At a meeting of the Knesset, Holocaust survivors who are relatives of those who were killed by Hamas on October 7, or remain hostages, or died as a result of a terrible friendly-fire accident prompted by Hamas’ hostage-taking, testified to their anguish. More on their unbearable grief can be found here: “Holocaust survivor plays last voicemail from hostage grandson killed in Gaza,” Times of Israel, January 30, 2024:
Bella Haim, a Holocaust survivor and the grandmother of Yotam Haim — who was held hostage and then killed in Gaza — told Knesset members and ministers on Thursday that she is experiencing the Holocaust for a second time amid the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war.
Haim shared her and her grandson’s stories at a special Knesset conference marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Yotam was among the 253 hostages taken by Hamas on October 7, when thousands of terrorists invaded Israel’s south and killed some 1,200 people.
He was killed on December 15 along with two other hostages in Shejaiya, northern Gaza. The three were trying to escape but were misidentified by IDF soldiers as terrorists and shot.
“I was born in 1938 in Poland,” Haim told the Knesset members and ministers in attendance. “I believed that the Holocaust would not return. I chose and I fought to live… Today, I have five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. I thought I had found peace and was happy.”
On the morning of October 7, Yotam sent his grandmother a voice message from his home in Kfar Aza saying, “I’m a little worried, there are terrorists in the kibbutz, but I’m taking care of myself and you should take care of yourself, too.” That message, which she played aloud at the meeting, was the last Haim heard from her grandson before he was kidnapped.
“I am a Holocaust survivor,” she said, “and I cannot believe that the Holocaust has returned to us again.”…
“This is my second Holocaust,” said survivor Tsili Wenkert, whose grandson Omer Wenkert was taken hostage by Hamas at the Supernova desert rave on October 7. “How much can a human being endure? My Omer is in grave danger.”…
“He needs medicine,” said Wenkert of her grandson. “They will not give him what he needs.”
Menachem Haberman, a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor, described his time in a Nazi death camp, in which he saw 8,000 people sent to their deaths in one day. “I saw people come in with a kippah and without a kippah, with a beard and without a beard. They were all murdered in the same way.”
“There is only one way to beat the murderers,” said Haberman, referring both to the Nazis and to Hamas. “It is to be united, united, united.”
Hadassah Lazar, sister of Hamas’s oldest hostage, Shlomo Mansour, who is nearly 86 and a survivor of Iraq’s Farhud riots, told the committee of the violence her brother endured at the hands of his Arab neighbors.
Shlomo was born in Iraq and lived through the Farhud Holocaust [that took place on June 1-2,. 1941, in Baghdad] where Arabs murdered, raped, abused babies, kidnapped, beheaded, looted, and burned shops that had been marked with red paint ahead of time,” she said. “It was the Kristallnacht of the Jews of Iraq. And the world was silent.”…
Think about Bella Haim, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, playing for the Knesset members the anguished tape of her grandson Yoram who, in his last message to her, was trying for her sake to downplay the danger, and who then was kidnapped, and taken back to Gaza, where managed to escape his captors, and then, in a terrible error, was killed by the IDF that mistook him for a terrorist.
Think of Tsili Wenkert, whose grandson Omer was taken hostage, and remains so, deprived by his captors of the medicine he desperately needs. For his grandmother, what happened on, and after October 7 has been “like a second Holocaust.”
Think of 96-year-old Menachem Haberman, who saw 8,000 Jews murdered each day in the extermination camp — was it Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec? — where he somehow managed to survive. Haberman’s only lesson was that “there is only one way to beat the murderers,” since the Jewish people can rely on no one but themselves to survive. And that way is this: “It is to be united, united, united.”
Hadassah Lazar spoke of her 86-year-old brother, Shlomo Manzour, who is now a hostage. Shlomo was a survivor of the Farhud (the “great dispossession”), that eruption of rape, robbery, and murder by Baghdad’s Arabs against the city’s Jews that took place on June 1-2, 1941. About one thousand Jews were murdered, and another thousand were wounded. What her brother saw those days left him scarred for life, she said. And now he sits in some tunnel in Gaza, one of the human shields being used to ensure the safety of Hamas leaders.
The same annihilationist bloodlust against the Jews displayed by the Nazis, and by the Arabs during the Farhud in Baghdad, was on display again, on October 7, when 3,000 Hamas members poured “like a flood” into Israel, where they beheaded, burned alive, raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered Jews. Those aged Holocaust survivors who testified at the Knesset had al thought it could never happen again, that in the Jewish state they would finally be safe. That confidence turned out not to be warranted. An awful lesson was learned on October 7 that has been seared into their very beings. They will never again be caught off guard, never again allow such atrocities to be inflicted on the people of Israel.
“Lest we forget — lest we forget!” They won’t, not ever again. Nor, of course, should we.
rick says
The reason so many see the Gaza war that began on Oct 7th as a recurrence of the Holocaust is because Hamas and their supporters are Nazis in every horrible way.