already been posed by others before us. We also know that there are few answers. This does not make us any less devout, because in Judaism we can ask questions and know that sometimes the answers are elusive and impossible.”

Frimet Roth was born in a secularized family in New York; Arnold has severed roots in Europe. “I was born in Melbourne, to parents who had survived Auschwitz and had lost everything there,” says Arnold. Both of his parents came from Poland. “My mother, Genia, survived together with three of her sisters; they were deported to the ghetto and then to a death camp. After the war, they discovered that their parents and their three brothers had been killed by the Nazis. My father was the youngest of a large family. He and his oldest brother survived; all the others were exterminated by the Nazi machine. My uncle Shaya had decided that the prewar anti-Semitism in Poland was intolerable, so he survived thanks to his decision to emigrate to Tel Aviv. His children, my cousins, are authentic Palestinians, Jews who escaped Nazism and whose parents decided to take them to Palestine. So we know that our lives are an inseparable part of an organic nation with strong connections to the past. I was a child without grandparents. We didn’t talk about our uncles, cousins, and grandparents who had been killed as heroes. They died because they were Jewish, and those who murdered them did so in the name of hatred and racial prejudice.”

Arnold remarks, “I never would have expected to see the past tragedies of our people return into our lives. But it has happened, and today it is impossible for us to see what has happened to our daughter, her death as a martyr, without connecting it to the centuries in which we were dominated by those who hated us, by racists and by the ignorant. This is the reason why we have become so involved in the debate on terrorism, and it frightens and disturbs us that civil society is so reluctant to understand the danger.” Unfortunately, in Israel there does not yet exist a shared memory of terrorism. “Israeli society wavers endlessly between the expression of force and determination on the one hand, and of compassion for the victims on the other. In Israel we have learned that terrorism is not a fluke, but a constant. It is a form of war in which one act of terror is a prelude to the next. They will strike as long as they can, until we have stopped them.”

Arnold has founded a nonprofit association in Malka’s name. The Malki Foundation has no politics, but optimistically celebrates life and the human spirit. “We wanted the foundation dedicated to Malka to be the antithesis of terror. We wanted to honor her memory through practical actions that would unite people, apart from race and religion—Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The most difficult thing for the parents of a daughter who has been killed is to get up in the morning. This gives us the strength. We have financed 27,500 therapy sessions for hundreds of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Druze children. And we did this in order to preserve and honor the memory of a beautiful, sweet young woman who never reached the age of sixteen. I am filled with hope by the stories of a society afflicted by terror that is learning to honor and respect the memory of the human beings who have lost their lives. A society’s correct answer to actions of hatred is actions that affirm life and dignity, starting with the lives and dignity of the victims.”

Roth explains that the concept of chesed is different from that of charity; it is a Hebrew word more similar to “love.” “When you perform an act of chesed, you know that you will receive nothing in return from the person who benefits from it. There will be no ‘thank you.’ People who do chesed do so because they know that it is intrinsically good, and adds goodness to the world.” One example is the preparation of the corpse. “In every Jewish community, there are people who do this for free, without being paid. It is clear that the deceased person cannot offer any thanks. In Hebrew, this is called chesed shel emet, true generosity. My daughter Malka knew this. And she took great pleasure in the simple fact of helping other people, especially children with problems. Her sister, Haya, is blind and does not communicate with the world, not even now, at the age of thirteen. Haya didn’t know how to thank Malka when she picked her up. When we decided to remember Malka by creating a foundation bearing her name, it was because we wanted to honor her beauty and generosity. We wanted to emulate her values. This way she will not be forgotten. We wanted her memory to be respected. As I said at the funeral, her life was an act of beauty. The people who live on the other side of the security barrier, the Palestinians, are not worse than us. It is the values of our society that are different. By doing an act of chesed, we remind ourselves every day that our society is different from theirs. A person like Malka couldn’t have been born in a society that produces murderers.”

Arnold Roth was one of eighteen victims of terror from different countries who spoke at a symposium hosted by the United Nations in New York. “The challenge to individuals, to the victims who endure terrorism, is to find and adopt ways to survive the evil of the perpetrators of terrorism,” he said. “To reaffirm our humanity, our dignity, our generosity, and our optimism.”

Arnold has always felt that the life of his daughter was the continuation of another story cut short by barbarism sixty years earlier—that of Feige, his father’s sister, who was killed by the Nazis in Europe. “Malka herself saw a strong connection with Feige. I live in Israel, and I have chosen to come here to be with my wife and my children. Although our life in Australia was certainly comfortable and good, we wanted more: a place where Jewish values would be at home. Malka, like me, grew up knowing that she was part of Jewish history. She seemed very similar to the aunt that I never met. Feige’s upbringing was very similar to that of Malka; both of them prayed from the same book and mentioned Jerusalem in their prayers three times a day. Unlike Malka, who had the privilege of living in Jerusalem, Feige was murdered in the Nazi campaign of hatred that turned into something unimaginable on a vast scale.”

