Читать книгу A New Shoah - Giulio Meotti - Страница 9
Оглавление68.864 Was My Name
The siren begins on a rising note before settling into a mournful steady tone. For two long minutes, the signs of human movement simply stop. Everyone is overwhelmed by the mysterious solidarity of the moment. It is Yom Hashoah, the solemn commemoration of the Holocaust. Drivers get out of their cars to recall the Nazi extermination of six million European Jews.
The same single-tone siren was used as the all-clear signal in the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq threatened to “burn half of Israel.” The specter of chemical warfare was a special nightmare, one that recalled memories of the annihilation in Europe and brought forth feelings of helplessness and fear. To its 4.6 million people, Israel distributed gas masks, syringes of an anti-nerve-gas agent, and powder to absorb vapor droplets on the skin, evoking dark memories for elderly citizens whose families perished in Nazi gas chambers. The fact that Saddam’s missile power was aided by German companies drew a line in Israeli minds from gas masks in Tel Aviv to gas chambers at Auschwitz and Treblinka. “The echoes and reverberations of the past returned,” said Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. “Once more we spoke of gas, we spoke of Germany.” Israeli infants had to be put inside a greenhouse-like plastic tent called a mamat, and parents could touch them only through stiff plastic gloves. “Another dictator using gas on the largest Jewish population in the world,” said Theodore Weiss, a survivor of three concentration camps and president of the Holocaust Educational Foundation, in Wilmette, Illinois. At times of crisis, the memories of the Holocaust always surface from the Jewish unconscious, from places where Israel did not even know they were hidden.
For Israel, there is no moment more significant than Yom Hashoah: when the siren sounds, people stop in the streets; they stand at attention after getting out of their cars; they freeze while shopping in the supermarkets, studying in the universities, marching in the army, doing business. It is like a great wall of silence, full of suffering and vitality. All of Israel focuses its devotion on one memory. Some thought goes to the uprisings in the ghettos and in the camps, the pinnacle of Israel’s national spirit.
This is why, when Ilan Ramon died, the country united around his name—because the soft-spoken young man with a humble expression had brought the memory of the Holocaust into outer space. As the first Israeli astronaut, he had carried with him a copy of a drawing that Petr Ginz made in the ghetto of Theresienstadt before he was killed in Auschwitz at the age of sixteen. Ramon was excited about bringing along the drawing by “a boy imprisoned within the walls of the ghetto, walls that could not imprison his spirit. His drawings are the testimony of the triumph of his spirit.” Ilan also brought a Torah scroll and a coin from 69 CE, minted in Jerusalem, with the inscription “Salvation for the people of Israel.” Ramon identified himself as the son of a German Jew who had taken refuge in Israel and a woman who had survived Auschwitz. He had taken into space the memory of the Holocaust, which his mother had escaped, unlike his grandfather and other relatives, and of the struggle for independence, in which his father had participated. Ilan died when the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded on February 11, 2003, killing the seven astronauts aboard.
The Torah scroll that Ilan brought into space, the first ever to have gone there, was the one that Joachim Joseph had used to prepare for his bar mitzvah in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Early one Tuesday morning, before the alarm went off, the prisoners put blankets over the windows and lit candles, and Joachim chanted his passage from the Torah, as every Jewish boy has done for centuries. Then Rabbi Simon Dasberg, who had given him the scroll, said to him, “I will not get out of here alive; here, take the scroll, and tell the story.” Joachim gave it to Ilan as “a symbol of the Jewish resistance even in the extermination camps, of the determination to survive.” The Torah scroll, he noted, “came out of the most profound darkness, and Ilan took it into the dazzling light of space.”
Ilan Ramon is buried in Moshav Nahalal in the Jezreel Valley, a place where death and malaria once reigned before the Jewish pioneers turned it into one of the most fertile areas in Israel. And beside him is the liberator of Jerusalem, Moshe Dayan. The diary entry with his dvar Torah, message from the Torah, has not come down to us. It will remain forever indecipherable. Just as in the legend about the Jewish mystic Baal Shem Tov: He met the Messiah and asked when he would come down to earth. The answer was, “When your message arrives in heaven.”
