2023-10-13 19:00:27
What is really important? What touches us today – and won’t go away tomorrow? They are the things that have moved us since humans existed: happiness, love, family, relationships, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, sadness.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen*, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to humanity’s eternal questions from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are astonishingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
★★★
There were only a few people standing at the small town sign. Umbrellas, coat collars folded up, a windy autumn evening in Berlin-Zehlendorf.
They came to remember the people in their sister city. It is located in the south of Israel in the Negev Desert. Hardly anyone in Germany knew her name. That changed horribly overnight.
The whole world now knows the 26,000-inhabitant town on the Gaza Strip: It’s called Sderot. In this city, hundreds of children, women and men were murdered by Hamas.
Sderot has become the epitome of terror.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
Photo: Wolf Lux
Since the terrorist attack in Israel, people have been gathering every evening in Berlin-Zehlendorf to remember the victims. They lay flowers, often red roses. They remain silent, they bow when they come and when they go.
“We don’t know each other at all,” a pensioner tells me. “But we have something in common: We want to remember the victims who died in such a horrific way.” I say this because I can look directly onto Sderot Square from my living room and am there every day.
I think sometimes it doesn’t matter how many people do the right thing. But rather that they do it. The Talmud, an important text of Judaism, says: “Whoever saves a single life saves the whole world.”
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Even if it is not possible to save a life here: just the remembrance that brings these people together on a regular basis has a lot of dignity and strength. Other passers-by pause and stand still. Many people look and talk to those who remember. It’s a small circle that keeps growing.
On the Internet you can currently find touching drawings by German elementary school students who painted for the children in Israel – wonderful.
The people at the small town sign do it differently, in their own way. There are moments when the focus is not just on your own life. But also the lives of men, women and children in the Negev Desert who we do not know by name. As I write this, rockets are hitting Sderot again.
God save Israel.
* Louis Hagen (76) was a member of the BILD editorial team for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts have also been published as a book and are available at koehler-mittler-shop.de.
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