The tunnel girls

In

Night Porter

(1974), Charlotte Rampling plays Lucia, a Jewish girl who survives a concentration camp.

Years have passed and Lucía is now a splendid woman who arrives in Vienna with her husband, a famous opera director.

They stay at the Von Oper Hotel: the hotel concierge is none other than Max (the incomparable Dick Bogarde), a former Nazi officer who lives in hiding under an assumed name, like other Nazis.

The film takes place in two times, the present and her dark memories: sometimes, Max dressed her in a little pink silk and lace dress.

Other times, he shoots her and Lucía has to run to avoid the bullets, naked.

Other times, she puts on a Nazi cap to perform an old Marlene Dietrich

hit

half-naked , as if the concentration camp were a Berlin cabaret.

Lucia was just a little girl when she became a monster's toy.

The director, Liliana Cavani, was highly criticized at the time: how did she think of filming the twists and turns of sex using the extermination of the Jews as a backdrop?

But the great Italian director had found a formidable way to talk about rape, to make visible the personal, univocal use of terror that a man in a position of power can exert on a woman.

A few days ago, in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, a freed hostage testified about the sexual abuse to which hostages captured by Hamas are subjected.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” says Aviva Siegel.

“The terrorists bring them inappropriate clothes, they play with them as if they were dolls.

Dolls that they can do anything to, whenever they want.”

They dress them, they play with them, like the Nazi officer played by Dirk Bogarde played with Lucía.

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Enjoyment has been part of Hamas violence since the moment it exploded on October 7.

One of the most impressive testimonies is the euphoria with which they accompanied the brutality of the massacre.

The New York Times

published a report detailing Hamas' sexual abuses: how they used gender violence as a lethal weapon.

The stories agree that the attackers were having fun.

A survivor of the

rave

watched as several of them raped a woman, cheering and laughing, before sewing her up with an axe.

At least 30 women and girls were raped, mutilated and horribly beaten before meeting their deaths.

Like Gal Abdush, raped and burned.

Like a woman found in the rubble of a kibbutz, with 12 nails embedded in her groin.

Like the teenage girls at Kibbutz Be'eri.

Her family was murdered but they, ages 13 and 16, were taken to a separate room.

They lay dead with their underwear torn, their pajamas up to their knees, semen on their backs.

Hamas attackers came in with cameras, filmed each other;

They even broadcast their violence live.

The Hamas euphoria was reproduced, there were crowds who celebrated it;

They understood that the Palestinians were finally rising up against the oppressor and that Hamas is, above all, a fighter for liberation.

But how is a mass rape of women part of a liberation strategy?

And who would be the subject of liberation?

Could it be that the most brutal patriarchy is released, with its train of hate crimes?

What would be the political message that is transmitted by raping and murdering free women?

Only the rise of anti-Semitism allows these hate crimes to not be visible, to remain in the darkness of the tunnel.

“When they see the captives crying, their captors take advantage of their weakness to touch their parts or rub their organs,” says Agam Goldstein-Almog, a freed hostage who saw the girls in the tunnels.

Are these the pure ideals of jihad?

Suffering finds no compassion;

only encounters more abuse.

There is something of that in the Hamas films: explicit cruelty and gender violence are not understood as such nor do they produce compassion, but are “put into context.”

Hamas understood how the current narrative machine works, where reality is created via social networks: facts only exist as long as there is an audience that supports them.

But the girls in the tunnels have no one to cry out for them.

Hamas's greatest narrative device is in those tunnels: they are everything that cannot be seen, the offscreen too painful to be imagined.

Oblong concentration camps, where human dignity disappears or is transformed.

There are 136 people still there, perhaps or not alive.

One is a 19-year-old violinist;

another is a baby, Kfir.

We do not know when or if Hamas will allow them to leave the tunnel;

in Cavani's film, young Lucia never really leaves the tunnel.

She relives her captivity over and over again;

When she meets Max they are both in the dark, without food, locked up.

There is no cure, she says.

She never forgets.

The hostages must be freed and the horror must stop.

Pola Oloixarac

is a writer.

Her latest book is

Gallery of Argentine Celebrities

(Libros del Zorzal).

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