Holocaust survivors in Israel faced new horror when Hamas attacked

Videos and photos of her grandson from the time of the attack show the young man being tied up, stripped to his underwear and surrounded by armed men in the back of a truck as he was taken to Gaza.

“If I think my grandson is being held by Hamas, how am I even supposed to live?” Mrs. Wenkert said.

Israelis, Palestinians and their supporters on both sides of the conflict have evoked the Holocaust and “genocide” – a word coined in the aftermath of the carnage of World War II and which has since been codified in international law. since October 7.

In October the head of Israel’s Holocaust Memorial museum criticized Colombia’s president for drawing comparisons between the Holocaust and the Israeli response in Gaza. He also criticized Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations for wearing a yellow Star of David during a speech to the Security Council, saying the symbol, which was used under the Nazis to identify and humiliate Jews, harmed both the country and the dishonors victims of the Holocaust. .

“While these attacks and while these atrocities are reminiscent of the Holocaust, we must draw distinctions as well as comparisons,” said Simmy Allen, spokesperson for Yad Vashem National Monument.

Shoshana Karmin, 92, a Holocaust survivor who managed to leave the Budapest ghetto with her mother before it was sealed off, survived the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Magen last month. She is pessimistic about Israel’s prospects of eliminating the group, which she said was “a lot stronger and bigger” than she had thought.

“What worries me is what will happen after the war,” she said.

Despite the horrors of the attack, some draw strength and hope from their history.

Dov Golebowicz, 92, fled Poland as a boy when the clouds of war began to gather. During the Hamas attacks, he hid in the safe room of his home in Kibbutz Nirim, where he had lived for almost 70 years. Using a wooden and metal fixture that his son, an engineer, had made for just such an emergency, he pushed the door closed for hours.

“I sweat it out myself,” Mr. Golebowicz said. “It was very frightening and disturbing.”

In the weeks after the attack, Mr. Golebowicz said he had thought of “Zog Nit Keyn Mol,” a Yiddish song sung by Jewish partisans during World War II that became a popular song. hymn of resistance still sung during Holocaust memorial ceremonies.

“It goes: ‘Never say this is the last road you take,’” Mr. Golebowicz said, adding: “The last word is: ‘we are here.’”