On this Holocaust Memorial Day

On this Holocaust Memorial Day I want to pay tribute to members of my family who perished in the Holocaust and to those who survived it. 

In 2008, with seven of my maternal cousins I visited Plunge, our mothers’ hometown. With no Jews left in twon after WWII, Jewish life there all but died. Walking there I could not help but think about how all those picturesque houses I saw – among them my mother’s house that was made into a women’s clothing store in 2005 - had once belonged to Jews who, during the Nazi years, were forced out of their homes into ghettos, then murdered.   

We visited the areas that used to be the Telz and Shavli ghettos, to where our family was taken. We visited, too, the nearby forest of Koshan, where my grandmother, aunts, uncle, my unborn cousin, and other relatives are buried in mass graves, together with eighteen-hundred other Jews from their town. By those graves we solemnly recited the Kaddish prayer for the dead. 

We walked by the paths on which my aunts Sorke and Eerle walked daily - four miles each way from the ghetto to the German aircraft factory, where they were forced laborers, and back to the ghetto. Young and good looking they survived the 1941 Koshan massacre, witnessing the murder of their mother and sisters alongside the hundreds of others from their home town. Their brother Itzik was murdered in Telz, probably in the Rainiai forest, in the outskirts of town.

Having immigrated to Palestine in 1933, eight years before the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, my mother (and two of her siblings) did not experience the fear and horror of the World War II years that her family did. But she might have never forgiven herself for escaping that terror.

We also visited with Jacob Bunka, eighty-two at the time, who has been for years the only remaining Jew in Plunge. He lived with his wife in a one-bedroom apartment, which he had turned into an archive, documenting and memorializing the life of Jewish Plunge that ended with the Nazi slaughter. A known carver, he had also erected numerous towering totem-like sculptures made of tree trunks, commemorating the Nazi victims of the killing fields at Koshan and other forests. 

In the summer of 2010 I traveled through Poland with my paternal cousin Anat, to trace our family’s history. My father and her mother, their parents and siblings, escapes the Holocaust: In 1926, after witnessing and stopping an anti-Semitic incident, my grandmother Brucha Bakman decided in no uncertain terms that her family will immigrate to Palestine.

We traveled through the horrors of Birkenau and Auschwitz. Nothing that I haves studied, read, or seen in films, documentaries or photos; none of the interview I had watched and the Holocaust museums I had visited, including Yad Vashem; not even my previous visit to the Terezienstadt concentration camp near Prague, had prepared me for those death camps. What socked me most was the efficiency with which the Nazis ran their oiled death machine and industry. They left nothing, not even the minutest detail to chance: they carefully calculated where the trains carrying their Jewish human transport would first stop, where their victims would initially be selected for immediate death or for forced labor, often by young SS soldiers; where their victims first undressed, where they were first disinfected and shaved, their hair used by the Nazis to manufacture fabric, and where they were disinfected for the second time if they had not been immediately selected for the gas chambers; where their clothing was first fumigated, where their clothing was fumigated for the second time; where their clothing and other belongings were collected, sorted and stored; where they would die by the Zyclon B poisoning gas, and where and how their corpses would be burned. It took merely twenty-five minutes from the time the human cargo arrived to the camps selected to die and turned into ash. 

In Krakow, from where we left for the camps, a Jewish festival was taking place. When we returned there from our emotional trip the town was festive with live Hasidic music and dancing. I needed to be among the celebrators. Anat, who was shocked at my ability to do so immediately after the horror we just saw, could not. But for me, standing in the center of Krakow, where the Jewish Ghetto once was, surrounded by hundreds of joyous Jews and non-Jews alike, celebrating Jewish life, was the very answer to the place from where we had just return. To me, it epitomized Jewish continuity in Eastern Europe in spite of Hitler. Nothing would have angered him more, I thought tearfully, than seeing the great granddaughter of Samuel Bakman, who died of starvation in the Radom Ghetto, and the great grandniece of his sisters Khaya, who was murdered in Auschwitz, taking part with so many other descendants of his victims, in the revival of Jewish culture in Poland. 

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On This Passover Eve

When, this past Monday, on Passover eve, I began to write a new post, I meant to devote it to President Obama’s pro-Zionist speech in Jerusalem (March 21) and to the meaning of Zionism, and relate it to Passover, the Jewish holiday of freedom. But the smell of burning onions emanating from my kitchen drew me from my study back to my kitchen, as I prepared for our family Seder. I was foolish to presume that I could host a Seder in the evening and devote time to write a post. I haven't written for a month, I thought, it can wait another day or two, or….

