my Holocaust when I was a young child—were now replaced by entirely different emotions. Now, in Poland, as a high school adolescent, I began to sense belonging, self-love, power and pride, and the desire to contribute, to live and be strong, so strong that no one would ever try to hurt me.
I remember the tones of “Hatikvah” as I played my trumpet in the death camps of Poland, and a year earlier in the German concentration camp at Buchenwald, which I visited with a German-Israeli friendship delegation of youth—the strongest sensation I had had back then was the desire to take revenge.
As I played I took revenge on all those who hated us. If any Nazi villain, I thought, is hiding in Argentina or Brazil, if some miserable train worker of that war is now sitting in his living room in Germany or Poland, he is surely going crazy at the thought that in spite of all the extermination efforts, our State has come into being. A whole nation was gathered from all corners of the earth to the land of its forefathers to found a mighty army and build national waterways and highways, and glass skyscrapers in Tel Aviv. And that nation sent me to the country of this Nazi villain to play our national anthem, full of hope—tikvah.
Wherever they might be, those scum-of-the-earth criminals, they were now tormented by my vengeful playing, our vengeance in being proud Jewish boys, a vengeance mightier than any court sentence, more painful, even, than the hangman’s noose. That melody echoed in the ears of our haters and proved that in spite of the registers of the victims that we read, weeping, and despite the ashes of all those who were incinerated, and the piles of shoes and spectacles and gold teeth pulled out and shipped directly to Switzerland, in spite of it all, we were strong. And I was here and I was blowing the trumpet D-E-F-G-A-A for “Hatikvah” and B-B-F#-G for “My God, my God, may it never be over / The sand and the sea, the rustling water / The glittering sky, man’s prayer.”*
This was sweet revenge. I drew power from my Holocaust and this power pushed me on, to want to enlist and serve in a select recon unit, possibly in the Nahal, for my dad served there and that would strengthen my roots. (And also because there are fewer bullies in the Nahal and my time there would be more fun.) But this is only in parentheses because frankly I am all for integration, and a melting pot the likes of our army exists nowhere else in the world.
This was the force that later pushed me to go to officers’ training at the end of my training as a combatant. Other options of assignment made by my commanders were tempting and even flattering and much in demand, and I wasn’t exactly one of my team’s favorites, to put it mildly. And rightly so.
I was one of those who told on the commander who cheated on exams and who opened a map during navigation maneuvers. I had been instructed that “credibility and truth are foremost in the army,” but I never realized they didn’t really mean it. Even years later, when I would join Breaking the Silence and would tell anyone, any journalist who listened, how houses were blasted and what it was like to use a human shield and how it felt to command a dozen soldiers and 2,500 Palestinians on a normal “workday” at Qalandiya Checkpoint—even then I would still think that credibility and truth come first.
It would take a long time for me to gradually realize that for many people, truth is worth nothing. When I realized this I was deeply disappointed in human nature, just as I felt when, as a child, I discovered what rape was and was ashamed of being male, and just as I felt when I discovered how many guys cheated on pilot training exams. There were only a few nerds who watched their ass and they didn’t really mind what the others did. When the squadron commander arrived to deliver a speech about credibility and warned us not to cheat, I wondered whether he had once been one of the few nerds and not like all the rest. Suddenly, I didn’t believe him. I got sick to my stomach and cried that night, cried like a kid on the shoulder of my buddy, the other nerd in the course.
I cried because I missed my girlfriend, and because of the lies. Everyone lied. Even I lied. I had lied to her two years earlier. I had gone as a “young ambassador” to represent our country in Argentina and Chile. I told them what a cool place Israel was and that they shouldn’t listen to the news about us because everyone lied and we in Israel only wanted peace, and that boys and children were the same everywhere, maybe except for those in countries where they are brainwashed and it was not their fault. There, in Chile, I kissed the daughter of the man in charge of education in the region. We even made out in the back seat of the car, when her father drove us to our next destination. And now I was crying because I hadn’t confessed this to my beloved, my girlfriend who was not waiting for me at home like she did two years ago, loving and loyal, and I was a wretched liar like everyone else. What a crisis that was. The irony is that the friend on whose shoulders I cried would wait not even twenty-four hours after I broke up with that love of my youth before he took her under his wing and invited her to cry on his shoulder—not just any shoulder. It was the shoulder of a pilot, a tall and handsome pilot.
I was sent on this mission to Chile and Argentina on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when I was in the eleventh grade. We traveled in couples as “young ambassadors” and stayed overnight with host families, mainly from the Jewish communities but also with families of non-Jewish Zionist supporters. We spoke at schools, universities, youth movements and even at one Christian church. We projected an official silent PR film and spoke of our country’s beauty, sanctity and uniqueness. We said that in our country new drivers tagged their car with a yellow sign so everyone would know they couldn’t drive very well yet, and this always made our audience laugh. We would show the audience this “new driver” sign and use it to demonstrate the special Hebrew alphabet, which we said was written from right to left. We wrote our names on the board and even the names of a few people in the audience.
The most amusing part for us was to explain our country’s miniature proportions, as we fitted its whole length into the width of narrow Chile. Or all of it into the tiny province of Tucuman in Argentina—they simply couldn’t believe it. We amazed them by telling them the obvious: that as Deborah, my fellow traveler, explained, “Soon we will enlist, he for three years, I for two,” and added how important it was for us to contribute to our country, and how normal and obvious it was for us that the army was the next phase in our lives, after school and before the “big trip” and college.
At every lecture we gave, Deborah and I raised the topic of the Holocaust and its inevitable lesson: that our country, the State of Israel, must exist and be strong. The idea of talking about the Holocaust was mine, but Deborah played the principal role in this show. At times she made the audience weep as she told about her survivor grandmother who could not possibly throw away food, not even a single crumb, and forced the whole family to eat everything on their plates, down to the last morsel. And if there were still leftovers, she collected them and ate them herself or saved them for the next meal. Before one of the lectures I suggested she let up a bit, and in this spirit I even changed our usual commentary during the film. She was very cross at me and for nearly two days we hardly spoke to each other.
Slowly, the telling of the Holocaust became our mission’s main topic. I recall how one evening, in the province of Misiones, Argentina, I touched the heart of the mother of our host family. We spoke about the Holocaust and the refugees who arrived on a rickety boat from blood-drenched Europe and immediately went forth to fight the Arabs. I described in detail the myth of the Jew who migrated to Palestine on his own, without any family relations, disembarked in Jaffa port, was handed a gun and ran east to fight for Jerusalem and fell there on one of its rocky hills, and now he is buried nameless, and has no one to mourn him or honor his memory. That is why we as a nation must mourn and honor this refugee, whose force and valiance all of the seven Arab states together could not defeat. I spoke about the successors of this refugee in Israel’s subsequent wars, and when I got to 1967—the conquest of the Wailing Wall, the unification of Jerusalem and the nation’s broken heart—her tears flowed. Tears that must have already sprung earlier when she thought of her father, how he sailed alone to Argentina at the end of that war, and but for his luck, he too might have reached Jaffa and run on from there to some Jerusalem hill, and then she would not have been born, nor would her large house exist, neither her great wealth nor her daughter, about my age, who sat at the table throughout this conversation, completely bored.
And so my brain—washed with a single dogmatic truth—combined with my youthful