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Honora Foah (HF): I liked Francesco Lotoro from the first
moment we met. I also grew up around survivors, so I
thought, “ I don’t know if I can deal with this”… but I
thought what he was doing was amazing; I was glad
someone was doing it.
One of the things that was true to me about survivors from my upbringing (in an unusual way) is that it is very clear how complex the stories are…
For instance, one man who was among my parents’ best
friends had been in the concentration camps when he was
young for a long time. The numbers were tattooed on his
arms. As a young child, I learned quickly that survivors
didn’t want to talk about it…there was silence. When this
man, Sasha, was released from the camps, he had no one
and he wandered around Europe trying to survive. So, he
became a cunning, wily operator. He knew something about the dark side of human nature that other people in the U.S. did not know. He was always nice to me, but scary. He was good in sales, always looking for the “main chance,” and his son was confused, eventually getting on the “wrong side of the law.” Morality became different, all confusing for them, after their experience.
So for me, I was always aware of how complex the situation was.
As a teenager, I became politically active, both in a Jewish
group and in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and it was
very clear, even then, in the 60’s that if you wanted to have conversations about peace in the Middle East, very quickly the Holocaust came up and stopped the conversation cold…because one has so little standing in the face of people who had been in the concentration camps. You cannot simply plow over their experience. It is too disrespectful. But it also means that the conversation is always held hostage to this horror and grief. Some kind of measured conversation and accommodation with the Palestinians is not very possible.
Israel as a Jewish state in the Holy Land is a direct result of the Holocaust and the export of centuries of European
anti-Semitism and evil plunked down in the Middle East.
Europe is not facing its own shadow. They exported it to
Palestine.
Zionism became a Jewish issue at the turn of the century
because Jews were desperate to escape from European
anti-Semitism and to end the centuries of the Diaspora.
One of the ways Al Qaeda and Muslim dictators foster hatred now and in the past is by blaming Israel and the tragic relationship with the Palestinians for all the woes of Muslims all over the world. So much of what we are living with in “the clash of civilizations” is a direct result of the European anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust and the
consequences of the Holocaust. It is a clear, visible,
traceable case of the sins of the fathers being visited on the children unto the seventh generation.
At the end of the War, many of the Jews who survived could not bear to be in Europe any more. They were displaced and did not have homes or lives or families to return to. Nor were they wanted anywhere. The ugly truth is that many people were not unhappy with Hitler’s “solution” to the “Jewish problem.” They may have disapproved of his methods, but within their own communities, they were not unhappy with the result that all of the Jews in their town were gone.
I just read a story of a young Jewish boy whose family was moved to the ghetto in Poland. One day, as the Nazis came into town, he hid and saw other children who had hidden in the branches of trees, falling through the sky as the Nazis shot them down from their perches…Then his mother and sister were taken to the camps and killed. He was disguised by a Catholic family as one of their own. Then, when the war ended, and here he is eleven years old or so, trying to find a place to live, a Polish woman shouts at him, (You Jews),”filthy animals, you came out of your holes, too bad they didn’t finish you off!” He emigrated to Israel.
So, “the world” decided to send the Jews to Palestine.
During the war, Jews fleeing from Hitler were turned away
from many countries, including the United States, and they
were turned away after the war as well. The displaced Jews had no home and so the international community, such as it was, “gave” them Israel. Unfortunately, there were already people living there.
But here is something that speaks to the possibilities of the human spirit. The man I was talking about who emigrated to Israel, Zeev Sternhell is his name, has been a leader of “Peace Now” and a supporter of Palestinian rights.