SHOAH / HOLOCAUST
Shoa – Holocaust by Esther Eillam
In 1988 I participated in England in a support group of women on the subject of WW II, together with English and American women. I was then 49 years old. In this group, I identified myself for the first time as a Holocaust survivor. I explained it to myself that even though I am Sabra – born in Palestina-I (Eretz-Yisrael) in July 1939 – I am lucky not to have moved to Auschwitz with the 60.000 people of Salonica, because my parents came to Palestina (the Jewish name for Palestine) in the 20s and the early 30s of the 20th century. I think that another factor that contributed unconsciously to this identification was the fact that in 1947, when I was eight years old, I was sexually molested several times by an Ashkenazi elder man (who was eventually also a Holocaust survivor).
In 1941, Italian airplanes bombed Tel-Aviv. More than 100 people were killed. Because of that my parents moved with 3 small children to Petah-Tikva (20 km from Tel-Aviv), and we lived there about a year. My father went to his work everyday by bus, and my brother and me were put in a nursery for most hours of the day. Another memory from childhood: believing that in the shelters built under the ground in Rothchilde Boulevard near my house the Germans lived, and that they went out in the night to walk the Tel-Aviv streets. I remember wondering how they could live there all the time, and what they were eating there.
Also how was it possible that nobody was doing anything about it. When we played in the boulevard in the afternoons I was careful not to get too close to the shelters. I used to dream at night that the Germans came to my house and wanted to kill my family, and that I negotiated with them. Some facts: during WW II my mother’s grandmother and other members of her family, as well as my father’s sister and her family, were exterminated in Auschwitz.
Esther Eillam / one of the founding mothers of the feminist movement in Israel.
Shoa by Ruslana Lichtzier
The Shoa for me is one of the shaping events of my private history and my moral and ideological ideas, despite the education that I absorbed from the educational system in Israel. The schools are pumping up kids with a perverted spectacle that is treating death as a supreme stage. When I was a child I wanted to be in the Holocaust. These terror fantasies are leaking to many parts in life, I believe, from our bed and sex life to how we pereive ourselves as humans.
Ruslana Lichtzier, Künstlerin aus Israel.
