The silence thundered in the destroyed kindergarten when Yossi Landau, a ZAKA man, recounted in a trembling voice what his eyes saw - and his heart clenches at his descriptions.
ZAKA volunteer describes the horrors at Kibbutz Be'eri // Hanan Greenwood
Between the corner of the dolls and the orphaned drawing tables, soldiers from a special Border Police unit stood and listened to the harsh descriptions of the ultra-Orthodox man, a father of ten and a grandfather of twenty, also trying to hold back the tears. They fought terrorists on 7 October, just dozens of meters from where they now stood, but did not know the extent of the atrocities that took place on the other side of the building. Auschwitz in Kibbutz Be'eri.
"Children whose parents were murdered fled to this place," says Yossi, who has been active in ZAKA for 35 years. "The only place they knew how to escape was this compound. They fled to their garden - and this is where they were murdered. We took out two children who burned them, they were 8 years old. The smallest is 5 years old. I've been to quite a few disasters around the world, but here is the only place the bodies talked to me. I could see on the bodies what they had gone through. I thought I was crazy, but when I talked to my team, they all said they felt the same way."
Auschwitz at Kibbutz Be'eri
Landau, who has been active in ZAKA for 35 years, thought he had seen it all, until he reached kibbutzim near Gaza. Now he is the most famous activist in the world, because he speaks several languages, and he repeatedly tells the difficult descriptions to journalists from all over the world.
Landau. Sharing the stories with the foreign media, photo: Oren Ben Hakon
Public relations officials, including ZAKA, have limited time to mediate the terrible massacre to as many journalists from abroad as possible, so full buses arrive at the kibbutz every day.
"In a nearby house, I found a family," he says. "Parents and children are bound – and in the middle of a table. The father is missing an eye, the mother is sexually abused, the child is missing two fingers and the child is missing the feet. And these terrorists opened a table in the middle, ate the holiday food while they abused."
"In the end, they brought the family to their knees and shot everyone in the head. When my guys said they couldn't get in because of their monsters, I sat them down in blood in their white suits and we sang together two songs to lift their souls, 'Our Father, our King, opened the gates of heaven for our prayers' and 'I believe' in a version written on the way to Treblinka. In the village of Gaza, we found 20 children in two piles. Burn them alive."
"Fear of serfdom"
Over the past three weeks, ZAKA personnel have witnessed an unbelievable horror. Even now, when we all describe the horrors in the past tense, they are still on the ground, doing their hardest work. Here, while we were talking at Kibbutz Be'eri, body parts were discovered in a booby-trapped building next to us.
From comic dirt. The Israeli flag next to a burnt house in Bari, photo: Oren Ben Hakon
That morning, the head of an Israeli woman was discovered in the village of Gaza on the way to the border. Many others suppress more, and more, and more, and continue the hard work. In the middle of the week, ZAKA spokesman Motti Bookchin collapsed and was hospitalized.
In the front seat of the massive van sits Nachman Shai Revivo. He wears a ceramic bulletproof vest with a patch that bears the inscription "Staff Eagle," his initials. During the ride at breakneck speed – without a belt, for fear of mortar fire or worse – he is busy making phone calls and briefings.
Shortly before he picked me up, he and his staff were collecting the bones of a young man who had been murdered at the Nova festival and whose car caught fire, while the bereaved brother, who survived the inferno, watched from the sidelines. Home Front Command personnel neutralize an armed RPG shell and ZAKA personnel enter to do the holy work.
Revivo, Head of the Nesher Team, Photo: Hanan Greenwood
The driver, Natan Sabag, is a young ultra-Orthodox man who wears fashionable sunglasses and has curly wigs behind his head. The van we are traveling in belongs to him, and before the war was brand new. The fuel, it must be said, was paid mainly from his personal account. The vehicle has traveled only 7,000 kilometers so far, including 4,000 in the past two weeks, and the plastic wrap on the sun awnings has not yet been removed.
The vast majority of those in the vehicles in the past two weeks were not alive. Next to me in the back seat sits Shimon Yoel of Shomrei Emunim Hasidism, the "hardcore" of the ultra-Orthodox world. He spent his childhood in Mea Shearim.
