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Opinion

Israel's survivors need us now

May 20, 2011 11:05
3 min read

M y grandfather did not talk much about what happened to his family when the Nazis occupied Warsaw, but we knew there were 10 Goldkorn brothers and sisters before the War, and only three afterwards. He never stopped grieving for those who were killed, for their families and their children.

The Holocaust sits like a shadow on my family's story. Before we went to Israel, Celia and I visited Auschwitz. All the facts, the photos and the history of the Holocaust seemed to be compressed into that one place. And then, just before our arrival in Israel, we read about a Holocaust survivor sleeping rough there. It was incomprehensible. We resolved to do something to help survivors in Israel.

When we arrived, we talked to everyone - social welfare minister, Isaac Herzog; the organisations set up to help survivors, and the survivors themselves. The message we heard was that the biggest problem survivors in Israel faced was loneliness. Through the Israeli government and the Claims Conference, their accommodation and medical needs were supposed to be met but too many had almost no human contact. Friends and families had gone; hundreds were house-bound in wheelchairs.

It is a tragedy when we let anybody grow old alone. When that person carries the weight of memory that survivors carry, the tragedy is doubled.