The echo of the Holocaust
The two minutes in which public life in Israel comes to a standstill once a year are intended as a silent remembrance of the Holocaust and acts of resistance against the Nazis. On that day, sirens are sounded across the country at 10 a.m. and people stop whatever they're doing – whether it be working, driving, or going for a walk.
But when Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day was marked once again on 6 May this year, the thoughts of many people were likely to have dwelled on a much more recent event. The gruesome and for most people unimaginable massacres committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 have been burned into Israel's soul. Official representatives like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, often speak of "the worst crime against the Jewish people since the Holocaust". They refer to the figure of more than 1,150 people, most of them Jews, murdered on a single day.
Some have in the meantime gone even further, implicitly or explicitly comparing 7 October with the Holocaust. "That was a Shoah" is a phrase that continues to be used in Israel in connection with the terror attack. In recent years, comparisons between the genocide of the Jews and other events have usually triggered heated debate in Western societies – and in Germany in particular. Many are vehemently opposed to a relativisation of the "singularity of the Holocaust".
The Shoah as a core element of Israeli identity
That there has been less of a response to such comparisons made after 7 October could be explained by the specific circumstances: the shock caused by the attack, the ongoing war, respect for those affected, the identity of the victims.
However, the question as to how the Holocaust and 7 October relate to each other remains unanswered. And this isn't a purely academic question: over the decades, the Shoah has become a core element of Israel's national identity – something some agree with and others criticise. As a result, the categorisation of 7 October also becomes a political issue.
Furthermore, the Holocaust occupies an important place in humanity's collective memory – although its binding effect has been somewhat diluted by a diverse array of sometimes competing cultures of remembrance. It remains to be seen how 7 October will slot into these narratives, how remembering and commemorating the Holocaust will change. It is, however, already becoming apparent that this process won't be without conflicts – and that it could be politicised and instrumentalised.
Both events came face-to-face with each other on an immediate level on 7 October itself. Several Holocaust survivors living in the kibbutzim around the Gaza Strip also experienced the Hamas attack. One of them, Sarah Jackson, even sheltered victims in their hour of need.
Refuge at Kibbutz Sa'ad
That morning, the 88-year-old woman took several young people into her home at Kibbutz Sa'ad. They had managed to escape the Supernova music festival, where Hamas terrorists killed 364 revellers. The young Israelis remained at the old lady's home for several hours until they deemed it safe enough to leave the kibbutz.
Several months later, Jackson and three of her unexpected guests from 7 October met once again in northern Tel Aviv at an event arranged by the organisation Zikaron BaSalon "Remembrance in the Living Room". At these events, which have been running for several years now, mostly young Israelis gather in private homes to hear the accounts of Holocaust survivors. The aim is to preserve their recollections for future generations.
Jackson, a sprightly woman with short white hair, had already tried on 7 October to tell her guests about her life. She thought it might calm their nerves, she said. "But they didn't really listen," she added, saying they were constantly on their mobile phones as they sheltered together in her home's safe room.
On the evening of their reunion, in the home of Zikaron BaSalon founder Sharon Buenos, Jackson got another chance. She provided a detailed account of how the German Luftwaffe bombed her home village of Tomaszów near Łódź in 1939; she was four years old at the time. Her family immediately fled east. From there, the Soviet Army deported them to Siberia, where Jackson's parents worked as lumberjacks and in coal mines. After the war, they returned to Poland for a short time, but "there was nothing there to return to". Instead, Jackson's family eventually found their way via a circuitous route to the newly founded State of Israel.
"I couldn't believe it was happening again"
Then, the three young Israelis related their experience of 7 October and how they found refuge in Jackson's home. Their escape was chaotic, no one knew what was going on, said 34-year-old Ilya Pisatzkov. Pure luck brought them to Kibbutz Sa'ad, he said, which was miraculously spared from the attacks. There, they spotted the old lady on a veranda. "And then she invited us into her house," said Pisatzkov, to which Jackson countered with a smile: "You invited yourselves in."
In view of the old woman's life story and his own experiences, Pisatzkov said that the fact that Jews once again had to run for their lives 75 years after the foundation of Israel had prompted "very profound reflection". Asked whether she viewed 7 October as a new Holocaust, Sarah Jackson replied that this was a difficult question.
