A DAY OF MOURNING FOR A GASLIT NATION
October 7, 2023 – the day that changed everything in Israel’s 21st-century history. That day, Hamas and other Palestinian gunmen entered Israeli territory, killed 1,200 people, and took 251 people hostage, abducting them to Gaza. Innocent people were massacred in cold blood in their own homes, on the streets, in cars, and in shelters. Many of those fleeing the Nova music festival crowded into roadside concrete shelters, where the attackers threw hand grenades among them and then opened fire on those hiding inside. Some survivors lay beneath dead bodies for hours, pretending to be dead.
In the kibbutzim, people were massacred house by house. Murdered family members were found in bedrooms and protected rooms. Babies, children, mothers, and fathers were killed; in some cases, family members were found dead while embracing one another. In other families, parents were killed while their children remained alone for hours in safe rooms, and there were also cases in which children died from fire and smoke after their parents had been executed.
The youngest victim of the cold-blooded massacre was just nine months old.
Three years have passed since then, but looking back on all of this is still heartbreaking. I struggle to find the words for what happened that day, and for what has happened since.
I must have been around fourteen when I read Dr. Miklós Nyiszli’s I Was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant. The Holocaust shook me deeply, especially as I was still almost a child myself. That was when it became important to me that, in my own way, I should always remember and remind others of the victims and of history itself, so that something like this may never happen again.
Barely 80 years have passed, and once again we are confronted with systematic incitement to hatred, while antisemitism is once again gaining more and more ground in our time. We cannot allow this.
Political reframing and the manufacturing of narratives are becoming increasingly dangerous. It is painful to see that people fail to recognize the ever-louder propaganda and its lies, while the voice of truth is gradually being drowned out. But we should not forget: the loudest voice is not always the one that represents the truth.
That is precisely why we cannot remain silent when speaking out is our moral duty.
