a monument to the dead and the living, by Anne Sinclair – L’Express

They finally have a name, an existence, a history. We can almost hear their voices, we now know the unfolding of their lives cut down on October 7 at the border of the Gaza Strip. They are 1 year old, 20 years old or 80. They were massacred by Hamas or escaped from it. They are wounded in their flesh or forever devastated because their grandmother, their father, their children were brutally killed or kidnapped as hostages for almost seven months. They finally come to terms with reality as individuals, those who were murdered, as those whose life has since ceased to be a life.

October 7 by Lee Yaron (Grasset) is a Yaron monument. The first book which recreates almost minute by minute, kibbutz by kibbutz, the horror of the events that occurred from 6:30 a.m. that morning. She is a journalist at Haaretz, a left-wing Israeli newspaper and has undertaken in a few months a crazy investigation to bring to life the victims of the infinite barbarity of Hamas in the south of Israel, to bring out of the anonymity of the number, these 1200 executed, these 250 taken hostage , these 133 still there, these survivors in tatters. She interviewed more than a hundred families; she went through the messages of distress from the victims and the messages of joy from the killers carefully broadcast by them; she watched the recordings of surveillance cameras from the streets of the town of Sderot to see how terrorists on board a white van finished off the father and mother of Lia, 3 years old, and Romi, 6 years old, leaving them covered in blood of their parents.

She read the interrogations of the Gazans taken prisoner to reconstruct the story of de Bipin, a 23-year-old student and his sixteen comrades who left Nepal in September to come and earn a little money as agricultural workers in Kibbutz Aloumim: ten killed, six injured, and Bipin, of whom there is no news, probably in the Gaza tunnels.

She brings us to life the incredible story of Trippy Abou Rashid, a resident of a Bedouin village in the Negev, caught in the middle of machine gun bursts with his wife Sujood who was about to give birth, and whose baby, still in her stomach, was took the bullets, survived, saved the life of his mother, who was also narrowly rescued by Israeli doctors.

Thousands of shekels for Gazan families

Two chapters are gripping. The first one dedicated to the scattered bodies of young people massacred at the Nova festival. Lee Yaron recounts the meticulous and terrible work of Haïm of the Zaka association who tried to reconstruct the mutilated remains of the victims of terrorists killed near Kibbutz Réim; the tragic fate of Shani Louk, still dancing at 6 a.m. and whose body was paraded around Gaza like a trophy; how Raz Perry, sick with lymphoma and still going dancing in the desert, survived and… resumed his chemotherapy.

Lee Yaron undertook the same pious work house by house in the martyred kibbutz of Be’eri. This socialist cooperative where initially each member received the same salary, where a prosperous printing press lived, where avocado and mango orchards flourished, where an art gallery could be visited. During the last elections, 94% of the inhabitants of this kibbutz voted for left or center parties. Its members donated thousands of shekels to Gazan families; an NGO, called “The Ways of Healing” was very active there: founded by an Israeli woman whose brother had been killed by Hamas in 1993, it regularly transported Gazan patients to Israeli hospitals.

This is one of the tragedies of these massacres which targeted the populations most favorable to Palestinian rights: Roni, 80 years old, arrived from Algeria in the 1950s and shot dead in her bed, or the magnificent Vivian Silver, murdered At her place. Born in Winnipeg in Canada, but since 1974 conquered life on a kibbutz, she settled in Be’eri, joining B’Tselem, an organization for the defense of human rights in Israel. She defined herself as a “conditional Zionist,” fighting for the Jewish state on the condition that it respects the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people.

Lee Yaron tells the story of the Zemach family scattered across six different locations on the kibbutz. She shows us the terrorists walking around the village for hours, holding fifty hostages and threatening to kill them all; she takes us through the captivity and release of Hila Rotem and Emily Hand at the end of November; the 27 hours it took Ayelet Shachar-Epstein to be rescued when her son Neta was blown up by a grenade in one of the other martyr sites, in Kfar Aza.

Say the names so as not to forget

Lee Yaron did an incredible job. The author of this October 7, memorial book with a black cover, bordered by the Gaza barbed wire torn down by the killers, is a very young and beautiful woman of 29 years old. She is a resolute opponent of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government of extremists, collapsed by the way in which the fate of the hostages has become the adjustment variable of the Israeli government which thinks above all of its survival and which she judges with infinite severity.

The turn the war in Gaza is taking dismays her, aware that the whole world has already forgotten October 7 and is drunk with lies and confusion, brandishing the word genocide like a mantra against all evidence. She is finishing a sabbatical year at Columbia where she measures the violence unleashed against Israel and against Jewish students.

Additional irony, the evening we met, it had been blocked by demonstrators from Sciences Po, ignorant of history, words, symbols, transposing false reading grids onto Israel, and above all abused by politicians who all shame drunk, fanning the fire for electoral purposes foreign to the European campaign.

I wanted to cite here some of the countless testimonies that Lee Yaron reported in his book to give life and flesh to dozens of families. To give them back their identity, she describes their silhouettes, with the red t-shirt of one or on the bicycle of the other; recounts their odyssey, sometimes begun for them or their parents, in the shtetls of Ukraine or Poland, survivors of the Shoah or not; insists on their commitment to a population in whose name they were assassinated.

Saying names so as not to forget is a commandment of Judaism. Writing down names to remember and bow is what Lee Yaron does in this book. Reading these names is the least we can do to remember their ravaged existence.