Several months after the Columbia explosion, a group of Israeli pilots made a highly symbolic flight. Ignoring the protests from the Auschwitz museum, the Israeli jets, piloted by children of Holocaust survivors, flew over the concentration camp that had swallowed up a million Jews. The demonstration was led by Brigadier General Amir Eshel, whose grandmother had been murdered down there in the gas chambers of Birkenau. “We pilots promise to be a shield for the Jewish people and for Israel,” Eshel said. “There was the platform where the selection took place, the railway line, the green fields, an innocent silence. That is how hell appeared on earth, in the heart of Europe. As an Israeli who had been taught that the Jews had gone ‘like sheep to the slaughter,’ I felt the courage of the millions who faced infinite suffering in the ghettos, in the forests, in the cattle cars. Representing their memory was a great honor for us. We understood the enormity of our responsibility, in guaranteeing the immortality of our people and bearing their greatness upon our wings.”
On the occasion of Israel’s fifty-eighth anniversary, Eliezer Shkedi, then commander of the air force and a man with a contagious smile, had his father, a Shoah survivor, get aboard his F-1. “For me it is clear that my duty is to restore value to human history,” Shkedi said, “and for this reason I followed the path of my father, and my father today is somewhat compensated.” The chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, a survivor of Auschwitz, said that Israel represents a special form of revenge: “The revenge is that we are here, the revenge is that we are home, the revenge is that we have a country, the revenge is that we are here in this place with the blue and white flag and the Star of David.”
For Jews, the fact of the Shoah is a justification for Israel’s existence. For the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denial of the Shoah is reason enough to pursue a war of extermination against Israel. According to Ahmadinejad’s logic, Israel was created after the Shoah (a historical fallacy); Jews have used the Shoah as an excuse to reclaim their nation (another historical fallacy); and therefore, since the Shoah didn’t happen, Israel may consequently be obliterated. This is why, when a Holocaust survivor is killed by a suicide bomber or loses a relative in a terrorist attack, the entire country reads the story with anguish. It is a perfect murder—the conclusion of a project begun sixty years earlier in Europe. The aim to annihilate the Jews has left a long trail of darkness down through the generations.
George and Anna Yakobovitch had gotten on the train to Auschwitz together. He was able to get away before they reached the gate of death. She came to the ramp of Dr. Joseph Mengele, along with her father, mother, and siblings. They were gassed immediately, but she made it out alive. Thirty years later, George and Anna met again by chance and got married. At a Passover supper in 2002, a suicide bomber killed George on the spot, together with twenty-seven other people. “Sons of pigs and monkeys,” the terrorist had called them before blowing himself up.
Another victim of terrorism was Mendel Bereson, from Saint Petersburg, who had lost all his relatives in Europe; today his family in Israel says he was “a true Zionist,” someone who “said that the Jews have only one state.” Leah Levine had just found out that her brother, the only other member of their large family to have escaped the genocide, was living in Russia. She is remembered as “a wonderful wife, always happy, and the mother of four boys.” Leah Strick, a survivor of the massacre in the Bialystok ghetto in Poland, was blown up in a bus on a Sunday morning while she was going to visit her sister in a geriatric clinic.
“We came here by ourselves because our parents were killed in the Holocaust,” said the brother of the artist Miriam Levy, who was killed in Jerusalem in June 2003. Her grandson noted that his “elegant and intelligent grandmother had emerged from the abyss of the Holocaust aboard the ship Exodus.” Miriam had come to Israel on the legendary ship that in 1947 defied the British blockade by trying to reach Palestine with 4,515 Holocaust survivors. “We swore to them then: never again another Auschwitz,” Commandant Yossi Harel would say later. “I like to think that Israel was born then, on those ships crammed with refugees considered illegal immigrants.” The Exodus 1947 was fired on by the English in the Bay of Haifa, and with dead and wounded aboard, Harel had to surrender. One girl on the ship had escaped being killed by the Nazis because she was buried under a pile of corpses; she could no longer close her eyes because her eyelid muscles had contracted.
Elsa Cohen and Bianca Shichrur, also victims of terrorism, had much in common. Both had survived the Second World War, and both had a mentally disabled son living in the same area of Jerusalem. Bianca, born in Italy, had come to Israel forty years earlier. Elsa had lost her whole family in the Holocaust, and was one of the children of Kinder Transport in London after the outbreak of the war. About ten thousand Jewish children were sent to Great Britain, without their parents, from Austria, Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Elsa made the journey with one of the children of Robert Wasselberg, who had to decide which of his three children would take the last spot available on a Kinder Transport.
