The lesson

It is freezing in Europe, the news reports that dozens have died as a result of the weather,especially in eastern Europe,polland.                     . I myself am caughing a lot..feeling  like the Bronte sisters, frail and sick and alone at night reading by a small light.                                                I try to open a book and read but am drawn to watch t.v. tonight, trying to go back to our time...

Last night I had turned on the news and got what was to me the most horrible profile I  had seen in a long time..the C.N.N interviewed a Palestinian woman called "the mother of the Martyrs", a woman in her 60's a frail figure ,her head covered in the traditional Moslem attire  who speaks with burning eyes about her political agenda, she is campaigning  for "Hamas" having lost 3 boys to the struggle, she shows a photo of  herself smiling with a handsome tall and lean young man, Mohamad, her son who died after killing 5 Israelis .".we scarifice our children ", she says

lifting her hands upwards (to the skies?) "Because our cause is more important for us than our children's lives."

"The israelis will leave in peace or they will leave in pieces", she declares and turns back to campaign votes for her party "Hamas".

I  do not consider myself a political person because most of the time I think ,to quote Anton Czekov, ("The cherry orchard")

"They forgot man"   but the image of  "the mother of Martyrs" , a small thin woman  campaigning for the voices of her people , seeking to represent the Palestinian people horrifies me first of all as a mother then I am also an Israeli.  

I have 3 children . I can not imagine sacrificing them for any cause, in fact i have  lived in fear for their survival from the very beginning  of their creation  as microscopic grape like beings that something will threaten their lives..a fear, i realize now, will continue throughout my life as a mother and will probobly increase with the onset of puberty and their growing independance.

When my babies were born I refused to let the nurse in the Maternity hospital place them next to the other babies side by side which they do so the mothers can get a rest.                                                          Right from the amazing-needs a book to describe- birth, I could only fall asleep with them  as near to  me as possible  though nowadays I must admit i have learned to keep a bit of distance so i could keep a bit of sanity and like cats and dogs push them away sometimes when they climb all over me and don't  accept  any limits. It's an acheivement for me to say :"close the door now." 

Which is why I find it very frightening to hear of a mother sacrificing her children for a cause:any cause.

I tried to be fair and  reflect upon  my family 's ideology as i grew up.

I don't remember having been told to sacrifice anything. I married outside my religion and perhaps because my maternal grandmother was not alive at the time , there was no one to mourn the loss to the jewish people..my mother was relieved I had finally married  at the ripe age of 32 and could have children, what she considered an experience no one should live without.For my mother  the goal of life are children -without a doubt. 

I thought of all the Israeli mothers sending their children to the army which is an obligation for both men and women when they reach 18 years of age, mine included being a Zionist family.

Zionists believe that Zion-the land of Israel is the historical Jewish homeland .How this is done varies in a spectrum of political ideologies and sparks plenty of arguments in the parliment and outside it..

It was considered a big pride to serve in the Israeli army when i was 18 , espcially for my maternal grandparents that escaped their home in  Czekoslovakia on  the last train that was still  available for civilians who wanted  to leave that country  in 1941, leaving behind them a palace with servents and a successful mill.

Having been refugees and victims of tyrants there was nothing that had made them more proud than to watch the Israeli defense army march in the annual parade on  Independance day..my grandmother would  wake up at dawn just to get a good place up front where she could watch young Jewish soldiers marching  proud giving her reassurance that she will not have to leave her home again or have her relatives murdered for being jews.

My mother told my husband what i heard for the first time when she came to visit us when my first child ,Shannie  Annie was born in 1996. How she could not go to school anymore , being called deragatory   names on the street , and not being able to sit on benches, having to rescue her younger sister, a thin frail girl who never ate enough from a group of youth who wanted to hang her..

No,I can not imagine sacrificing children for any cause, but I can imagine hiding them and sacrificing my life so they can live.

Children are for me the eternal life, the links of  an unbroken chain ..no, i can not imagine sacrificing them for any cause.

 Tonight i saw a documentary film on the European Arte channel that closed the circle for me that made me understand the difference between the need to defend and the need to find a reason to kill.

I turned the t.v. a bit late, did not catch the name of  the film..i was so happy to hear English on t.v. since everything on Swiss t.v. is dubbed so the Swiss don't have to hear English or any other language but German..

The film maker was a man called Samuel Fuller, he was a man in his 60's with a full head of white hair and a very strong and clear way of pronouncing his words. You could tell what he was saying was very important, that he had something to tell.He spoke at the scene where he had filmed  in 1945.                                                                                As an American  soldier serving  in the second World War Fuller had asked his mother to send him a film camera..it took her a year and a half to comply but he  finally  had one towards the end of the war..

Fuller had participated in the last battle of the war which was fought in great irony in the place that had first started the war, the Sudates, Czekoslovakia ..he described how Chamberlaine had lifted his famous umbrella 7 or 8 years before and had declared "Peace shall prevail!" -the image of the umbrella deep in his memory as he looks back.

