Hamas killing spree haunts Holocaust survivors
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STORY: 86-year-old Bellha Haim fled with her family as child from Poland during World War Two. And on October 7 last year, her grandson Yotam, like her a resident of a village near the Gaza border, was taken hostage by Hamas. He managed to escape, only to be accidentally shot dead by Israeli soldiers. The trauma drove Haim to return to Poland, where she will on Monday (May 6) take part in the "March of the Living" at the site of the Auschwitz death camp. The annual ceremony is timed to coincide with Israel's Holocaust memorial day. Holocaust commemorations this year have a searing significance for her and six other elderly survivors now deeply scarred by the Hamas attack that sparked the ongoing Gaza war. “What happened here on October 7th, it's impossible to believe. I see the huge picture mounted in the new library in Jerusalem with all those who were killed and murdered, it's impossible. To this day I cannot fathom. I'm running away from it.” A veteran campaigner for peace with the Palestinians, Haim said she would no longer pursue that activism. "Now what interests me is only my people," she added. Among those joining her will be 90-year-old Daniel Louz. His hometown Kibbutz Beeri lost a tenth of its residents to the Palestinian attackers. In some ways, he said, that ordeal was worse for him than the European war, when he escaped Nazi round-ups in his native France although half his family perished in Poland. “In France, as a child I suffered all kinds of post-traumas that I’ve learned to cope with, but in Be’eri, it was the first time that I felt the fear of death.” On October 7 last year, he woke up to the sound of Arabic yelling and gunfire. A neighboring house was riddled with bullets. Louz's was untouched. He says he imagined the souls of the six million Holocaust victims steering Hamas away from him.
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