Arno Klarsfeld is the son of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, who dedicated their lives to hunting down Nazi war criminals. Arno said that he “broke intellectually and morally” with France in September 2001, after the attacks on the Twin Towers. He moved from Paris to a small apartment in Tel Aviv, refusing the subsidies provided for immigrants and taking up the study of Hebrew. He was outside the Mike’s Place pub in Tel Aviv on April 30, 2003, right after an attack by a suicide bomber with an English passport who had come from London to massacre Jews. Those charred bodies, those human remains lying there on the pavement, gave Arno the last push toward enlisting in the Israeli army. One of those lifeless bodies was that of Yanay Weiss, the son of Lipa Weiss.
The saga of Lipa Weiss is emblematic of how much the survivors of the crematory ovens have suffered from Islamic fanaticism. He was fourteen years old when he was deported to Auschwitz, where in a few hours he saw his entire family vanish in the gas chambers—his parents, his grandparents, his brothers and sisters. After the war, he joined a kibbutz in Israel. Two years before his son Yanay was killed at Mike’s Place, Lipa had lost his granddaughter Inbal in a suicide attack.
Lipa’s story, recounted here at length for the first time, began in Zdeneve, a tiny village in the Carpathians, in December of 1924. “Mine was a classic Jewish family,” he says. “As a child I studied in a cheder; I learned Hebrew and the Bible, translating our sacred language word by word into Yiddish, which was spoken at home. Up until the age of fourteen, I studied at both the Jewish school and the public school. I learned the stories of Adam and Eve, Isaac and Jacob, about how Joseph was sold by his brothers, about the captivity in Egypt, about Moses and the liberation and the conversations with the Pharaoh, the Exodus, the desert and the Ten Commandments, about Joshua at Jericho. These stories were the origin of my faith. Hebron, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem were my homeland, and I wanted to see them in person. This was the origin of my faith in Judaism, my faith in God and Jewish values. When I got older, my father questioned me every Sunday morning about the previous week’s reading from the Torah. All this was done in a kind and respectful way, and this instilled in me a profound respect for my father and mother. She cooked my favorite dishes for me when I came back from school.”
Until 1938, under the democratic Czechoslovakian government, the Jews were not discriminated against, and those years had a very strong impact on Lipa’s personality: “Respect for Shabbat, the prayers in the synagogue, strengthened my faith in a merciful God, and this would give me the strength to confront the horrific period that would follow. I believed that God would save us.”
The Weisses went through years of dire poverty. “Farming was the way of life in our region, growing potatoes for domestic consumption, and working in the forests. There were no industries or businesses. The Jews sold basic necessities to non-Jews. When Hungary came back to power in 1939, new economic laws were imposed on the Jews. The men, including my father, were conscripted to work on the fortifications, because we were on the border between Poland and Hungary. My family was not able to support itself, and since I was the oldest child I went to work in the forests to permit my mother to buy oil, sugar, and salt. We had two cows, and they gave us about a gallon of milk a day. We also had the potatoes that my parents grew in a little garden plot. Over time we were even able to buy clothes, which were mended and passed from one child to another.”
With the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Nazis and the Soviets, the Polish region on the border with Hungary was put under Soviet control. And the Jews were accused of being Communist spies. “The most difficult thing was proving Hungarian citizenship from generation to generation, and it was too expensive to bribe the official,” Lipa recalls. “My father returned home for the feasts of Rosh Hashanah and Passover, and two more children were born.” During that period, the fate of the Jews was bound to the success of the Germans. The worse the war went, the more ferocious the SS became. “After the fall of Stalingrad in 1943 and the beginning of the German retreat, the Nazis started to deport the Jews to Ukraine, and the Ukrainians killed them by every means possible. They took families out onto the Dniester River, or killed them in the forests with axes and knives. When the Russians approached our area, the Jews were banned from leaving the villages. I was allowed to work in the forests, but not to enter a non-Jewish house.”
The Hungarian regime under Horthy understood that the war was coming to an end, and withdrew its army to the east. The Germans entered, and together with the Hungarian fascists they began to confine the Jews to ghettos. “In April of 1944, at the end of Passover, when my father was at home, we were told to pack our bags, one bag weighing forty pounds for each person, and to get ready to leave our home. The next day we were deported to the ghetto of a city named Mukachevo. There was no water, no bathrooms or kitchens. Whole families packed together, one next to another. There were no medicines, and the sick died, the elderly died. Every day the bodies were burned in the communal crematory in the cemetery. We cooked potatoes and beans, and every day a list was drawn up of the people to be deported to Auschwitz.”
Lipa Weiss would be one of the few Jewish survivors of the death machine of Adolf Eichmann, who deported the entire Hungarian Jewish community to the gas chambers. The Ungarische Aktion was the apex of the German capacity for extermination. About one-third of the victims of Auschwitz came from Hungary. Twelve thousand Hungarian Jews arrived every day, and Eichmann needed just twenty officers and a hundred functionaries to annihilate one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe.
