Jewish Past Finder

7 October
Dancing until the early hours, celebrating life, laughing and having fun, believing you belonged and were just a normal person amongst 8.4 billion people – and then: gunshots, screams, horrifying screams, panic, sheer fear for your own life. Running, whilst gunshots continue to ring out all around you. A desperate search: where is a safe hiding place?

Reaching the shelter and barricading yourself in. Holding out there for hours whilst shots and screams can still be heard outside. Then the door is rattled. Shots ring out and you tremble with fear: will the door hold? What if they set the house on fire?

Somewhere on the kibbutz grounds, in your flat, in the broken-into shelter: A bullet hits you; you collapse, screaming and contorted with pain. You are grabbed by the hair or the arm, dragged across the floor and thrown into a pick-up truck; you groan in pain and lose consciousness.

Later, you find yourself tied up in a tunnel, your wound only roughly dressed. You are starving and terribly thirsty. For more than 500 days, you see no sunlight; you are humiliated, beaten, tortured and raped by the terrorists. More than once, you think of ending your life – yet you cling to the hope that this madness must come to an end at some point.

Your loved ones wait desperately for a sign of life from you, trying everything to get in touch with you. They lie awake through endless nights, merely going through the motions of daily life, no longer truly able to live. This grief, this pain, this despair – it is literally eating them alive.

Your non-Jewish friends and acquaintances, the politicians, the media: at first, they still show compassion. But when your country fights back, when your country’s army tries to take out the terrorists’ command centres, the mood shifts very quickly: ARE THESE supposed to be victims??! At first you try to explain, to justify your country, but at some point you realise: it’s pointless.

And you remember what Holocaust survivors told you only after many years of silence: Of the ‘JUDE!’ graffiti scrawled on their German shops and front doors, the indifference of former friends and neighbours, the endless humiliations, beatings and kicks, the desperate, fruitless search for refuge abroad. Of the studded boots on the pavement, the letter from the authorities: ‘…to report there and there on such-and-such a date. You may take only 20 kg of luggage with you.’

You did not experience it yourself, and yet it is literally seared into your very genes: the appalling hunger, the roll calls lasting for hours in the freezing cold, the epidemics, the slave labour in the quarry, in the latrine and elsewhere. Every day, the trembling, silent question: Will I still be alive by the end of this day? And then the gaps in the far too cramped, meagre sleeping quarters – where just yesterday someone was lying. The black smoke and the appalling stench from the camp’s chimneys and your silent cry: Why??!

Back in the present, the realisation creeps up on you once more: The world seems indifferent to your suffering; indeed, it focuses solely on what, in its view, your country’s army has done to those forced to live under the rule of terrorists. And you ask yourself again and again: What have I actually done to the world that it hates me so much?

In memory of the Israeli victims of the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October 2023