It will take years to digest the magnitude of Oct. 7
The writer Charles Bukowski is famous for saying, “Humanity – you never had it,” and though he wasn’t Jewish, he could have been talking about we, the Jews.
We know all about living in a world without pity, up to Oct. 7, and where in the Hague, a stacked deck of UN judges plays the usual role of putting Israel on trial.
For defending itself.
Nothing changes…but some things have changed.
When we say, the Holocaust, we still mean what happened in Europe years ago, but it in terms of horror, we can justly say it happened again, only this time in Israel.
The numbers aren’t the same, but the horror is a match….and so is the process of getting people to believe that such inhumanity really is possible.
Even good people, here in America, were slow to catch on to the Holocaust, a word that was in and out of use until the 1990s, when it became widespread.
The event itself, however, the murder of six million Jews, was too much of a stretch, or too unbearable, even for sympathizers.
I can attest to this from personal knowledge, which brings us to the day my mother went to visit a relative on Long Island, Jenny, prosperous and American to the hilt.
This was around 1950. Mother was a refugee, and still scarred from what she and her family had endured. She welcomed the chance to tell her story.to a congenial listener.
Hardly anyone else that she came across understood what had transpired there in Europe. Only bits and pieces had gotten out, and The New York Times had put a hold on the story. The grand rabbi of Cincinnati, Eliezer Silver, galvanized the March on Washington, 400 rabbis with a petition for FDR to intervene on behalf of the Jews marked for extermination…but to no avail. FDR sneaked out the back door of the White House.
So the meeting was set between Mother and Aunt Jenny…a meeting between two people, two families from the opposite ends of the world.
A clash of civilizations was inevitable.
For Jenny, this was supposed to be a chat. She and her husband were scheduled to attend a gala at the New York Public Library.
But she wanted to know what happened? Gradually, over tea and cakes, Mother explained, until both women were driven to tears.
Mother told how one day, there in Toulouse, France, German Gestapo appeared on the streets, even directing traffic.
Then, the streets were periodically roped off to restrict Jews, and then Jews began disappearing. They were picked up and driven off, to Auschwitz, we later learned. This was how Villie and Manfred and their mother Erna disappeared. Next, Jews were forbidden to conduct business, or to hold French citizen documentations. Like that, we became a people without a country.
The French, once friendly neighbors, turned on us as well. But the priest, Father Laroche, managed our escape, over the Pyrenees.
We arrived here with one suitcase.
Jenny listened to all this without interruption. But this was not the chat she’d had in mind, and in a burst, she yelled, STOP. She wanted no more.
Mother said, “I thought you wanted to know.”
“But not such details. You can’t just come into a home, even among family, and tell a story so heartbreaking. This needs time to absorb.”
So it is with the immense tragedy of Oct. 7. This needs time to absorb.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here.
NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here
Plus, a free sample chapter of his noir gambling thriller, Compulsive, is available from hiswebsite, here.
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