Lipa remembers very clearly the time he saw the SS: “They were looking for the important men in the community. They pulled them out of the roll-call line, in front of their wives and children, and began to torture them. They ordered them to remove their hats, cut off their beards, and whipped them to the point of exhaustion. For us, these men were the highest authorities, models of honesty, morality, and piety, and they were publicly humiliated. When they were no longer able to react, they were left to die where they were lying. The stronger ones, who stayed alive longer, were shot. On the lists were the names of the people to be deported—entire families, the sick, pregnant women, the elderly.”
Then came the day of deportation. “No one was allowed to bring more than ten pounds of luggage. There was barbed wire on the boxcar windows, and when the deportation began the German and Hungarian prisoners began shouting. Everyone, regardless of age or physical ability, had to get into the boxcars. An SS official checked to make sure they were full. We had no food or water. We didn’t know where they were taking us, but we were on the train for four days. At the few stops, they threw out the urine and feces. Without warning, the train arrived at its destination. The doors were opened, and we were ordered to get out fast, without taking anything with us. We came down a ramp, and that was the first time we saw the prisoners who were already there. Their job was to separate the men from the women and children. I don’t know how, but suddenly I found myself among the men. My mother, my seventeen-year-old sister, who was holding my one-year-old brother, and the other children all disappeared, and I didn’t see them anymore. It was night, and they took us away. In a camp, the SS inspected us to see who was able to work. Those who were able went to the right; otherwise they joined the women and children.”
Lipa looked out between two strands of barbed wire. “On my left, I saw the smoke of the crematories, and what looked like dead bodies being lifted by the hands and feet and thrown into the fire. We heard terrible screams. Later we found out that the gas chambers were there. They divided us into groups of ten and ordered us to run. We hadn’t had any food or water. We came to a big shower room, where the men and women were stripped and beaten, and examined to see if they were hiding any valuables. The hot water was turned on for a few minutes, and then suddenly it turned cold. We went into another room where the barbers cut our hair. We were given a uniform, a hat, and an aluminum mess tin. That was all we had left in the world.” The mess tin was the most important thing—without it you didn’t eat. “The next morning, the men and women walked in two parallel lines. I saw the girls from my section, and I could see who had survived and who hadn’t. I was the only one left from my family. All the others, my parents, sisters, brothers, the relatives with us on the train, they were all exterminated the night before.”
Only Lipa and a cousin on his father’s side were still alive. “From there we went to the barracks of Birkenau; we spent hours in the Appellplatz, famished and exhausted. We had not had anything to eat or drink since the ghetto. We had to support the prisoners who were about to fall down. The barracks was full of beds. We had to ask permission to go to the toilet, which was a barrel with planks on it. They ladled vegetable soup into our mess kits; the Germans called it Durgensuppe. It had no flavor, but we had to fill our stomachs. During those two terrible weeks, the journey by train, the time in the barracks, I had to learn to live in a new way. In the ghetto, I had slept with my parents, I had a blanket, but here I was alone. The few things I had to make my life happy had been taken away from me when I got on the train. There was no drinking water. We had to bathe ourselves standing up, in front of the others. How could human beings do this? The only things of your own were your shoes, and if they were good shoes you would live longer; you had less chance of getting sick. Any kind of help, like giving someone a glass of water, was forbidden. If you helped a sick person, you were risking your own life. The sick and the injured were left where they were until they died. If they were lucky, they went to the Revier, a sort of hospital. There you were subjected to every sort of medical experiment until you died. Those who could work went to Commando X or Y; those who couldn’t went to Commando Himmel, the clinic. And then they were burned in the crematory. You always had to watch what was happening around you. The policy of the Germans was always Vernichtung, annihilation. And there were two ways of achieving this: gassing the unfit, the women, the children, the sick, and the elderly; and working the fit to death. The saying was Vernichtung durch Arbeit.”
Lipa was always thinking about his loved ones. “You thought about your parents who had died in that horrible way, and about the fact that you were left alone. There was no one to tell you what was happening. But the others were all alone, too. There were some who were trying to make it through the pain, and some who just couldn’t. They threw themselves against the high-voltage wires, or killed themselves in other ways. In Auschwitz, I thought that I would be strong, the Germans would need me. One day we were taken to the train station in Birkenau. The orchestra was playing. Our only ‘property’ was the mess kit and a piece of bread. The train left in the evening, and the bread was our only food for four days. We had no water.”
