From Holocaust to Hamas: A musician’s family story

The following account has been sent to us for Holocaust Day by an employee of an international orchestra who wishes to reman anonymous:

A photo of my Grandmother Zofia and Grandfather Moshe, Warsaw 1937.
Young, hopeful and not a care in the world.

They had just moved into a flat in a nice part of town, bought a sewing machine and installed a telephone (so proud they were of progress, coming from the muddy and often fearful shtetl, where antisemitism was the local pastime). Zofia is a newly qualified midwife, and Moshe, a skilled tailor, walks in the broad lapelled suit he has just made.

Everything seemed ‘normal’, though clouds of violence were gathering on the horizon. They were in love, as youthful optimists, refusing to contemplate the rise of fascism as an imminently mortal danger.

Zofia, unlike her best childhood friend Sara, was not a Zionist back then. Zofia was a Bundist: for her, socialism and improvement for the Jewish European diaspora was the path to follow. (Her friend Sara went first to Argentina, then to British Mandate Palestine where her children founded a small and happy kibbutz in the Negev desert).

September 1939, in the blink of an eye, blitzkrieg came to Poland, and Nazi occupation.

By 1942, Moshe, now a captured slave labourer, was beaten, starved and shot to death, buried in an unmarked pit; Zofia’ parents, grandparents, siblings and almost all cousins lay in various killing fields of western Ukraine. Moshe’s parents, grandparents and siblings all ended in Auschwitz.

Zofia was hiding from cellar to barn in freezing winters with two young children in tow. The Soviet army eventually liberated them in 1944, after terrifying years of interrogation in Gestapo jail, illness, near-mortal betrayal and hunger.

Zofia moved to Israel only in 1968, having run orphanages and pioneered paediatric care in the wasteland of postwar Poland. Being Jewish in Soviet territory became, let’s say, precarious and politically unwelcome.

De facto I suppose, Zionism came to her. Where else on earth would she go?

She worked with children’s education deep into old age, and studied Arabic. She died in the 1990s in a nursing home.

When I said Kaddish at her funeral in Jerusalem, Hamas was sending the youth of the Palestinian territories to blow themselves up on Israeli buses as an ideological imperative.

I must confess, I felt like a Zionist then.

Her best friend Sara, remember her?… together with her own children and grandchildren, lived happy lives in that southern kibbutz for decades.

Until October 7, 2023 that is, when Sara’s granddaughter and small great-grandchildren were all murdered in their homes by Hamas. (Their story here).

They were peace campaigners. I suppose they were Zionists too.

As a far from dispassionate observer to my own family history, I despair that today the bones of both Moshe and Zofia bear aural testimony to the thud of war, one in Ukraine, the other in Israel.

In memory of all who have experienced the sweep of death at the hands of fascistic, extremist, racist and fundamentalist autocracy in every way that manifests itself, I can only hope humanity is profoundly insulted by that.