One of the most difficult jobs American soldiers during the second WW had to do was to liberate the" work camps" as they were called which were in fact torture camps and so during their stay at a place called Faulkenau in Czekoslovakia the commander, a man called cpt. Richmond had decided to teach the local population and collaberators a lesson they shall never forget.

"Do you still have that camera?" , the Captain asked Fuller, "go get it".

There were houses  a mere distance of 50 meters from the "work" camp and yet the local villagers   had claimed upon being investigated that they knew nothing about the camp and people being tortured there, they did not smell the stench of death , did not know anything about it!

Cpt. Richmond said he was going to teach them a lesson about walking away from inhumantiy by turning the inhuman treatment of the prisoners to a humne treatment:                                                                                    He had ordered the men of the village ,very healthy looking men to collect the nacked  bodies(tortured skeletons)   of the victims and dress them in whatever they could and bring them to burial while the people of the town watched  and all this was documented in film by Samuel Fuller and his small movie camera his mother had sent him during the war..

I, who could not watch any holocaust movies not  "Schindler's list",

nor "The Pianist" , although I had read the books , could not  but watch 

Fuller's documentary film                                                                      "I don't care that people know how many people had died in the war, whether it is 6 million jews , 9 million protestants or 12 million Lutherns , but I don't want to hear that the holocaust was a myth like people say today in America too ", Fuller states in his no nonsense tone of voice   and so the film shows how the heathy men of the village carry the nacked bodies of the camp's victims , the first one is a man, almost a skeleton, there is hardly any flesh on his body,, it could be my grandmother's mother or her  sisters.(we never found out what had happened to those relatives left behind) .but the expression on the victim's   face is of pain beyond words..

The villagers  obey as they carry the bodies-skeletons one by one, placing them in a row and proceed to dress them in pants and shirt as though they were dolls in a store display..

The local people doing this task  were not threatened to do so ,they were simply told by Captain Richmond to do that because they had lied and he wanted to teach them a lesson not to lie.                                      They had claimed they knew nothing about the camp and the activities going on there..

"Look", says Samuel Fuller , "The houses of the village are 50 meters away from the gates of the camp!",

The captain made some of the men,now prisoners  of  war dress the dead bodies of the victims and wheel them in carts to a burial site near by..he had ordered a Hitler youth, a young Blonde handome Slave to climb in the grave and place the bodies in a neat fashion, to place the limbs side by side and the young man did not show any expression on his face, he obeyed the orders without batting an eyelash..

"I could not do that", fuller states, "It is a living nightmare to have to dress and place the bodies in a grave, to have contact with them yet this young man was able to do that without showing any feeling "

The Natzi war machine had taken human beings and dehumanized them, they had shown films where Jews were said to be like rats, infesting the pure Arian race with germs , they had to be exterminated was the final solution the Nazi war machine produced.

Human beings were stripped of  their cloths and had to give up their jewlerly and facial hair till they resembled what is vaguly a human being, without cloths, beards, signs of culture or fashion human beings are stripped down to what they are basically :flesh and blood and bones.                   .No one is interested in them as individuals any longer and what is amazing is that the bodies resemble each other so much...the process of dehumanising completed in taking away everything you can take, even the gold in their teeth, but what Cpt. Richmond had done had been a brilliant solution -he gave back the victims their humanity and he had the local villagers who had ignored human beings' torment do the work ..

Cpt. Richmond did not preach to the villagers or torture them, this was not allowed any longer..                                                                     They  would have been shot had it not been for the peace agreement having been just signed  according to which the American soldiers were forbidden to shoot the local Nazis .

So Cpt.  Richmond had decided to teach them a lesson.:                  Some of them worked restoring humanity to those dehumanised while the rest of the villagers stood on a hill above and watched..

A soviet Doctor gave a talk about how a third of the victims could not survive , a third would die soon and  a third would live a life of death,seeing in their mind the memories of what they had experienced in the camps till the day they died .

The villagers were not threatened  yet they obeyed as they knew so well how.

The burial ceremony for the victims of the camp ended by throwing earth upon their graves as is common to many religions and with a military salute to the victims who once again regained their humanity.

I wonder how many fathers, mothers, children of those victims know where they are and i wonder how many villagers there considered that these people had families and children or were somebody's children and that they had names.

For me the circle closes.The lesson taught.

There is no excuse for me to take away from human beings the very essence of what makes them human beings, there is no excuse for putting any cause  above human life.

 I salute Samuel Fuller who filmed his first film which is the essance of film that people can see what really happened and never say it never happened and I  salute here Cpt. Richmond -the beautiful American and a great  teacher!

                                                                                                                                                   We We are living in times where many people believe that for the sake of peace we should sacrifice all that we can but we must be careful not to sacrifice our security against those whose stated  goal is to take away from other human being their life.  

My  maternal grandfather ,another great teacher i miss daily,               would say when asked about the politics of  Hayatola Humani in Iran of the 1980's :"Democracy, democracy but first let the people be *Mensche!"

*Menche in Yiddish means a human being that has humane values.