At Auschwitz, Diaspora Jews who lived through terror march alongside Holocaust survivors |
OSWICIEM, Poland — Abbie Talmoud said she can still hear the screams from a terror attack outside a Jewish museum in Washington, DC, last year, in which Israeli Embassy staffers Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were fatally shot.
Standing outside the gates of Auschwitz on Monday, Talmoud told The Times of Israel that she was coming to terms with the fact that the attacker murdered her colleagues, and tried to kill her, “because of antisemitism.”
“I have to be stronger, and I have to love my Judaism more than they will ever hate me,” she said.
Talmoud and fellow survivor Catherine Szkop, both embassy staff who were colleagues of the victims, are in Poland for the 38th International March of the Living, which takes place on Tuesday, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. There, they lit a memorial torch together with survivors of antisemitic terror attacks this year in Manchester, England, and Sydney, Australia.
“One of the suggestions through therapy has been to talk to Holocaust survivors,” Talmoud told The Times of Israel. “To learn from their resilience and their ability to move forward with life, and how to really live with this trauma while also living and continuing on. In short, to be resilient.”
Talmoud said Monday she looked forward to meeting with fellow survivors from global antisemitic attacks, “because they will understand me in the way that the average Joe does not.”
On Tuesday, that meetup between survivors of antisemitic attacks from three continents took place during a moving event ahead of the march.
Hanna Abesidon was at Sydney’s Bondi Beach when gunmen attacked a Hanukkah celebration on December 14, killing 15 people, including her father, Tibor Weitzen. On Tuesday, exactly four months later — and one day before the 81st anniversary of her grandmother’s liberation from Bergen Belsen — Abesidon described the ordeal to the audience of gathered journalists and dignitaries.
She described attending the event with her parents, nine-month pregnant daughter, and 3-year-old grandchild. It was only when she managed to get her grandchild to safety that Abesidon returned to check on her parents.
“I came closer to the area where Mom and Dad were sitting, and I recognized Dad’s shoes and pants, but he was covered already, so I knew that he was gone,” she said. “He didn’t make it because he was a Jew, nothing else.”
Abesidon’s mother, Eva, survived, although her best friend was also murdered at the scene.
“There were about seven or eight people holding the [synagogue] doors closed while a very large, very, very angry person was doing his level best to get in, and he had a knife,” Finlay said. “He was using the knife to try and break through. He was picking up things from the grounds of the shul, trying to break in, and he had what looked like a bomb around his waist.”
When police arrived at the scene, they shot and killed the attacker, but a stray bullet hit Finlay in the chest. Someone at the scene found Finlay’s father and brought him to his side.
“I remember his face — no child should ever see their parent like that,” said Finlay. “He said afterwards that he’s a doctor, but he’s not trained for that.”
Talmoud also recounted the horrors of the day that her colleagues from the Israeli Embassy were murdered at an event outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, last........