On a Sunday morning, the train stopped in Mauthausen, in Austria, not far from where Hitler was born. “We walked for four miles, toward an uninhabited place, and on a hill we could see guard towers. And the SS opened the huge gate. We entered the Appellplatz. There were two marble buildings in front of us, built by the prisoners with stones from the nearby quarry. From the balcony, the commandant informed us of the rules we had to follow. After that, we went through another door. The ground was covered with gravel, and there were barracks on both sides. On the right were the gas chambers, the crematory, and the laundry. Our barracks were empty, no tables or beds. We had to state our names and birthdates, one by one. They told you that from that moment on, you would be called by your registration number. My name was 68.864. When they called out your name, you had to respond ‘Jawohl,’ that’s me. That number was stamped on both of my pants legs and on my jacket, together with a red triangle and the letter J.” It was the initial for Juden, Jew.
“In the afternoon, they gave us soup and three and a half ounces of bread, and we were sent to the barracks for the night. It was the end of June, it was hot, the sun was blazing, and we were not given anything to drink. There were no mattresses, and we were crammed together side by side. Our sleep was disturbed by cries and wails of pain. We stayed like this from Sunday to Thursday, when they took us to the trains going to Melk, on the Danube, to a concentration camp in the mountains. On the gate it said ‘Pioneern Kaserme,’ and it was the base of the military engineers. In one building was the general headquarters, and in another were the kapos. We slept in the garages. We were divided into work groups, and I was put together with a friend from my village. Our job was to build the tunnel walls.”
The plant was used by Daimler-Benz to build modern aircraft. “An engineer in the SS was in charge of the work. The entire process was carried forward with German precision. There was an electric fence to keep us from escaping. In the evening, after counting us and counting those who had died that day, they brought us back to the camp. Occasionally they gave us cigarettes as a reward, and these could be exchanged for some soup, some bread, or a good pair of shoes taken from the dead. But the food was never enough to satisfy us; there were too few calories, and our bodies had no energy reserves. Many died and were burned in the crematory.”
Lipa was able to assess the progress of the war from three things: “from what the trains were transporting, from the number of tanks, and from the mood of the Germans. After D-Day, we saw the airplanes that were going to bomb the German cities. We were overjoyed to see the four-plane formations in the sky. But in the camp, the Germans’ dedication to the extermination never waned. When the Russians took Vienna, forty miles away from us, instead of letting us go the Germans took us to Linz. On the fourth day of the march, we were sleeping in the Austrian cold. Many died, or were shot because they couldn’t walk.”
They arrived in Ebensee, where there was another Daimler complex. “There were three sleeping in the same spot, and in the morning you realized that the one sleeping next to you was dead. There wasn’t enough food, and the death rate rose dramatically. Death was present everywhere. Our job was to build new train tracks to replace the ones that had been bombed. One Friday, I was assigned to work in the tunnels. In the afternoon, we were taken outside to have some soup. The SS officer told us that just this once we would have the chance to be ‘normal’ people. We didn’t return to the tunnels after lunch. It was a fantastic day. Each of us found a spot to lie in the sun. We felt we would be set free any day. One morning, the commandant announced that the Americans were going to try to take the camp, and that the SS were going to fight. He told us that if we wanted to save ourselves, we would have to go into the tunnels. We refused, and he disappeared; we never saw him again. There was no more order in the camp. Some went around looking for food, while the stronger prisoners lynched the kapos.”
The Americans arrived on Sunday, but they left almost immediately. “My friends and I, blood brothers whose cooperation had been the secret of our survival, found ourselves free again. It was as if we had been reborn. The memories of our families exterminated in Auschwitz, the knowledge that we were alone in the world and far from home . . . who could we talk to about this? Who could advise us? My friend and I were exhausted, without enough strength to walk. Our last meal had been some bread the day before. And we left the camp for the city. We had grown accustomed to the images of our imprisonment—so the lake, the mountains, the farming village all fascinated us.”
They came to the city of Ebensee, to another labor camp. “We stayed there for three weeks, drinking milk, eating eggs, eating chocolate. I signed the list of people from Czechoslovakia, and we were divided by nationality. I wanted to find somewhere new to go, not go back to the place where I was born and see the people who for years had ignored our sufferings. I had lost my faith in God on the night in Auschwitz when I saw that horror, the innocent Jews walking to their death, their faith in God still strong. Their only crime was that they were Jews. Then I thought: how could the world ignore what was happening to the Jews? Europe knew and saw. Hitler had been very clear about his intention: the final solution to the problem of the Jews. I wanted no part in that world. One day the Jewish soldiers from Israel, called the Brigade, and the English and Americans brought faith and hope to the camp. They helped us believe that the Jews could defend themselves and have a state of their own. They could be ‘Jews in Palestine.’ Then why not build their state there? Europe had been destroyed, the cities had been razed to the ground, and the Allied armies were there. Normal life hadn’t resumed yet.”
