In Jerusalem, October 7 revived the nightmare of Holocaust survivors – L’Express

This November morning, only a group of seven young people enter the majestic hall of Yad Vashem. Since October 7 and the war in the Gaza Strip, visitors have become rare. They have just made aliyah, the immigration of Jews to Israel, and have come to learn more about history, about the hell of the Shoah. “To all these young people, I say to them: make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” summarizes Berthe behind the reception counter. As they leave, each young person hugs and kisses him. Berthe beams.

This afternoon, the 91-year-old young woman has a meeting with her group of the Aloumim association, which brings together nearly 500 hidden children of the Shoah living today in Israel. In a classroom loaned by Yad Vashem, around fifteen of them, aged at least 80, gathered for their first discussion group since the massacres committed by Hamas. Horror, war, abandonment. The darkness of this period plunges these elders back into their childhood nightmares. So we must exchange, open up to those who have gone through the same trauma. “Free speech, break our loneliness,” as Suzy Sprecher, just 83, who leads the conversation, says.

Sitting in a square on school chairs, they express what has been on their hearts since October 7. Everyone at their own pace. Sonia, in an elegant white and black suit, puts her thoughts into short sentences that convey the essentials. His son in the army, the nightmares, the waking up in the middle of the night. “Everything comes back to me,” she sums up. To her right, her husband Szmil has lost his speech, having become aphasic since a car accident. As a child, he survived Auschwitz. With the tenderness of those who never leave each other, Sonia recounts Szmil’s emotion since the start of the war: “He no longer speaks, but he cries every day.”

Opposite the eternal couple, Madeleine, straight as an I in her chair, has a sharp delivery and raw emotions. “When I saw that, I let out a scream… In Israel! I always thought that this horror could return, but not in Israel.” Like her comrades from Aloumim, she says she fell back into childhood, for the space of a tragic day. “Then I took a sleeping pill, and when I woke up, I said to myself: you are in Israel, safe, and I buried all my past,” continues Madeleine. “I put the Shoah aside, like resilience.”

Near the window overlooking the wooded valleys of western Jerusalem, Gaby nods. “All my life, I have absorbed anxieties, fears, exodus. From one day to the next, on October 7, I fell back into abandonment and fear, states that paralyze me: I find myself a baby, I have difficulty feeding myself, making food…” In his 82-year-old eyes, the fragility and hesitations of childhood resurface.

Very quickly, a subject focuses the attention of the discussion group. For them, whose early years were forever damaged by the madness of adults, the vision of child hostages resonates intensely. And intimate. Meïra Barer was the same age as little Kfir Bibas, the youngest Israeli captive of Hamas (9 months), when she miraculously escaped the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup. She cried so hard that a police officer asked her mother to leave, before being hidden for three years with families in Oise and Yonne. “I don’t remember it, obviously, but I have this memory of abandonment and solitude,” says Meïra, 82 years old. “When I see the child hostages, alone in the tunnels, in the cold, helpless… It deeply touches me.”

Facing her, Suzy Sprecher also splits her shell, sharing her solitude, her anguish, her tears. “I have no images of the Shoah, but I have sensations and smells,” says this former virologist, who devoted forty years of her career to the Pasteur Institute. “The smells, in particular, remain. I was in German Switzerland in a refugee camp, I was 3 years old, I escaped at night looking for my mother. That’s why I’m crying today: this feeling of abandonment is part of from us, and with the war it rises to the surface.”

The vast majority of Aloumim members are French, apart from a few Belgians. They all made aliyah several decades ago. For some, October 7 changed this relationship with their country of origin. “At the moment, as an Israeli, I don’t feel French at all,” says Madeleine, scandalized by the pro-Palestinian marches in Paris. “I only have our soldiers and our hostages on my mind.” “Israel is my refuge,” says Suzy, who does not have words powerful enough to praise the solidarity of Israeli society after the Hamas attacks. Meïra sets off, devastated by the outbreak of anti-Semitic acts in her country of birth. “In France, the Jews are afraid again, they are reliving our traumas. But here, in Israel, I am not a victim, underlines the survivor of Vel’ d’Hiv. We have seen coming for years what “it’s happening in Europe, and particularly in France… There, we are powerless, here we can act.” Almost every day, she collects and makes food packages for Israeli soldiers on the front near Gaza. Her way of participating in the war, she says.

At the back of the room, Paul shifts in his school chair. He too experienced the Shoah in France, he too is a hidden child. Today, he describes his anger at the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London and New York, which he equates to support for Hamas and its atrocities. “I am disgusted to see that the whole world is against us, that a new generation can think that Jewish blood is worthless,” sighs Paul. At his side, René also came back up. With his Belgian accent intact, he recounts his first childhood memory, during the bombings of 1944, just before the Liberation. “The Allies couldn’t ask nicely to go through Belgium, so they sent carpet bombs to the cities,” recalls the child from Liège, who lost a brother and a sister under these Allied bombings. scandal is that we are accused of bombing poor civilians in Gaza, while we take Sioux precautions not to touch them.” In a war, only victory seems to count.

After two hours of discussion, hearts are lighter, the bag empty. We promise to see each other again for the next discussion group in Jerusalem, at the beginning of January. At the exit, we find Berthe, who cannot prevent her broad smile from lighting up the room. As often, she thinks back to the child hostages in the Gaza Strip. “I hope they come out safe and sound. Although, of sound mind, I’m not sure…” At 91 years old, the dean suddenly straightens up: “These children… All their lives, they will have in them this terror and this anguish. Like us, in fact.”