choking.
This is what you feel when the wheels of the plane land on the accursed soil of Poland.
Even the applause of the Israelis is weak.
And the road in the sky and on the ground is frozen and snowy, and the snow is the same snow, from those drops of water that evaporated and fell and froze the Jews in the striped cotton.
And the ravens are the descendants of the ravens that ate the corpses of the Jews who did not ascend to heaven in the crematoria.
The earth is fertile from the blood.
In the trees I see shadows of Jews running away from the dogs.
In front of Birkenau there is a small playground overlooking the stone pavilions, in front of the famous gate are built villas, and even a bicycle path crosses the track that led us to the end.
On the path, a father and a child shaking hands are painted.
Father and child.
Father and child.
Former President Rivlin,
The feeling of suffocation reaches its peak these days, when we are hated in the surround.
When my little son asks me why they hate us so much, and I don't know how to answer.
And I've been thinking about it a lot since that Shabbat: Is the hatred of Europe and the hatred of Gaza the same hatred?
This is also the question that echoed during the "Never Again" conference organized by Yad Vashem and EJA, the organization of European Jews, in Krakow this week.
European leaders past and present, as well as Ben Shapiro and Elon Musk, spoke at the conference, and they all repeated the phrase "never again" as if it were a mantra, as if it were self-evident.
If it is so understandable, why is it said so much?
I wonder if this is true.
Because yes, there was a small holocaust on October 7, and there was great hatred and magnificent cruelty that had not been seen for many years, and a lust for murder.
I mean - on the part of our haters, surely there could have been another holocaust.
Young people in front of the many pictures in Auschwitz,
And from our side?
The unbearable lightness of the lack of Jewish existence, of its near extinction, is not perceived in today's Israeli reality, even, and especially, after the autumn riots.
And it is related to the question of how we survived despite everything.
We are such an ancient and so hated nation, how come we were not exterminated or assimilated like all the other nations?
An experience no nation has ever gone through
And perhaps these two facts, of this people being so ancient and so hated, are related to each other.
Perhaps thousands of years of riots managed, in a shocking and perverted way, to pass us through a minute-by-minute sieve that no other people passed through, and only the genes of those who stood up to them and were able to - survived?
And that's why we are Startup Nation, a nation of thinkers-outside-the-box, because whoever thought inside it perished?
But not only those who survived.
The garden of unimaginable heroism, the garden of personal sacrifice, the willow also survived.
Last night, at a magnificent gala evening, with tables set and pink evening dresses and candles, everyone sat and listened to Moshe and Shira Shapira, the parents of Anar the hero, who saved 11 people when he threw out one after the other grenades thrown by Hamas terrorists into the shelter, where he and other young people from the party were hiding.
Moshe's grandfather, after whom he is named, and who signed the Declaration of Independence, invested all his energy during the war in rescuing Jews.
As part of his duties, he arrived in occupied Vienna in 1939, stood proudly in front of Adolf Eichmann in the Gestapo offices and managed to save thousands of the city's Jews.
Exactly 99 years after the birth of that hero, the hero's great-grandson, Aner, was born.
"It's enough to be human"
"Aner left a testament to the world for generations," said Shira, his mother, "In the face of evil and cruelty, one can and should stand, even with bare hands. From a moral stance, social solidarity, compassion and love for people, lives can be saved. In one of his poems, Anar wrote: 'I am a person who believes in change, Let go of change - it's enough to be a person who just believes in good, so I'm a believing person. Let go of believing - it's enough to be a person'."
And the next day, in Birkenau, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the founder of the EJA and its president, will say that there is now the same ignorance and the same hatred as before the great extermination, and then he will invite the world leaders to become ambassadors against hatred and ignorance in their country.
And Reuven Rivlin, the former president of the country, will look at them and say "If the world doesn't stand by us, at least it won't interfere when we defend ourselves."
Then, one by one, European leaders will bow their heads and lay beautiful wreaths next to the remains of the crematoria, under the white sky of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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