Malka knew well what terrorism does. “She wept secretly for the victims; we found this out from what she had written. We found it out only after she was gone. Hers was a pain that was intimately connected with that of her people. She wept over the death of innocent Jews, and Malka’s tears have become our tears. Her life was taken away just as the life of my father’s family was torn from him, leaving him alone. It is therefore impossible for me to think about my daughter’s death without it reflecting on the stunning number of Jewish victims over the course of history, especially the victims of the Holocaust. My parents, victims of the Holocaust in which they lost everyone, tried to live productive lives after the horrors of the Nazi extermination. In the same way, my wife and I are trying to help people and to express an optimistic perspective on life.”

Israel is a country that has become all too accustomed to digging graves for its children. Is the Holocaust really over? Those killed at Sbarro also included two-year-old Hemda, four-year-old Avraham Yitzhak, fourteen-year-old Ra’aya, their mother, Tzira, and their father, Mordechai—five members of the Schijveschuurder family cut down in a single stroke. They had come from Holland, where their Jewish ancestors had lived for more than four centuries, since the time of Baruch Spinoza. The children’s grandmother, who had survived the Holocaust, was called the next day to identify the bodies of her loved ones. “I had sworn that I would have another family after the war. Now Arafat is finishing what Hitler started,” said Naomi Friedman. Born in Czechoslovakia, she had gone through the concentration camps of Ravensbruck and Bergen-Belsen, while her husband was in Theresienstadt. “We survived that hell, but we lost seven brothers and sisters. Here we have found worse murderers than the Nazis.”

During the funeral, a woman ran away weeping: “This isn’t a funeral, it’s a holocaust.” The chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, who had married the Schijveschuurders, turned to God: “How long will it last, O my God, how long? It’s been three generations.” Rabbi Lau himself is a survivor of Buchenwald, where he lost two of his brothers, while his father was killed in the gas chamber at Treblinka, where the Jews were exterminated in less than two hours.

Mordechai Schijveschuurder had decided to live “on the front line,” in the Neria settlement. Shortly before he was killed, a friend asked him if he was fearful in driving that route every evening. Mordechai replied, “A bomb could kill me in Jerusalem, too.” He was a man of faith who loved the Torah and had been the principal of a religious school. His wife, Tzira, had taken care of deaf children. After the explosion, before he died, Mordechai recited the first line of the ritual prayer Shema Yisrael, “Hear, O Israel.” He died with those words on his lips.

At the funeral, a friend of the family remarked that “the angel of death can reach wherever he wants.” Ten-year-old Leah wanted to take part in the ceremony for her parents and siblings. “I loved you so much, dearest,” she said. “I am sorry for how naughty I was.” The oldest child of the family, Ben-Zion, also spoke: “We will hold tight what you left us, love for one another. We love you. Watch over us from above, so we can remain united.” Meir, another son, remarked, “The terrorists want to kill the free world, and America and Israel are the symbol of the free world.” Grandma Naomi said, “Thanks to God, we had returned to the land of our dreams, to the land that symbolizes our freedom. Now that the bloody hands of our murderers have reached us, all of this is incomprehensible.”

“To my father, Neria was a place to live like any other,” says Ben-Zion. “He made the aliyah from Amsterdam, and in his mind Israel was Israel. It’s not that Neria was a better place than Petah Tikva, where I was born. Israel was very important to him, but he never protested against the government because of the withdrawal from the Territories. He thought that Israel went from the bank of the Jordan to the Mediterranean.” Ben remembers his father as a businessman first of all, “and then a talmid hakham, a person who studies the Bible. Photographs show him with his black kippah like the Haredim, but he always thought that unless one is a genius, one must work. And he was a genius: every morning he learned something before going to work. He brought books with him every time he traveled. I think that one of his dreams was to be a teacher, but he knew that he could do better in business. But I am grateful that after the death of my father, a school was named after him. Everyone talks about him, never about her, my mother, who was the true genius behind my father. She loved to stay in the background, but he always listened to her. The school wouldn’t have existed without her. She loved her family, my father, and her job. The rest isn’t so important. The others in my family, the ones who are gone now—well, I was in the army, and I didn’t go back home often enough to talk with my sister.”

Ben also talks about how it was possible to get over his mourning, to move forward. “My relationship with the State of Israel is not simply one of hope and strength. I live in Israel as the place of my birth, where my friends are. Those who have helped me have been the friends of the family and my personal friends, and also people on the street. Returning to normal life was very difficult, and at the same time very easy, because I had two sisters to think about. So you can’t beat yourself up all day and feel sorry for yourself. But this deprived me of my own space to mourn. Nonetheless, I must say that I am happy with the way I chose. For a whole year after the death of our family, we went from one place to another without any plan, like a ship without a captain.”