"You see horrors just like in the Holocaust, only we saw it in color," Revivo describes as he travels. "In Migonit we found an 80-year-old woman who had been murdered, in the bathroom we found a young woman hiding there, they threw a grenade at her and closed the door. You start working and loading trailers into corpses, like a holocaust. And this is another promo before the party in Reim, Gaza Village and Bari. And the fear of serfdom, you know you can get hurt and die at any time."
More and more gloves of ZAKA personnel. More and more bodies, photo: Hanan Greenwood
We enter Kibbutz Be'eri and turn left, into the area. Haim Otmazgin, commander of ZAKA's Special Operations Unit, stands outside a large hayloft, surrounded by a group of ZAKA personnel, and explains the mission: "This area was poorly scanned. We know that people fled and fled, whether in the first blow or afterwards. There are parts here that are visible, but those who hide are not in a visible place, but quite the opposite. There is no doubt that if someone hid, he went in between things and hid."
He points to the hayloft: "There wasn't a single person walking through the hayloft and not smelling the smell. You need to go closely and use your nose. Keep in mind that if you don't stand closely, you won't smell the smell. Stand in the shape of a comb and start smelling. There are deficiencies in the kibbutz structures. We come on the blind."
"In the village of Gaza, there is the head of a kidnapped woman 200 meters from the fence, and there may be someone here too. This area must be scanned and denied." And so the volunteers straighten up in a long line and start walking and smelling. To try and find the body of an Israeli who escaped from the murderers - and fell dead in the field.
Haim explains that you have to scan and search for bodies using the smell, Photo: Hanan Greenwood
A bulldozer works in front of the People's House and moves rubble from what remains of a residential building. Several soldiers from the search and rescue unit and inspectors stand in front of the building, and when we get closer, they rush to get us away. Many terrorists barricaded themselves in the building with the bodies of Israelis and the entire structure was knocked down on them. There are certainly bodies among the rubble, but first of all the IEDs and ammunition left in place must be neutralized. The smell is almost unbearable.
Thirsty for decency
Shimon Yoel takes advantage of the opportunity and places tefillin in front of the killing valley. He says that the recent period, in which Haredim have been severely attacked for not enlisting, has hurt him.
"It hurts," he says. "Already in Haidar, we were taught that because of unfounded hatred, the Temple was destroyed, and you stand up and say, 'Look what baseless hatred is doing to us.' We don't look at what kind of corpse it is. It hurts us. My grandmother, who raised me in Mea Shearim, instilled in me all my life a love of Israel. She would send me down at demonstrations with bottles of water to hand out to the police. Write down that I'm from Satmar, so they know that not everything is black and white. We also bear the burden."
The destruction at Kibbutz Be'eri, photo: Reuters
This is a sensitive point. On the one hand, ZAKA is one of the most important organizations in the State of Israel, leaping into the most difficult and sensitive tasks. On the other hand, its volunteers absorb the anger of the general public that Haredim do not enlist.
Now the question arises again as to why the organization is not defined as a national body, just like MDA or the Fire and Rescue Department, and its volunteers still find themselves between the cracks - ultra-Orthodox, some of whom did not enlist, but do work that far exceeds that of some of those who serve in the IDF.
"Tell me when it comes out, because I'm dating a girl from Givat Shmuel. She told me, 'You didn't do the army, you didn't do anything.' Now in the war she has lost 5 kilos from the pressure. She said she just wanted me to come back," Nathan Sabag says of the dissonance.
Living room of a house destroyed in Kibbutz Be'eri, photo: AP.
The understanding of what ZAKA people are going through will presumably trickle down. In the meantime, they themselves have to deal with what their eyes have seen. "It breaks you down," says Yossi Landau. "On Saturday I sat at home dining with guests and I think about the murdered, they talk to me. Last night I went to bed at one and got up at three. I started walking around, smoking, and walking. We found a pregnant woman. They cut her stomach and the baby is still inside with a knife. Then they shot her in the head from behind."
We return to the booby-trapped compound and find that an NGO team is treating body parts found in the rubble. Suddenly, someone shouts "Color Red" and we go into the safe room in the house. We know that only a few days earlier, the family had done the same thing from the terror of rockets, and found themselves in a man-made nightmare.
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