The act of turning over the frying onions in a large cast iron skillet and their smell took me back to another place and another time, and to the two women who most influenced my life, each a Zionist in her own way.
Where I went back to was the terrace in my family's ground floor apartment in Tel Aviv. The time was sixty-two years ago, on Passover eve. The women were my paternal grandmother Bracha and my mother Khaya. They were cooking for all thirty or forty of us – my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and my cousins, who would gather in my grandparents’ home for the festive Seder.
They were frying onions and gossiping at the same time. So that I wouldn’t hear the gossip, they sent me to the terrace – to no avail - to watch over the cooling onions.

My grandmother, an ardent Orthodox Jew, and a true feminist decades before the term reached the Orthodox community, literally forced my grandfather to agree to emigrate from Poland to Palestine.
The immediate cause of my family’s emigration was an anti-Semitic incident my grandmother witnessed while traveling on a train during one of her business trips. She was sitting in a car full of passengers, some of whom were Orthodox Jews. When one of the Christian passengers, accompanied by a few of his brute friends, pushed off a Jewish passenger’s hat and laughingly took out a folding knife from his pocket and moved to cut off the young man’s beard, my grandmother grabbed his arm and commanded him to stop.

When she arrived home she waited to talk to her husband without their children present. Only then she proceeded to tell him about the train incident. “We are going to Palestine,” she told her husband in no uncertain terms at the end of her story. With those five words she saved her family from the madness that would erupt in Europe with the rise of Hitler less than a decade later. In February 1926, on board the ship Dacha, my teenage father and his family arrived in the northern port city of Haifa where they first settled.

When my mother was sixteen or seventeen, she belonged to the Revisionist Zionist movement Beitar (founded in 1927 in Latvia). By the time she had graduated from Plunge’s Hebrew Gymnasium (high school), she was fully committed to the Zionist movement, planning to immigrate to Palestine, to take part in the rebuilding of a free, democratic Jewish state there.

In 1932, when she was eighteen, my mother left home for the Lithuanian city of Klaipeda, or Memel. There she joined the HeHalutz (The Pioneer) movement, training to become a pioneer in Palestine. It was during that year of training while working on a farm in Memel, that she experienced the strongest expression of anti-Semitism she had personally endured. Working much faster than the non-Jewish farmers - picking strawberries as I recall from her stories - they threatened to kill her if she did not slow down. Perhaps it was her beauty as well as her efficiency that irritated them.

In 1933, my mother left Lithuania for Palestine aboard the ship “Martha Washington,” with other HeHalutz members. Her family members who stayed behind were not as lucky as my father’s family.
Together with Blumma, a woman she had met on the boat and with whom she became life-long friends, my mother arrived at a settlement in northern Palestine, where she became a legendary cook, preparing meals for her fellow pioneers. Blumma, a heavyset cheerful woman of whom I have fond memories, lost her laughter after one, and then another of her sons fell in Israel’s wars. But my mother lost her own laughter much earlier.

When she left her family behind in Lithuania at the age of eighteen, she followed a legacy of courage, determination and perseverance, and a commitment to a cause. But her bravery, as well as her sense of purpose and resolve, gave way to seasonal depression and despair that began when she was in her early thirties, shattering not only her own life, but the lives of those who lived closest to her - my father, my sister, and me. We loved her nonetheless.

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Syria

Though I intended to write sooner, it has been three weeks since I posted a new piece on my blog. I meant to write a post about Syria. But I procrastinated. Besides, those who know the book business tell me that I should write only about my memoir No Laughter in Winter, if I want to have it published.

As it happens Syria is closely intertwined with my past in a very real way. If you read my recent post about my family trip to the Golan Heights, or other posts I have written, you know that a Syrian missile killed my husband forty-five years ago. It was a tragedy that shaped my life; it is what much of my memoir is about. 

For the past two years, another generation of Syrian soldiers is killing not their Israeli neighbors (though they probably would if they could), but their own people. By UN estimates there are 70,000 dead Syrians, and according to the organization Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), among the slaughtered there are over 3,700 children and 2,150 women. These figures do not include the wounded and the tortured. Among the latter there are hundreds of children too. Additionally, there are about 670,000 refugees and 2.5 million estimated internally displaced Syrians.

