Movies and images of her grandson from the time of the assault present the younger man being restrained, stripped to his underwear and surrounded by armed males at the back of a truck as he was taken away to Gaza.
“To assume that my grandson is being held by Hamas, how am I even presupposed to dwell?” Ms. Wenkert stated.
Each the Israelis, the Palestinians and their supporters on either side of the battle have evoked the Holocaust and “genocide” — a phrase coined within the aftermath of the carnage of World Struggle II and which has since been codified in worldwide legislation — within the days since Oct. 7.
In October, the top of Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum criticized Colombia’s president for drawing comparisons between the Holocaust and the Israeli response in Gaza. He additionally criticized Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations for sporting a yellow Star of David patch throughout an tackle to the Safety Council, saying the image, which was used below the Nazis to establish and humiliate Jews, dishonors each the nation and victims of the Holocaust.
“Whereas these assaults and whereas these atrocities are harking back to the Holocaust, now we have to attract distinctions, in addition to comparisons,” stated Simmy Allen, a spokesman for the nationwide memorial, Yad Vashem.
Shoshana Karmin, 92, a Holocaust survivor who managed to depart Budapest’s ghetto alongside together with her mom earlier than it was sealed off, survived the Hamas assault in Kibbutz Magen final month. She is pessimistic about Israel’s prospects of eliminating the group, which she stated was “rather a lot stronger and greater” than she had thought.
“What worries me is what is going to occur after the warfare,” she stated.
Regardless of the horrors of the assault, some are drawing power and hope from their histories.
Dov Golebowicz, 92, fled Poland as a boy because the clouds of warfare started to collect. Throughout the Hamas assaults, he hid in his house’s protected room in Kibbutz Nirim, the place he has lived for practically 70 years. Utilizing a wooden and metallic fixture that his son, an engineer, had usual for such an emergency, he jammed the door closed for hours.
“I sweated it out on my own,” Mr. Golebowicz stated. “It was very scary and disturbing.”
Within the weeks for the reason that assault, Mr. Golebowicz stated he has been considering of “Zog Nit Keyn Mol,” a Yiddish tune sung by Jewish partisans throughout World Struggle II, which grew to become a hymn of resistance nonetheless sung at Holocaust memorial ceremonies.
“It goes, ‘Don’t ever say that that is the final highway you’re taking,’” Mr. Golebowicz stated, including, “The final phrase is ‘we’re right here.’”