On Saturday, the world marks the first International Holocaust Remembrance Day since Hamas brutally attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. There are some 245,000 Holocaust survivors still alive today — 49% of whom are in Israel, according to a new demographic report by the Claims Conference .
Israel’s elderly survivors have a direct connection to October 7 and its aftermath. Some lost loved ones. Some wait in agony for kidnapped relatives to return home. Some have been displaced.
Some were even taken hostage themselves, like Yaffa Adar, the 85-year-old who was released from captivity in late November.
“Everyone in Israel was deeply affected, and survivors even more so,” said Gideon Taylor, president of Claims Conference, which helps survivors with financial compensation. “October 7 brought back traumas from the earliest part of their life, right to now, as they approach the end of life. To relive traumas of their childhood is heartbreaking.”
Taylor recalled one survivor telling him: “I grew up in war, and I’m going to die in a time of war.”
The Post spoke to Holocaust survivors shocked that genocide against Jews could happen again.
‘Like a second Holocaust’
The rhythm of life is punishing these days for 82-year-old Tsili Wenkert who, as a young girl, endured a dangerous Ukrainian ghetto and saw relatives murdered.
Her grandson Omer Wenkert was abducted by Hamas terrorists on October 7 from the Nova music festival and hasn’t been heard from since.
The last images she saw of her oldest grandchild was a Hamas video showing the 22-year-old stripped down to his underwear and tied up on the back of a pickup truck surrounded by screaming armed terrorists.
“When I saw the video, I thought I was going to remain sitting down on the chair forever,” Tsili said. “It’s unimaginable for a grandparent to see. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope I’m going to see him.”
Holocaust survivor says Hamas attacks brought back devastating memories of Nazi massacres
She called October 7 “like a second Holocaust — but worse,” she said. Indeed, she added, it is both a blessing and a curse to “see the videos and hear the testimony from the kidnapped.”
Born in Romania in 1941, Tsili She recalls being on her way to Auschwitz when she was rescued by the Russian Red Army.
Running for shelter as rockets flew over her central Gedera home on October 7, sent Tsili right back to her painful childhood, when her mother would cradle her as Nazi planes bombed from above.
Now, she has nightmares about her grandson being trapped in the Gaza tunnels.
She’s also haunted, but “not surprised” by fomenting antisemitism.
“It’s the same old antisemitism from back then,” she said. “It’s antisemitism disguised as anti-zionism, but we all know what it really is.”
She warns what could happen when the world turns away from evil.
“What happened in Israel can happen in other places in the world— they won’t be happy to stop just with the Jews,” she said of radical Islam. “It’s like Israel is on the frontline to stop the radical terrorists from reaching the rest of the world.”
“We all say, ‘Never again.’ Well, it happened again”
Lucy Lipiner, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor from Poland, called New York City home from 1949 until this past September, when she moved to Tel Aviv weeks before October 7.
On that day, as booms from Israel’s Iron Dome air-defense system sounded, she ran with her little dog, Biji, to a lower floor of her apartment building.
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The attack triggered traumatic memories, like being on the run for years as a young child escaping the Nazis. She recalls trekking, sometimes barefoot, through Siberia and Tajikistan. Originally given the name Sara, that was changed to Lucy when she was very small to hide her Jewishness.
“I did not have a childhood – it was stolen from me,” Lipiner told The Post. “I did not have a childhood – it was stolen from me,” Lipiner told The Post. She lived through a 10-year flight to freedom,” including time at a displaced-persons camps until arriving in the US at age 16.
“We all say, ‘Never again.’ Well, it happened again,” she raged.
At least 17 of Lipiner’s family members were killed during the Holocaust, and she has shared her memories in the memoir “Long Journey Home: A Young Girl’s Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust.”
“The Holocaust happened because good people remained silent,” Lipiner said. “October 7 was a one-day Holocaust and people need to understand that.”
The retired licensed occupational therapist refuses to stay silent and has taken to X, where she has more than 31,000 followers , to explain that Hamas doesn’t just want to kill Jews but ”destroy western civilization.”‘
“The world is so quick to kill Jews but is always too ashamed to admit it. First, you denied the Holocaust. Then, you deny the Hamas murders. Unfortunately for you, I have witnessed both and I will speak the truth” she wrote on X.
Lipiner said she has encountered plenty of “trolls” who send death threats, deny the Holocaust and accuse her of genocide.
“They say nasty things to me, like, ‘Old lady, die already,’” Lipiner said, adding that she reassures her family: “Don’t worry. I survived the Holocaust, I have very thick skin. I need to educate people.”
Watching brazen displays of antisemitism around the world, including the vandalism of Jewish businesses, Lipiner said she feels safer in Israel than in New York City, which she called home for 74 years.
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“I worry about Jewish people around the world, including NYC. I don’t know if the men can risk walking out of the house with their kippah [yarmulke head covering] — they’re vulnerable.
“In a way, I wish I did not live long enough to see this,” she added. “But God wants me to be here.”
‘I will show them what it is to wipe out the Jews’
Born into a France in the throes of World War II some 83 years ago, Yaakov Weissmann escaped Nazi persecution by hiding with a non-Jewish French family.
He awoke that day at his Gaza-border kibbutz, Netiv HaAsara, to rockets raining down — a cover for terrorists to storm the kibbutz and unleash a torrent of machine gunfire. The instructions among his neighbors were clear: “Whoever has a weapon, takes the weapon out of the safe. Each one is responsible for protecting himself.”
He has now been displaced and is staying at a temporary shelter after his kibbutz was evacuated.
“I had a sad and terrible childhood – but I am convinced that it built me a strong character to overcome the difficulties that come my way,” said the Holocaust survivor. “On October 7th, I said to myself, ‘You have the strength to get through it.'”
After being hunted during the Holocaust, Weissmann understands self-reliance. “You know you can be attacked any minute and that’s a lot of adrenaline,” he said. “It’s all focused on how to defend yourself as quickly as possible and for as long as possible.”
Twenty members of his community were killed.
Weissmann never knew his father, who died from medical complications after escaping Auschwitz. He admits that, as a young man, he meditated on his “revenge on the Nazis.
“They wanted to wipe out the Jews, so I will show them what it is to wipe out the Jews,” he recalls telling himself. “I will start a family in the hope that there will be a dynasty.”
Weissman fulfilled his “revenge,” becoming a father of three, grandfather of 10 and great-grandfather of four, all of whom live on the kibbutz and survived the Hamas attack.
Still, he worries for his family’s future: “You see more and more people who blame the Jews for the world’s troubles.”
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