Syrian soldiers have had the reputation of being particularly cruel to their enemies. I can never forget the shocking photos published internationally by various news organizations after the October 1973 war, showing the disfigured bodies of Israeli soldiers who had been captured by the Syrian army, their mutilated penises stuck in their mouths.  Once, those defaced soldiers were beautiful, healthy men, like my husband had been before he was burnt beyond recognition. Decades later the Syrian army, now fighting to save its patron, is just as cruel. 

“They are your enemy and mine,” an acquaintance said to me recently during my visit to Israel. “Why should we care about those Syrian civilians?” This, I should add, is not a widespread response among ordinary Israelis to the Syrian civil war.

“Because they are human beings,” I replied. “Old and young; mothers and fathers, and children who are jailed, tortured and killed.” War. Civil, or international. It forever changes the lives of those who are affected.

True, like everyone else, Israelis in particular, I worry about Syria’s future: what type of government will be established there when Assad is defeated and the rebels take over? Most alarmingly, in whose hands will the country’s huge chemical arsenal will fall? Will Hezbollah and Hammas, or other terrorist groups in our globalized world get hold of it, ? And what relationship will a new Syrian government have with Iran? These are frightening questions.

But the women  - wherever they are and whatever nationality they hold – those who like me in the past, see their unrecognizable husbands;  those who see their children, brothers and sisters, those who hear their last breaths, are my sisters in grief, past or present.  

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In The Military

On Thursday, the Pentagon lifted its 1994 ban on women in combat. Presumably, the model the U.S. has studied for integrating women into combat is the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which enjoys the reputation of exhibiting more gender equality than any army in the world, even though Israeli women rarely fight wars. And though Israeli woman serve as fighter pilots, infantry officers, naval captains and Humvee drivers, only 3 percent serve in combat roles. 

The Pentagon news and the Israeli example brought me back to my own military service in Israel five decades ago. 

In my yet unpublished memoir I recognize one of the happiest days of my life to be the day I left my military base for the last time. After a two-year mandatory service, checkered with numerous infractions and courts martial, I was honorably discharged from the army. I remember the great sense of liberation I felt as I walked for the last time from the barrack that was mine toward my base’s checkpoint. As I was leaving my base behind, I walked slowly and deliberately, taking great pleasure in each stride, for each step I took on the base’s main road on my way out brought me closer to freedom, my invisible shackles melting into thin air. 

I was wasted in the army, not because it did not recognize my talents. The issue was less about me than it was about the status of women of my time in the military, and about the exercise of authority, a game one had to understand and know how to play not only to succeed in the military, but to endure it.

I fit in, socially. But little did I know that it would be in the military where my own heart, that which sought wisdom and meaning and fulfillment, would clash with the structure of authority; clash, but not crash. It took tragedy, only three years after my military service ended, for me deal with power and authority the correct way.  

In spite of its grueling nature, basic training was the only good experience I had in the army. On sandy hills I learned target-shooting with my heavy, Czech-made M-16, that shook my whole body with each shot; to throw hand-grenades; to shoot an Uzi; to crawl with a heavy kit-bag filled with military gear and hide in ditches; to watch for the enemy on my left, the enemy on my right, and camouflage; to build tents, peel potatoes, wash aluminum pots ten times my size, dust my barrack, shine my boots, and press my uniform to perfection. But in the end, basic training did not mean much, since in my time women in the military, officers including, filled administrative positions only, with many lower rank female soldiers wasting their talents, often serving coffee to their male superiors and doing other mundane chores. 

On my first night’s watch duty, I was standing alone, guarding an empty spot that had but a small lone bench. The night was pitch black; the air sweet; the silence piercing. All I could see were the shining stars; all I could hear was the faded sound of barking dogs in the distance. Mutely, I was humming familiar songs in my mind so I would stop thinking about how scared I was. Suddenly I heard gun shots from somewhere afar. Fearful, I dropped my gun and ran as fast as I could, an act punishable with a jail term if caught. I do not recall where I ran to. But when all was quiet, I went back to my spot and completed my task. It made little sense to stand there alone, as did most of my military service. 

The Army did not need many of us - females who came out of high school with no skills, but it used us nonetheless, and we did not speak out. I did, in my own insignificant, yet costly way.

