2023-10-21 15:46:37
In the book “Remembering together”, the journalist Claude Askolovitch and his mother Evelyn Askolovitch discuss the story of the latter, deported at the age of 4 to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
On October 11, only a few 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, deported at the age of 4 to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. A story that takes on particular resonance today for mother and son.
“In the first hours I refused to say that it was like the Shoah. But when I saw what was done, I didn’t believe it, I didn’t think it was possible,” says Evelyn Askolovitch, guest on BFMTV Friday evening, two weeks after the various attacks by the terrorist group. “This war changed something inside people’s bodies, inside their heads,” continues the survivor, now 85 years old.
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 the death of his wife there, were together in Amsterdam when the Jewish community, practically annihilated by the Nazis, celebrated the birth of the State of Israel. A State which should be just, moral and by which Jews would no longer be massacred.”
“This is all horrible”
Evelyn Askolovitch is particularly affected by the deaths of children. “I can’t stand it, perhaps because I was a child in the camps. It’s unbearable that children were taken hostage,” she says. “My daughter works in Israel in an institution with autistic children. She learned that a child she loved very much had been murdered with her grandmother. What is happening is absolutely unbearable,” she adds.
“All this is horrible: the people taken hostage, those who were massacred in their homes by Hamas, the desecration of the bodies…”, continues Claude Askolovitch, who emphasizes, however, that “what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza is also horrible”.
If in the West “we have more difficulty identifying” with the Palestinian population, we must not forget it, says the 60-year-old journalist. “All this is a catastrophe but in the catastrophe we must never forget the Palestinian children and the Palestinian parents too,” he concludes.
Clément Boutin Journalist BFMTV
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