For Israel, there is no moment more significant than Yom Hashoah: when the siren sounds, people stop in the streets; they stand at attention after getting out of their cars; they freeze while shopping in the supermarkets, studying in the universities, marching in the army, doing business. It is like a great wall of silence, full of suffering and vitality. All of Israel focuses its devotion on one memory. Some thought goes to the uprisings in the ghettos and in the camps, the pinnacle of Israel’s national spirit.
This is why, when Ilan Ramon died, the country united around his name—because the soft-spoken young man with a humble expression had brought the memory of the Holocaust into outer space. As the first Israeli astronaut, he had carried with him a copy of a drawing that Petr Ginz made in the ghetto of Theresienstadt before he was killed in Auschwitz at the age of sixteen. Ramon was excited about bringing along the drawing by “a boy imprisoned within the walls of the ghetto, walls that could not imprison his spirit. His drawings are the testimony of the triumph of his spirit.” Ilan also brought a Torah scroll and a coin from 69 CE, minted in Jerusalem, with the inscription “Salvation for the people of Israel.” Ramon identified himself as the son of a German Jew who had taken refuge in Israel and a woman who had survived Auschwitz. He had taken into space the memory of the Holocaust, which his mother had escaped, unlike his grandfather and other relatives, and of the struggle for independence, in which his father had participated. Ilan died when the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded on February 11, 2003, killing the seven astronauts aboard.
The Torah scroll that Ilan brought into space, the first ever to have gone there, was the one that Joachim Joseph had used to prepare for his bar mitzvah in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Early one Tuesday morning, before the alarm went off, the prisoners put blankets over the windows and lit candles, and Joachim chanted his passage from the Torah, as every Jewish boy has done for centuries. Then Rabbi Simon Dasberg, who had given him the scroll, said to him, “I will not get out of here alive; here, take the scroll, and tell the story.” Joachim gave it to Ilan as “a symbol of the Jewish resistance even in the extermination camps, of the determination to survive.” The Torah scroll, he noted, “came out of the most profound darkness, and Ilan took it into the dazzling light of space.”
Ilan Ramon is buried in Moshav Nahalal in the Jezreel Valley, a place where death and malaria once reigned before the Jewish pioneers turned it into one of the most fertile areas in Israel. And beside him is the liberator of Jerusalem, Moshe Dayan. The diary entry with his dvar Torah, message from the Torah, has not come down to us. It will remain forever indecipherable. Just as in the legend about the Jewish mystic Baal Shem Tov: He met the Messiah and asked when he would come down to earth. The answer was, “When your message arrives in heaven.”
Several months after the Columbia explosion, a group of Israeli pilots made a highly symbolic flight. Ignoring the protests from the Auschwitz museum, the Israeli jets, piloted by children of Holocaust survivors, flew over the concentration camp that had swallowed up a million Jews. The demonstration was led by Brigadier General Amir Eshel, whose grandmother had been murdered down there in the gas chambers of Birkenau. “We pilots promise to be a shield for the Jewish people and for Israel,” Eshel said. “There was the platform where the selection took place, the railway line, the green fields, an innocent silence. That is how hell appeared on earth, in the heart of Europe. As an Israeli who had been taught that the Jews had gone ‘like sheep to the slaughter,’ I felt the courage of the millions who faced infinite suffering in the ghettos, in the forests, in the cattle cars. Representing their memory was a great honor for us. We understood the enormity of our responsibility, in guaranteeing the immortality of our people and bearing their greatness upon our wings.”
On the occasion of Israel’s fifty-eighth anniversary, Eliezer Shkedi, then commander of the air force and a man with a contagious smile, had his father, a Shoah survivor, get aboard his F-1. “For me it is clear that my duty is to restore value to human history,” Shkedi said, “and for this reason I followed the path of my father, and my father today is somewhat compensated.” The chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, a survivor of Auschwitz, said that Israel represents a special form of revenge: “The revenge is that we are here, the revenge is that we are home, the revenge is that we have a country, the revenge is that we are here in this place with the blue and white flag and the Star of David.”
For Jews, the fact of the Shoah is a justification for Israel’s existence. For the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denial of the Shoah is reason enough to pursue a war of extermination against Israel. According to Ahmadinejad’s logic, Israel was created after the Shoah (a historical fallacy); Jews have used the Shoah as an excuse to reclaim their nation (another historical fallacy); and therefore, since the Shoah didn’t happen, Israel may consequently be obliterated. This is why, when a Holocaust survivor is killed by a suicide bomber or loses a relative in a terrorist attack, the entire country reads the story with anguish. It is a perfect murder—the conclusion of a project begun sixty years earlier in Europe. The aim to annihilate the Jews has left a long trail of darkness down through the generations.
George and Anna Yakobovitch had gotten on the train to Auschwitz together. He was able to get away before they reached the gate of death. She came to the ramp of Dr. Joseph Mengele, along with her father, mother, and siblings. They were gassed immediately, but she made it out alive. Thirty years later, George and Anna met again by chance and got married. At a Passover supper in 2002, a suicide bomber killed George on the spot, together with twenty-seven other people. “Sons of pigs and monkeys,” the terrorist had called them before blowing himself up.
Another victim of terrorism was Mendel Bereson, from Saint Petersburg, who had lost all his relatives in Europe; today his family in Israel says he was “a true Zionist,” someone who “said that the Jews have only one state.” Leah Levine had just found out that her brother, the only other member of their large family to have escaped the genocide, was living in Russia. She is remembered as “a wonderful wife, always happy, and the mother of four boys.” Leah Strick, a survivor of the massacre in the Bialystok ghetto in Poland, was blown up in a bus on a Sunday morning while she was going to visit her sister in a geriatric clinic.
“We came here by ourselves because our parents were killed in the Holocaust,” said the brother of the artist Miriam Levy, who was killed in Jerusalem in June 2003. Her grandson noted that his “elegant and intelligent grandmother had emerged from the abyss of the Holocaust aboard the ship Exodus.” Miriam had come to Israel on the legendary ship that in 1947 defied the British blockade by trying to reach Palestine with 4,515 Holocaust survivors. “We swore to them then: never again another Auschwitz,” Commandant Yossi Harel would say later. “I like to think that Israel was born then, on those ships crammed with refugees considered illegal immigrants.” The Exodus 1947 was fired on by the English in the Bay of Haifa, and with dead and wounded aboard, Harel had to surrender. One girl on the ship had escaped being killed by the Nazis because she was buried under a pile of corpses; she could no longer close her eyes because her eyelid muscles had contracted.
Elsa Cohen and Bianca Shichrur, also victims of terrorism, had much in common. Both had survived the Second World War, and both had a mentally disabled son living in the same area of Jerusalem. Bianca, born in Italy, had come to Israel forty years earlier. Elsa had lost her whole family in the Holocaust, and was one of the children