To my satisfaction, research and studies about the same issues I confronted appeared decades later with the maturity of the Israeli feminist movement in general and the field of women’s studies in Israeli academia in particular.

Two weeks ago my Israeli great niece Naama successfully graduated her officer's course. I would like to believe that she'll find more meaning in her service than I found in mine. 

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A Family Trip

Last Friday was extraordinary for me and for some members of my extended family.

Forty-five years after my husband Yigal was killed when his armored vehicle was hit by a Syrian shell, twenty-five of my relatives and I went on a trip tracking his battalion’s path on its way to capturing the Golan Heights in a suicidal battle that lasted two days – the last days of the 1967 Six Day War.

We were three generations of cousins, my niece and nephew and their children, and Yigal’s brother and his wife. Some were too young to recall the tense period that led to the war, or know anything about the war or about my past for that matter, though some cousins knew about Yigal from their parents.

We began the trip in the area where Yigal’s brigade gathered before battle. There, sobbing, his brother told us about Yigal’s bravery: Engulfed in flames, he jumped out of his burning armed vehicle, rolled on the ground to extinguish the fire, then, under fierce shelling, running forward he continued to command his unit until he collapsed. Only his belt was left on his body, its metal buckle melted.

He was taken to the hospital suffering burns over ninety-two percent of his body. There, he asked his doctor not to tell me about his injury because I was three months pregnant (I subsequently miscarried).

Earlier, when treated by the field doctors, he asked them not to tell me about his injury so I wouldn’t be disturbed while studying English. I was not. He must have confused his desire to enroll in the Technion (the Israeli equivalent to MIT), to study engineering, with my "English studies."

Our group then drove to Givat Ha’em (Mother’s Hill), from where his battalion began fighting. It was already there that his vehicle was hit. Rusty, it is still standing there as a memorial.

Someone placed the picture Yigal’s brother brought with him safely on the vehicle’s corner. I had planned to tell my family about Yigal and read from my still unpublished memoir a chapter that tells about the war and about Yigal’s death. All wanted me to speak by the vehicle.

There I told them about the tense days preceding the war, when Israel as a nation feared another holocaust because in his speeches President Nasser of Egypt promised to throw all Israelis to the sea. He had already taken aggressive actions that violated the terms under which Israel withdrew from the Sinai Desert a decade earlier.

I told them about our hope that a war would not break out, and about Yigal’s and my goodbyes. I told them about the knock on my door in the darkness of night. I told them about my trip to the hospital, the way I saw him burnt beyond recognition, and about the sound of his last breaths. I told them what his commander wrote about his leadership qualities and his camaraderie and about incidents in our life together that exhibited those characteristics.

I told them about my aunts and uncles – their parents – who, one-by-one filled my apartment upon hearing of Yigal’s death, and about the appearance of his brother there, having been called from the front, and how we silently hugged. Not a dry eye was left in that apartment. I told them that in the corner grocery store, my neighbors were whispering that the silence emanating from our home was worse than a thousand screams.

There was hardly a dry eye left on Mother’s Hill.

We then continued our journey on the path Yigal’s battalion fought until they conquered the Golan Heights, from where the Syrian had constantly shelled Israeli settlements in the valley beneath them.

We ended the trip with a family picnic, on a spot overlooking the now peaceful valley. A family bonded by its closeness and rich history.

My American family – my husband of forty years, my daughter and her family, were not with me on this trip. But that was fine. My past, that which occurred before they entered my life to my delight, belongs to me. The rest belongs with them.

                                                                             ***

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Newtown

On Friday morning I wrote a post on the killing of Najia Seddiqi, yet another women’s rights activist and official who was murdered last week in Afghanistan, only five months after the assassination of her predecessor, Hanifa Safi. Then I heard the news about the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

At first I combined both atrocious events, but I could not post that piece even though the events shared a common thread, that of senseless violence. I decided that my post on Najia should wait, for I had to respond to the colossal tragedy that happened in Newtown separately. How could I not? 

But what could I write? That it is imperative that this country should have an honest debate about its violent nature? That the time has come for both the Federal Government and civil society to finally debate in earnest America’s gun culture, the power of lobbying groups, especially the gun lobby that is one of the most powerful influencing groups in American politics? That we should talk about the politics of mental health and the bureaucratic hurdles families of mental patients have to go through to get the help they need before they give up?