After more than a month in the camp, Lipa was taken to Prague. “The Czechs welcomed us and gave us medicine, they invited us to eat in their homes, and they wanted to know what had happened. I saw some of the others reunite with their relatives, and I desperately wanted to meet one of my own. I knew that my parents were dead, but I thought I might be able to find some other relative. I went back home, but I discovered that all of the Jewish homes had been burned. So I went to Budapest, where I met one of my father’s cousins; he was in the Czech army outfit that had entered Auschwitz, where he had found one of his sisters. I got work in a Jewish orphanage, but while I was living in Prague, the Communists interrogated me about the reason why I had not gone back to my country.”
Meanwhile, the Zionist leaders had sent emissaries from Palestine to Europe, to organize the new Jewish state. “The young Zionists prepared our immigration into Israel, the aliyah. I joined the socialist group Hashomer Hatzair. They gave us lessons on Jewish history and Zionism. But the British had put restrictions on immigration, so we stayed in the camp until March of 1948. I remember the vote at the United Nations, an incredible historical event. Just two years earlier, in the camps, we had no future. Now there was recognition of the right of the Jews to the land of their fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We knew that the Jewish army, the Palmach, was smaller than the Arab armies. We were eager to take part in the war.”
On May 14, 1948, Lipa found himself in Marseilles, where he would take the first ship bound for Israel. “We set sail knowing that we had a state. When we arrived in Haifa, there was excitement in the air. The Jewish army enlisted us immediately. The women were taken to Kibbutz Masaryk, and we were left to guard them. Then to another kibbutz, Ein Hashofet. While I was still at Kfar Masaryk, I married Judith in a religious ceremony, but without any celebration.” Lipa was alone in the world. There was no one to share his joy. “I worked in the dairy for one year, and then I was enlisted in the artillery for two more.”
In November 1950, Avner was born. “Avner means ‘memory of my father.’ We wanted to honor my father and Judith’s father, who had been exterminated in Auschwitz. Two years later I became a reservist, and I returned to my job at the dairy. It was hard; the kibbutz depended on our work. But it was very satisfying—rewarding in a way that can’t be measured in monetary terms. The kibbutz became my life. The standard of living was low, but the quality of education was very high, and that was the most important thing for me. I hadn’t received any formal education since middle school, and this way of life allowed me to study. I made up the ground that I had lost. I saw the progress and success of the kibbutz as a living testimony to the expertise of Jews who had been viewed as less than human in the camps. We Jews now had a country, where we did every sort of agricultural work and sold the fruits of our labors. We were capable of defending ourselves. I found myself in a country where the Jews were laborers, farmers, merchants, actors, musicians—in other words, a normal country. We were independent, and we didn’t exploit anyone.”
In 1956, Lipa had another son, Yanay—the one who would be killed by a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv. “I was no longer a refugee. I had my family, even if it looked different from the outside. The hours I spent with my children were the best hours of the day. After living in a tent, we moved into a real building, into a little apartment that was very cozy, a source of satisfaction. I began working on a state-of-the-art chicken farm. All over the country, Israeli agriculture had moved from primitive to modern and scientific. We were innovators in many fields. During these years, I was frequently called up from the reserve.”
The years went by, and in 1965 there was a third son, Gidi. “Avner played the flute and oboe. Yanay loved to listen to stories. On Sundays we went for walks, and we spent many hours in the swimming pool that the members of the kibbutz had built by themselves.” Later, recalls Lipa, “Yanay developed a great talent for music; he played the violin and the guitar, and the kibbutz paid for his lessons. We wanted our children to develop their talents.”
When war broke out in 1967, all Israeli men had to enlist, and Lipa did his duty as a reservist. “I worked on the farm for twenty-one years,” he recounts, “and then I studied management on behalf of the kibbutz and began working in the field of management. I worked until I was seventy-nine years old, when I had to retire for health reasons. Since my retirement, I have been active in the senior citizens’ center.” Judith and Lipa divorced in 1981, and Lipa married Pnina, who was also a member of the kibbutz. “We spent twenty splendid years together, in mutual love and respect. Pnina got kidney disease and had to undergo dialysis, but although we had done everything we could, she died in September of 2000.”
