In the book “Remembering Together,” journalist Claude Askolovitch and his mother Evelyn Askolovitch discuss the story of the latter, who was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany at the age of 4.
On October 11, just days after the Hamas attacks in Israel, Remembering Together (Grasset) was released. In this book, journalist Claude Askolovtich and his mother Evelyn Askolovitch discuss the story of the latter, who was deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany at the age of four. A story that has particular resonance for mother and son today.
“In the first few hours I refused to say it was like the Shoah. But when I saw what happened, I didn’t believe it, I didn’t think it was possible,” says Evelyn Askolovitch, guest on BFMTV on Friday evening, two weeks after the terrorist group’s various attacks. “This war changed something in people’s bodies and minds,” continues the now 85-year-old survivor.
Claude Askolovitch agrees: “There are obviously connections. Two years after leaving the camps, Evelyn, still a little girl, and her father, whose life had been destroyed after his wife’s death there, were together in Amsterdam when the Jewish community, virtually annihilated by the Nazis, celebrated the birth of the State of Israel. A state that would be just and moral and in which Jews would no longer be massacred.
“This is all terrible”
Evelyn Askolovitch is particularly affected by the deaths of children. “I can’t stand it, maybe because I was in the camps as a child. It is unbearable that children are taken hostage,” she says. “My daughter works in Israel in a facility with autistic children. She learned that a child she loved very much was murdered along with her grandmother. What is happening is absolutely unbearable,” she added.
“All this is terrible: the people who were taken hostage, those who were massacred in their homes by Hamas, the desecration of the bodies …,” continues Claude Askolovitch, stressing, however, “what about the Palestinians “What happened in Gaza is also terrible.”
If we in the West “have more difficulty identifying with the Palestinian population,” we must not forget that, says the 60-year-old journalist. “All of this is a catastrophe, but in the catastrophe we must never forget the Palestinian children and also the Palestinian parents,” he concludes.
Clément Boutin journalist BFMTV