Yes, I should discuss these issues, but so have many others.

What else could I write? That like most people in the US and abroad who saw the news, I was shocked, saddened, dismayed, petrified, and angry? That I hope that these sentiments will remain with the American public long enough to prompt these debates, which will hopefully result in necessary changes, from safer built schools to political and cultural change?

I could write about these issues, but many pundits and politicians have debated them this past weekend. 

I could tell you -- though that will not be original either -- that as a grandmother of two children ages five and seven I could imagine in my darkest fantasy the faces of the beautiful twenty murdered young children to be the faces of my grandchildren, because in the prevailing environment the Sandy Hook massacre could happen in any suburban town in America. But that vision was too horrific to bear. 

I could tell you that I could imagine my daughter and son in law being in that firehouse, awaiting news about their children. But I could not bear that thought either.

I too am a teacher, though my college students are much older than those who attended Sandy Hook elementary school.  At least once I had a seemingly threatening situation with a disturbed student. My school and I took the necessary measures immediately. But sometimes, especially after a school shooting, I visualize a situation when a distraught student enters my classroom with a gun.  Would I act as bravely as the six slaughtered Sandy Hook officials and teachers did? I should never have to find out. 

                                                                     ****

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Tyranny Defeated; Cruelty that Goes on

Initially I wanted this post to be about my visit on Thanksgiving Day to the beaches of Normandy, where Allied forces attacked German positions from June 6, 1944, to May 8, 1945.  It was a whole-day journey that included the Omaha, Juno and Gold Beaches, where tens of thousands of Allied troops were killed defeating Nazi Germany. We participated in a short yet dignified commemorating ceremony at the impressive memorial in the American military cemetery, which sits on a cliff overlooking Omaha Beach. We ended the day with too short a run in the nearby museum. 

I am used to visit military cemeteries: Since my first husband was killed in war, I have been visiting his grave annually during my trips to Israel.While my visits there are very personal and are naturally moving, there was nothing personal on my visit to the Normandy cemetery. But it was touching nonetheless. With thanks and gratitude my husband and I moved among the graves of soldiers of different ages, some as young as seventeen or eighteen, some killed on the first day of battle. Among the 9,387 graves there are thirty-three pairs of brothers and one pair of a father and his son. 149 graves are of Jewish soldiers.

I meant to write about that day a week ago, as soon as I returned home from our Normandy trip. Being caught with schoolwork I kept procrastinating until today. Then, just before I got ready to write my post I read about Gul Meena, the young Afghan “honor” victim who survived a brutal attack, presumably by her brother, who wanted to avenge her for seemingly being an adulterer, bringing shame on her family. I decided to write about her instead.

According to rumors , Gul, an eighteen year old married woman, ran away with another young man. When her family caught the two, they struck her with an ax 15 times, deeply slashing her face and head; the boy killed. Reportedly, in the hospital, where she is recovering against all odds, no one comes to visit or question her. Not her mother or father, not her tribe members, not the police, not anyone from the Ministry of Women's Affairs. 

Islam does not call for honor killing. Yet most if not all honor killings are committed by Muslims in Middle Eastern, African and Asian countries, and increasingly so in Western countries, including the US. The reason for the murders committed under this cultural custom vary: from killing girls who dress in western style to killing girls who run away from forced marriage or killing  rape victim, often due to incest. And while the majority of these killings are done by the male members of the women’s or girls’ families--most often the fathers or brothers of these female victims--recently in Pakistan fifteen-year old Anusha Zafar was killed by her mother for looking at a boy. The girl's pleas for mercy did not help. 

While there is no accurate statistics about honor killing, in 2011 The United Nations Population Fund estimated that over 5000 women are killed annually worldwide. Experts, however, believe that number to be too low. Tragically, this barbaric practice continues with minimal consequences even in countries where honor killing has been outlawed. And while civil society in some countries try to help potential victims, many times the hand of NGOs are tied because of cultural relativism. It is therefore  up to all governments to protect women against this practice. 

In 2009 UN Women, launched the UNiTE to End Violence against Women campaign, which aims to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls in all parts of the world. During its first phase over five million people signed on to the campaign. But less than 80 government added their names to that platform.  In 2011, under this drive UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon directed attention to honor killing. He should lead the way to end it. 

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