Block after block stacked with the carcasses of dead houses. Walls punctured by bullet holes and living rooms strewn with debris. Bathrooms with the pipes pulled out, and silent bedrooms filled with broken toys.
And in front of each home glared a poster bearing the names and likenesses of those who had lived and been murdered inside.
What I’m describing is Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the communities hit hardest in the Oct. 7 attacks. Of the 1,200 people Hamas massacred on the Israeli side of the Gazan border that day, more than 100 lived in Be’eri. Not to mention the 30 additional residents taken hostage.
Walking the now-barren streets of that abandoned kibbutz would be disconcerting for anyone with a human heart. For me, however, it was especially so. My mother was a Holocaust survivor who escaped from Nazi Germany to Shanghai, China, from where my American father eventually rescued her. Having been brought up in the United States, I was barely aware of my Jewish identity and certainly never felt threatened by it.
Which is why visiting Israel was never a priority. Nor was the compulsion to dwell on the past. Until Oct. 7 when the walls of complacency came tumbling down as spear-shaped spikes that pierced my heart.
About eight years ago, I moved to the Philippines, where I continue to indulge my lifelong passion for journalism. And so, just this past summer, I made my first trip to the Holy Land as part of a media delegation of Philippine-based journalists.
It was a truly amazing experience. We floated on the Dead Sea, bathed in the waters of the Jordan River, shopped at Mahane Yehuda Market, and visited Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square. Being with mostly Catholics, we also toured the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and visited the ancient village of Capernaum. And of course, I got to pound my fists on the ageless stones of the Western Wall, praying for an end to hostilities and even weeping there in wonder.
Two locations, however, affected me more than any of the others: the site of the Nova Music Festival and, yes, Kibbutz Be’eri. Which reminded me of a visit to Auschwitz the year before, during which my innocent then-four-year-old daughter asked me a haunting question.
“Daddy,” she said, staring at all that remained of the 1.1 million people who died there, “look at all those shoes! Where did they come from?” Gently, I knelt before her and tried to explain, as best I could, though everyone knows that some things cannot be explained.
Which brings me to my point.
The surviving residents of Kibbutz Be’eri recently voted to demolish the remains of those murdered houses. All save one, they said, which will be preserved for five years in remembrance of the destruction and bloodshed.
The next day, however, Israel Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu announced that he may actually designate most of those crippled structures as national heritage sites to be preserved for posterity. “In response to many requests received by the heritage minister’s office from families of those murdered in the towns and kibbutzim,” an official statement explained, “the Heritage Ministry has been working tirelessly for over two years to reach broad agreement…”
Believe me, I understand why the residents want those structural corpses demolished. “[We] don’t want to go back to living in Yad Vashem,” one was reported to have said during the vote. Declared another: “We don’t want to live in Auschwitz.”
But here’s the thing: they won’t be living there. And, like it or not, the issue is bigger than just them. In fact, it involves the entire Jewish community, not just in Israel but worldwide. For nothing tells a story quite like seeing the place where it happened. My little girl will probably never forget those shoes in Auschwitz. Just as I will always remember walking through the barren and bloody streets of Be’eri.
I grew up hearing an oft-repeated slogan, “Never Again!” Now that I’ve grown old, it seems, so have those words. For they refer to events increasingly ancient and irrelevant to a whole new generation. Oct. 7 is not ancient, but recent, relevant, and relatable. Let it be memorialized by a national heritage site where much of it happened. A place hopefully to be visited and contemplated by multitudes.
Lest they forget.
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About the Author
David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Joshua Tree, California, and Northern Mindanao, Philippines, where he writes a weekly column for The Manila Times. The son of a Holocaust survivor, he is a former staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where he contributed to two Pulitzer prize-winning stories. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appeared originally in the Times of Israel.
