By Merav Michaeli, Haaretz – 20, Apr 2009
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1079419.html
Tomorrow night the Yad Vashem Holocaust Rembrance Authority will host an official screening of the documentary “Killing Kasztner.” Israel Kasztner saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews by negotiating with Nazi officers. After World War II, Kasztner immigrated to Israel and was murdered by a Jew after he was accused of collaborating with the Nazis. In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that he was also my grandfather.
“Killing Kasztner” is an American documentary film that describes some of his feats and tries to figure out how someone who saved so many Jews not only was not recognized by the State of Israel, but was denounced and murdered.
The answer to this question can be found in Israeli culture, in which the sanctity of life is pretentiously discussed, while only death is really held sacred. Holocaust Remembrance Day is a good example of how in Israel the dead become heroes who get commemorated, honored and glorified, while those who survived, those who were saved, those who are alive but not fully intact mentally and physically are ignored or humiliated.
Every year, in the many ceremonies and events marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, all our elected officials praise the victims and talk about the horror, the terror, the hellishness, and call on everyone “to remember and not to forget.” Indeed, over the years the state has invested billions of shekels in “memory” and “commemoration.” After all, our leaders are interested in perpetuity, and death is eternal, as well as heroic.
We are free to depict the dead any way we want, and death itself is imbued with a kind of majesty, an aura of uprightness. No more will they do to us, the Jews, what they did to us before.
The living, by contrast, are not something the State of Israel cares to remember. Some 150,000 Holocaust survivors are living here in poverty, sickness, neglect and great shame, and despite the battles over the last few years to improve their well-being and the increasing awareness of their situation, the government has still not found the funds to allow them to live out the rest of their lives in comfort and dignity.
Life, after all, is not eternal; it is all too fleeting. And life just doesn’t offer the same upright aura as death. The living, the saved, the survivors of the horror, the terror, the hellishness (which in the mouths of our leaders long ago became an empty mantra) are not upright; when they first arrived here they were already bent over. They were damaged physically and mentally, left with nothing after losing those closest to them, along with their property, dignity, confidence and belief in whatever they used to believe in. Even then, when the survivors arrived at Israel’s shores, they were treated with contempt and derision.
The proud, boastful Israelis, the “new Jews” who were certain – then as today – that they discovered, if not invented, the way to beat everyone else, referred to the survivors as “used goods” in Polish. Survivors were integrated into society in a disgraceful manner, under poor conditions, and had difficulty finding jobs. “Who are you?” those who felt they were walking around with their head held high snorted scornfully. “You’re just refugees” – another derogatory word – “and you went like sheep to the slaughter.” In a way, this was pretty much the same accusation made against Kasztner: You collaborated with the Nazis. The State of Israel accepts only the new Jew, the belligerent Israeli, the upright ones, who aren’t traumatized or shell-shocked, who don’t negotiate in order to save lives, but just fight – preferably to the death.
And so next week, Israel will once again commemorate all those who “in their death commanded us to live” – and yet the country has not secured the release of the person who did not die in an action that commanded us to live, but has been living in captivity for three years. If Gilad Shalit dies in captivity, God forbid, you can be sure his corpse will be returned with all the honor it is due, in exchange for many terrorists, and that the flood of words about the sanctity of his deeds will know no limit.
My grandfather, Israel Kasztner, has already been killed, and Yad Vashem’s screening is the first step in making amends. But I would rather we didn’t have to make a movie about how we could have saved Shalit.
