OCTOBER 7 – “Why we are no longer afraid”

By Angelica Calò Livnè*

These days, I often think that in the 1930s, when the racist laws were promulgated, my grandparents were the same age of my children today. I have often imagined my grandfather Cesare in his thirties, wandering around the villages in the Marche region, holding the tiny hand of my seven-year-old mother, whom he intimated never to reveal she was Jewish, to barter fabrics and embroidery threads from his store in via Palestro in Rome for a few eggs or a loaf of bread. Or my grandfather Anselmo, in his 40s, who on October 16, 1943, loaded on a cart his wife, my grandmather Angelica, and their three teenage children to go in search of a place to flee, to hide, to be taken in at a convent or some farm. They spent long months of hunger, of cold, of the smell of hay, of grains of wheat burned in some field where they had passed right after the harvest and eaten with gusto along with a few drops of freshly milked milk, before making back to their houses in via della Reginella and on Ponte Sisto in Rome.
Like all other Jews in Europe, my grandparents were caught off guard by the rise and spread of a visceral and irrational hatred that devastated their lives. Today, Israelis in their 30s and 40s do not flee, do not hide. Not anymore. They are still few against many, so many. They still wonder “why,” but they do not wait for answer, they fight. They fight in the field, to defend democracy and this country’s spirit, to support their families in one of the most difficult periods in the history of Israel, where every week the price of milk, bread, and eggs increases. Many of them have been away from their homes for nearly eight months, with makeshift schools and kindergartens, missiles fired, and non-stop attacks from every border of the country.
My grandparents did not give up and upon their return they started all over again, because this is our spirit. Israel falls and rises again, rises from the ashes, and invents the flash drive, drip irrigation and the Iron Dome. It does not surrender to bullying, to power, to racism, and gratuitous hatred. Israel fights back, defend itself and without erasing any pages continues to write its history, even if it is tired, even if it is sick of telling its children every year in the month of Adar that in Persia they wanted to hang all the Jews and in the month of Nissan that Egypt enslaved them all. Even if it cannot take anymore escaping to the shelters when the loudspeakers shout “Zeva Adom!” (Color red!) or when the sound of sirens pierces your heart and confuses your soul.
No, we don’t want war, we have never wanted it, but the word needs to understand that we are no longer afraid neither of the lies spread about us or the threats and violence raging in universities, on screens, on social media and in bar talk. They say we have the strongest army in the world … It is true, because it is an army animated by the force of desperation, by the awareness that history wickedly repeats itself and humanity refuses to learn. So we have no other choice and as the artist Herbert Pagani said paraphrasing Descartes, “I defend myself therefore I am!”

*Educator and coordinator of Beresheet LaShalom Foundation. From Rome, she is a member of the kibbutz Sasa, in Israel.