If Regina, the Holocaust survivor who lived on the first floor of my childhood housing complex, had seen the sunken faces and terrified eyes of Eli, Ohad and Or as they were led by human monsters, she would have surely scolded them—just as she used to reprimand my mother after she became widowed at a young age and stepped out of the house looking defeated and unadorned.
"You must never let them see you weak. You always have to smile, always be tip-top. If you don’t look that way, they’ll sense it and come back. My father taught me this even before we were thrown into the ghetto—how to walk with confidence so that no one would know you were afraid. Remember that. They are not human; they are animals. One sign of weakness, and they’ll all be on you again.
"If you cry, they hear it—and that’s not good. You must always look your best, as if you have a husband, as if you have money, as if you’re not alone," she would say. And then, in a lower voice, she would add: "As if you’re not Jewish."
Her voice, which for years had strained to project confidence and joy despite having lost her entire family in the Holocaust, echoed in my head as I watched the footage of the released hostages being broadcast repeatedly: Don’t walk like that! Walk as if you are not broken. As if you are not in pain. As if you are not shattered. As if you are confident. As if you are not Jewish.
Yes, Regina—who despised the sanitized term "Holocaust survivor" ("I was saved, I won, I didn’t just survive!")—believed that we Jews must always project strength, resilience and victory; otherwise, the beasts would try again. That is why she preferred not to talk about defeat and chose to remain silent about the horror.
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This was not just her personal lesson. Many survivors believed that was the only way to endure. When the protagonist of Imre Kertész’s novel Fateless returns from Nazi concentration camps to his hometown in Hungary, he meets two old acquaintances and speaks with them. They ask him to forget what happened to him.
"'First of all,' he said, 'you must forget the horrors.'
'Why?' I asked him, even more surprised.
'So that you can,' he replied, 'live.' And Uncle Fleischman nodded in agreement and added, 'Live freely.'" They were wrong.
They were wrong because neither Regina nor they truly lived in freedom. On the contrary, they existed in constant fear, paralyzed by the anticipation of the next oppressor who would invade their homes the moment they let their guard down and showed weakness
They were also wrong because it is terrible advice. Perhaps it was necessary for Jews back then—when we had no homeland and no protection. But it is certainly not relevant to our situation today, when we have a state and an army.
As free Jews in our own country, we are obligated to look them in the eye and remember the depth of the abyss we could fall into again if we are not careful.
Prof. Yuval ElbashanWe don’t need Or, Eli and Ohad to appear groomed and victorious. We need them as they truly are, as they have become—partly because of us—so that we cannot ignore or forget. And maybe then, it won’t happen to us again.
Sorry, Regina. Sorry, Uncle Fleischman. And sorry to you – Or, Ohad and Eli.