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Many of the survivors, who today are obviously very old, live in extreme poverty: the allocation they receive from the state is insufficient to live decently in the few years they still have, and they often lack proper medical care. Their protest is for money, but above all for their lost dignity: “I came the whole way from Ramat Gan to protest against the humiliation of the Holocaust survivors” said Haya Rosenbaum, a survivor from Auschwitz.

And the humiliation is double: first, that they have to beg for money in order to survive, while the State of Israel exists through the huge German compensations it received “on behalf of the victims”; and, second, that the first response of the government was to raise the monthly allocation to… US$20, not enough to buy a daily cup of tea. After negotiations, Ehud Olmert agreed to raise the amount: the total monthly payment will now be… NIS 280 Shekel, i.e. US$70, in addition to what every senior citizen receives from the National Insurance Institute, around NIS 2,000.

Much worse than the financial aspect of this present confrontation is its moral dimension, and the total lack of empathy towards the survivors. One can imagine what would have been the reaction of international public opinion if Germany, or any other European country, would have treated the Jewish survivors the way Israel is treating them (I intentionally wrote “Jewish” because the other survivors—Romas, communists, homosexuals, etc.—are completely ignored in the Israeli discourse). “They are not ashamed to try and make money from the suffering of our people,” one of Olmert’s advisors dared to say on Israeli television. He, who can have an office, a car and a salary 10 times higher than the survivor’s allocation, all thanks to the German support to Israel in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

The debt of Israel to the victims of the Jewish genocide is immense, and without that tragedy it is reasonable to deduce that Israel would not have come into existence. One would have expected that the country’s leadership would express at least respect, if not gratitude, to the survivors and would have done their best to provide them with decent conditions in their last years in life.

“Often I ask myself if it was not a mistake to remain alive,” said Miriam Yahav, who has survived Auschwitz and Treblinka, “if it was not a mistake to come to Israel to live among Jews. Sixty years ago we have been oppressed and robbed by the Nazis and their assistants. Years later we are robbed again by our own government. It is shameful!” Eizer Eilon, who was in no less than five Nazi concentration camps, adds: “What the Nazis ultimately failed to achieve, the Israeli government may succeed to achieve, God forbid…”^[1]

This last quote reminds me of an interview from the 1980’s, given on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt by Marek Edelman, one of the commanders of the uprising and a leader of Solidarnosc. In that interview, the great man accused the State of Israel of having pounded the final nails into the coffin of Eastern Europe Jewish existence: “The Israelis, so strong and so powerful, the Israelis who have won all their wars, are ashamed of the victims of the Shoah and despise the survivors. Israel has done nothing for the revival of the Jewish culture, heritage of millions of human beings who have created a Jewish world between the Dniepr and the Vistula Rivers. Even their language has been buried. As if Israel is ashamed of the history of the Jewish people of Eastern Europe and wants to erase its past"^[2]

Indeed, the attitude of Israel to the genocide of European Jewry is totally manipulative: museums and memorial days aimed at indoctrinating Israeli youth that only might and military strength can guarantee the existence of the Jews, and systematic propaganda oriented towards the international community and the peoples of the world in order to oblige them to unconditionally support the policies of Israel and to deny the suffering of the Palestinian people.

The memory of the martyrs of our people is too sacred to be left in the hands of the cynical politicians who are running the State of Israel. It is our duty to take their ashes from the dirty and bloody hands of Ehud Olmert and Shimon Peres, and to translate the last testament of the Warsaw combatants into a line of action: "For our freedom and for yours, for our pride and for your human, national and social dignity!"