"For my part, I closed the war chapter in 1945. Wherever and whenever there's a war, I don't want to think about it," she said. That was also the case on 7 October: she says that she didn't understand what was going on – and perhaps didn't want to. "I couldn't believe it was happening again," she added.
Many feel reminded of the Holocaust
Other accounts have a more definitive tone. Yaelle Bonnet, also a survivor of the Supernova party, described her escape to the "Jewish Telegraphic Agency" and reported that she was part of a small group tramping for several hours across open country. "We didn't have any water; everyone was pretty quiet. It felt like a caravan of death, like we were experiencing the Holocaust all over again," said the 21-year-old Israeli, adding: "That's very hard to say, but I'm allowing myself say it."
Bonnet's account, which dates from mid-October, may have been influenced by the fresh intensity of what had just happened. But even in early April, Alon Pauker, an academic from Kibbutz Be'eri, told the Washington Post that he had for months been guiding visitors around the place where almost 100 people were murdered: "I've gone from being a historian to a Holocaust guide – a one-day Holocaust," he said.
This is a view not only expressed by those directly affected by the attacks. In a poll conducted early this year by the "European Forum" at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, more than a third of the 1,000 people surveyed said 7 October reminded them of the Holocaust. Officially, Israel remains ambivalent on the subject. Netanyahu and other senior officials attach great importance to the singularity of the Holocaust and have never directly and publicly compared it with the events of 7 October.
However, to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January, the government organised a public campaign in the United States. This campaign featured Ruth Haran, a survivor of both the Holocaust and 7 October. The Israeli woman, who was born in 1935, was shown in a short video filmed at Kibbutz Be'eri saying: "When babies are killed in cribs, when women are raped, thrown to the ground and murdered, malicious, satanic, innocent – that is a Shoah!"
Netanyahu compares Hamas with the Nazis
Indirect comparisons continue to be made. For several months after the terror attack, Hamas was put squarely on a level with the Nazis. Netanyahu in particular did this – even quoting a remark attributed to but never actually made by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, namely that Hamas are "the new Nazis". Netanyahu's chief aim here was to secure the support of the international community for Israel in the war against Hamas.
There must be unity in the fight against Hamas, just as the world was once united in its battle against the Nazis, he demanded. But Netanyahu didn't go as far as his far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who described all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as well as most Palestinians in the West Bank as Nazis.
Many academics or representatives of the official culture of remembrance view such statements with unease and have pushed back against them. Dani Dayan, chairman of the World Holocaust Remembrance Center Yad Vashem, said in November that he did not accept "simplifying comparisons" even if he does see "similarities in the genocidal intentions, the sadism and the barbarism of Hamas".
Vacillating between emotions and reason
Meanwhile Dayan made a telling addendum: It was "obvious", he said, what associations the descriptions of the 7 October atrocities evoked in Jews. "We have all thought about it."
This is indicative of the emotional state of many Israelis and Jews after 7 October. Even leading Holocaust scholars admit that they struggled to categorise the terrorist attack after it happened and vacillated between emotions and reason. Hanna Yablonka is one of the leading academics in the field. She was born in 1950; her mother was an Auschwitz survivor. Yablonka experienced the events of 7 October on television.
What moved her the most, she says, was an Israeli woman from one of the places under attack speaking live on a TV programme. The woman whispered into her phone that she was hiding in her apartment, the presenter in tears the whole time, and then she said: "They're in my living room." Yablonka says this conversation left her "in total shock". This is because her immediate association was: "Anne Frank in her hideaway, as she heard the steps of the Gestapo coming up the stairs." For three days thereafter, Yablonka was barely able to move from the sofa.
Nevertheless, she says that she quickly came to the intellectual conclusion that 7 October was not a second Holocaust. When the Holocaust took place, she says, the Jews had neither a state, nor an army, nor a strong civil society. Yablonka speaks rather of a "conversation" between the two events, one that has "many faces". She is vehemently opposed to all attempts at instrumentalization, such as in the case of those who describe Hamas as Nazis. This trivialises the Holocaust, she says. "7 October should be seen in the context of Israel in the year 2023, not in the context of Europe in the year 1941," she continues.
But even after sitting with the subject for months, the academic – whose views can otherwise be very categorical – still struggles to find the words. "This thing with the Holocaust dogs me to this day," she says. "And so far, I've not found an answer."
© FAZ 2024
Translated from the German by Nina Coon