All three of Lipa’s sons served in the army: Avner in the artillery, Yanay in the music band, and Gidi in the aviation sector. “Although I myself had been a reserve soldier for twenty-six years, my anxiety and concern for my sons has been a constant in my life,” Lipa says. He has found great joy in his grandchildren. Avner’s first daughter, Inbal, was born in 1979, followed by Avital, Ami, and Daniel. “To hold a grandchild in my arms, receive a kiss, be called Saba, ‘Grandpa,’ the laughter, the games, the delight of their first words—all of this has been a joy.”
The first of the Weiss family to fall victim to a suicide bomber was the charming Inbal. “She had served as a teacher in the army. One day a week, she went to the archives of Beit Lohamei HaGeta’ot, the center that documents the Jewish resistance against the Nazis—the partisans, the clandestine fighters, and those who rebelled in the ghettos. She was motivated by compassion, and by her connection to her grandparents and the Jewish people. Inbal and I had a special relationship, we talked about many things, she admired me and I admired her.” After her military service, it was time for Inbal to enter college. “She went to Emek Yisrael College. She started bringing me books, and she did a project on the policies of the Jewish Agency for Israel in my kibbutz. I admired her tenacity and determination. She was sent to the dean’s office, where she was told that she had been chosen for a special program. I remember that it was November 29, 2001, and Inbal called to tell me; she was excited, proud, and happy. I planned to see her that Friday at dinner at her parents’ house in Zichron Ya’akov. She always took the bus home. But that Thursday, she took a different route to meet her parents and go to the restaurant. The route wound through a number of Arab villages. Her parents called her on her cell phone to find out where she was. Two minutes later, the suicide bomber blew himself up. The bus was almost empty; there were three dead. Inbal was one of them.”
Israeli television interrupted its broadcasts to report on the attack. “I was nervous. I called Avner at home and the children told me that Avner and Marianne had gone to wait for Inbal at the bus stop. I called his cell phone and asked him where she was. I realized that Inbal had been on the bus. Later they went to identify the body. It was a horrible night. I went to Zichron to watch the children. We sat down in shock; no one said a word. We were alone with our sadness and our anger. Their parents returned in the middle of the night. We sat up until the morning, waiting for the funeral. It was rainy, another note of sadness. Pnina, my second wife, had died the year before, and I missed her deeply. I sat down to write my eulogy for Inbal. I don’t think I wept the way I did that night in Auschwitz, when my whole family was killed, maybe because I had to think about the things I had to do. But I had not wept since that night in the camps. Now everything made me weep. I missed Inbal so much; I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about her. I decided that I couldn’t let this crush me. I focused on my sons and returned to my routine. Inbal had been killed because she was a Jew, just like my parents, my relatives, and six million more.”
Yanay Weiss, Lipa’s second son, had left the kibbutz after his military service. “He wanted to become a musician, to make a living with music, although he would do any kind of work.” In Tel Aviv he married Orna, whose father was a survivor of Auschwitz and whose mother, together with her twin sister, had been among the “Mengele twins” who were subjected to horrifying medical experiments. “Orna taught at a nursery school and then worked as a therapist. Because they lived far away, I didn’t see them as often as I wanted. We saw each other once a month and at the holidays. Yanay gave up his dream of being a musician to work for a high-tech company, but he never gave up on music. He organized a band and a choir for the employees. On Tuesday night they were playing at Mike’s Place, and many of their friends and fans were there. The pub was full of people who had come to listen to them. They weren’t being paid anything; their only compensation was joy. Yanay had a family full of warmth and love.”
On April 29, 2003, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, Orna was at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, happy because they were going to give her an award for her work. “They decided to meet at the station in Tel Aviv. Yanay came with a bouquet of flowers, they had coffee, and then she went home and he went to the pub. That evening Yanay’s brother was at the pub, but he left a few minutes before the attack. The suicide bomber was stopped at the door by the bouncer, who was thrown back a few yards but survived. Yanay had gone outside to get some fresh air, and he was killed. The next morning I woke up at the usual time, 4:40, and turned on the radio. I heard that there had been an attack at Mike’s Place and that there were three dead. I was very anxious; I didn’t know the name of the pub, though I knew that Yanay played in Tel Aviv every Tuesday night. But I knew that the odds were against another horror in my family. Inbal had been killed a year and a half before. For two hours, I forced myself not to call. I thought that if Yanay were at home and if I called before seven o’clock, I would wake everyone up. Then the door opened. It was Avner—he had come to tell me the news. Yanay had been killed. It was as if my entire world had collapsed on me. Inbal had left her parents and relatives behind; Yanay left a widow and two orphans, a terrible tragedy. Avner took me to Orna. She was sitting down. She told me about the last time she had seen him, their last kiss. This time I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t write a eulogy for my son.”
