David Frèche is a writer and business leader.
We start with the bladed weapons, between two knives with 30cm blades, there is this swastika drawn in black felt-tip pen on the handle of worn pliers which were used to cut fences.
On a military base in southern Israel, we saw part of the arsenal recovered from terrorists by the IDF.
The guns also tell the story of this day of hatred.
It's this man-sized war weapon designed to shoot down planes, but used by terrorists on pick-ups to machine-gun Jewish homes in Kfar Aza with 14.5mm bullets;
these RPG rocket launchers with these homemade thermobaric grenades from Gaza, which suck out the oxygen and transform any space into an oven, yes, into an oven that euphoric terrorists threw at children shouting “
Allah akbar”.
Also read: “What we saw and heard in the areas attacked by Hamas on October 7”
We went to Tkouma, where we saw endless rows of burned carcasses belonging to the young people of the Nova festival.
The same deadly mechanism was at work: ravaging, killing, raping, burning again and again.
October 7 was a gigantic mass grave.
We met young Tomer, injured by three large caliber bullets at the Nova festival.
He told us at length about his ordeal with a dignity that commands respect.
He had to alternate between long periods of silence, lying down, and frantic runs through a wood under the bullets of euphoric terrorists with his atrophied arm.
He saw "the eyes of hatred and death", which he could never forget.
When he finished his story with a long breath punctuated by silence, he said to us: “This is my story, and now let me tell you another story.”
This was that of his grandfather, also a Jewish survivor of an anti-Semitic massacre.
While jumping from one of the death trains, an SS man shot him and he clung to life as he plunged into a German forest.
In his calm voice, in perfect English, Tomer told us: “Run without looking back through the trees, how many times did my grandfather repeat these words to me?”
How can we not understand the message of this young man.
That morning in Tel Aviv, in this small air-conditioned room of a hotel in Neve Tzedek, we touched upon the essence of the trauma caused by the massacres of October 7.
In a few words, through this testimony which pierces the barrier of time, Tomer illustrates what we felt in Kfar Aza: This deadly link which unites Nazism and the ideology of Hamas, the fear of the fears of annihilation inscribed in the cellular memory of each person, in the collective consciousness of the nation.
The oath of 1948 which, on the night of the creation of the State of Israel, screamed to the face of the world “never again” resonates throughout time.
The fear of extermination, which had been dormant for 70 years, was awakened by the cry of
“Allah Akbar”
, but Tomer is alive.
Even today, it is not difficult to imagine what an Eden this kibbutz, which had a three-year waiting list for new members, must have been.
David Freche
That same morning we went to this huge exhibition room dedicated to the victims of the Nova festival, where so many things have been reconstructed.
You must first walk through a camp which has something very bohemian about it.
A little further on the outskirts, I saw these yellow toilets in which the fragments of the terrorists' bullets methodically fired at the same places were surrounded by a small red circle.
I leaned on this bar that the first soldiers went around to discover these young bodies strewn on the ground.
There are half-filled glasses, ashtrays full of cigarettes.
In the background I hear
Hatikva,
the Israeli anthem which alternates with sometimes tribal music.
On the dance floor, the images of the festival-goers killed, in the expression of joy that evening, are recreated.
And then, there are these changing rooms, these tables of glasses, shoes, all the belongings abandoned on site that the victims' families have not yet recovered.
We all have in mind the rows of shoes of the Jews sent to the gas chambers, they are the same images.
I don't know if the organizers installed them like this unconsciously or on purpose, but these shoes speak both the language of each victim and that of history.
The day before, we had walked for a long time in the nameless streets of Kfar Aza.
Even today, it is not difficult to imagine what an Eden this kibbutz, which had a three-year waiting list for new members, must have been.
The neighborhood most affected was that of the “young generation”, that of the children of the kibbutz who, after the age of 17, have their own homes.
I returned to the burned and looted house of Sivan Elkabets and Naor Hassidim.
I read Sivan's last exchanges with his parents, and I hoped, while knowing the sad end that they would experience.
I passed by that of little Abigail Idan, kidnapped just after becoming an orphan.
We saw the images of martyred women, heard the leaders of ZAKA, the organization describing these scenes of horror, of children tortured in front of their parents.
During these 8 days in Tel Aviv, however, I never felt as sad as the evening of my arrival, when I went to “Hostages Square”, and I did not understand why my sadness had reached a peak at that point. place.
The day before I left, I went back.
There was almost no one there that night.
It is the pain of helplessness that reduces them to transforming papers, plants and wires into small statues.
David Freche
I pass in front of these little blue Klein statuettes representing beings in prayer postures.
There are photos of the hostages everywhere, without respecting any order, assemblages of letters, photos of flowers and flags, sometimes tall installations.
I stop in front of these stones covered with children's drawings, without knowing if there is any meaning.
I approach these wires stretched by two flamboyants three meters apart, in several rows, handwritten words hang, most of them in Hebrew.
I love this language, dormant for two thousand years, which woke up in one night, the shape of these letters also numbers.
There is a light rain that evening in Tel Aviv and as I get closer to this little rectangle of hanging paper, to this dripping blue ink, suddenly I understand.
Yes, I couldn't explain the wear and tear of this place, the faded flowers, the crumpled leaves that cannot be replaced.
In front of this flowing blue ink, this material which is being damaged, I understood that the objects were no longer objects, they had become fetishes.
This place, since it had taken the name of the hostages, had become the mouth that screams in the face of impotence.
Here, in front of the Tel Aviv museum, Israelis have awakened the oldest dialect of men.
When there is no longer any hope, men have returned to their primitive need to attach themselves, to see, to touch, to materialize suffering.
This is what a fetish is, a representation that allows you to touch what does not exist or no longer exists.
These damaged installations, these photos and pieces of wood washed with sadness are in fact totems which, here, do not express the cry of the insides towards the beyond, but towards this world underground a few kilometers away.
This black hole of humanity, sealed off from everything, from the Red Cross which doesn't do much, to diplomacy, to the IDF.
It is in these small colored stones that Kfir's cries resonate.
These assembled objects, this primitive chaos, make the oldest cry in the world resonate.
Also read: “One of Hamas’ strategic successes is to widen the gap between emerging powers and the West”
The cries of a group of three very young girls pierce the frost of silence.
They surely have family members held captive by the October 7 massacres, and they come here to feel closer to their erased relatives.
I saw at the Knesset committee on hostages, these families brandishing the image of a father, recalling to memory, the life of their flesh.
They have nothing else left.
It is the pain of helplessness that reduces them to transforming papers, plants and wires into small statues.
Faced with this tear in reality, they want to represent, touch, see, a need so distant from these people who banned idols 5000 years ago.
I thought back to the Nova festival exhibition, there everything had been meticulously done to express both the greatest realism and the memory of the victims with poetry.
How could these two places, these two expressions of the same day be so different.
Nova celebrates the memory of the dead, the Tel Aviv Museum Square which has become “Hostage Square”, occupied by the most primitive need, is a vortex towards the bowels of the earth.
Yes, there is a strong contrast between these two manifestations, on one side modern art and on the other naive art, realism and representation, memory and survival, reconstruction and the cry of silence .
The hostages keep the door to hell open, every day is the same long day of suffering.
How can we not think that this thickness which separates these families perhaps bears the name of hypocrisy, that of the nations which did not stop their dance when a young girl dragged by the hair was exhibited in a jubilant street, when babies were decapitated.
The “Place des Hostages” is surely the only place in the world where totems have been created to get closer to the living, because there is the madness that should revolt us.
Primitive societies used representation to touch what was not in reality, the hostages are indeed in this world.
Let the living be dug up.