During the shivah, the seven days of mourning, hundreds of people from Yanay’s workplace and from the music world came to pay their respects. One of his coworkers created a memorial website. “The terrorists were not from the Palestinian Territories; they were English citizens, well educated and from respectable families. Terrorism was based on hatred of Jews.
Inbal and Yanay were not killed as soldiers in battle, but as innocent citizens. The occupation is not the result of direct government policies, but a consequence of the fact that we must defend ourselves. I have suffered many losses in my life. The death of my family in the Holocaust had become a faint twinge of pain; my joy and pride in my sons and their families, and the satisfaction of my participation in the kibbutz and in Israel, had overshadowed the memory of those I had lost. But the tragic, cruel killing of my dearly beloved granddaughter and of Yanay, who was in the prime of life, who loved others and was himself loved, this has hit me very hard. I could never have imagined that I would bury my son and granddaughter in my lifetime—that I would be alive and they would be dead, that I would mourn for them in a eulogy. This has devastated both me and Judith. It robbed us of the satisfaction we had found in life. I had a family that was growing, and it has been reduced in such a cruel way.”
Both Inbal and Yanay believed in coexistence with the Arabs. “Judith and I had raised them that way. My kibbutz was very left-wing; the motto was ‘Zionism, socialism, and brotherhood. ’” I had great respect for the Arabs, and I identified with this ideology. Even after the attack, I was not angry with the Arabs, but with the extremists and fanatics who want to kill us. In spite of everything, our lives have been touched by hatred, cruelty, and fanaticism. Before they died, we gathered around the table for birthdays, for the Jewish holidays, we sang, we joked, we talked about our lives. It was the purest form of pleasure for me. But now when we get together, our joy is mingled with sadness. We don’t say it out loud, but inside we feel the absence of Inbal and Yanay. It is the sorrow that stains our happiness.”
These days, Lipa thinks about his childhood in the village in the Carpathians, about the death camps, and about rebirth in Israel. “I was born in the early decades of the last century, and I survived the horrors of the years that followed. I found happiness in life in the kibbutz, in the house I lived in for sixty years, and in Israel, which has made unbelievable progress. I am proud of who we are, and of what I and the other members of the kibbutz achieved through our work. Today, at the age of eighty-four, I am retired, and the kibbutz takes care of everything for me. My love for all of them, Avner, Marianne, Orna, Gidi, Dorit, and the other children, and my love and concern for Judith is what gives me the strength to move forward and to try to live a normal life. We talk about our losses openly and freely; we mention Inbal and Yanay all the time. But we also enjoy what we have.”
The story of Lipa Weiss is a story about destruction and heroism, about death and rebirth. It is the sacred story in which every life that ends is linked to another being born. It is Israel with its silent ranks of six million souls that march, hand in hand, until the ranks form an unbroken circle. One of the greatest mysteries of the past two thousand years is how one-third of God’s chosen people—six million men, women, and children—were reduced to ashes during the Holocaust, and no more than a blink of an eye later, the same battered people won independence and freedom in Israel for the first time since the destruction of the Holy Temple. “We, your children, were born to survivors of the Holocaust, and constitute irrefutable proof to those who tried so hard to extinguish the Jewish nation,” said Avner Weiss, speaking at his father’s kibbutz, Ein Hashofet. “Our existence is also a partial compensation for the inconsolable loss of your loved ones, who were taken from you with such brutality. We were born in this land, as members of a kibbutz, growing up as the new nation and society were being formed. We were the sons and daughters of parents who had undergone unbelievable sorrow and anguish, who were now seeking for themselves love, support, security, and peace—a home. I stand before you in awe, filled with admiration that you were able to overcome such tremendous obstacles and to bestow on your lives a new and special meaning, as living witnesses to the Holocaust that annihilated whole families and loved ones.”
The marvelous optimism of Lipa Weiss, his prodigious face of tears and smiles that is the very place of Shoah; the quiet smiles of Inbal and Yanay, emanating earnestness, seriousness, determination, moral strength and courage; the admirable spirit that carries Avner and Marianne through their almost unbearable pain—these will be forever part of this everlasting mystery. This is the best and most honorable part of Israel, and of all humanity.
