Mom, what is a massacre? Chronicle by Margarida Davim

I hug my children tightly. I hug them and kiss them often. They pretend to run away. They laugh as I tickle them, they ask me to cover them with the sheets and stay a little longer before going to sleep. I do. I can't get the image of a Palestinian girl I saw on the internet a few hours earlier out of my mind. Her eyes were sunken, her bones sticking out of her shoulders. "I just wish everything could go back to the way it was before." That was all I had the courage to hear her say. She must be about the same age as my children and she endures horrors that I can't even imagine. Hunger, thirst, fear. But it was I who failed to hear her speak. And now a tightness grows in my chest, as I lay my children to bed and think of all the children in Gaza who don't have the same luck.

“Schindler’s List” premiered when I was a little girl. There was also a little girl in that film. She was dressed in red, when everything around her was black and white. Schindler sees her in the distance, staggering, with the hesitant steps of a small child, crossing the streets where Nazi soldiers are shooting men who pass by, looting houses, throwing objects through windows. The little girl walks until she enters a building. She goes up the stairs, enters an abandoned house and hides under a bed. We then see her face straight on and believe that she will survive. But the red coat identifies her in a pile of corpses, a few scenes later. The soot from the incinerated Jewish bodies accumulating on his car was nothing more than an inconvenience to Schindler, until he realized that the little girl was among the dead.

I grew up hearing that “Davim” came from a Jewish great-great-grandmother. And I don’t know if that was why, but I spent part of my adolescence reading and watching everything I could about the Holocaust. At that time, the Nazi atrocities seemed like a suspension of humanity, impossible to understand. “Never again,” they said. And the films showed how the good guys fought the bad guys.

I realized much later that the extreme evil of Nazism towards the Jews was not an isolated episode of extermination. In fact, it was a practice repeatedly used by colonialist regimes, particularly in the 19th century in Africa, when Adolf Hitler was still a child. It is a practice of annihilation that is only possible when we stop seeing the exterminated as human. That is why the girl in the red coat is so important in waking Schindler from the moral torpor that allowed him to watch the persecution of the Jews almost without reacting. She forces him to understand that the persecuted are human.

This is why, throughout the Western world, demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza have been increasingly repressed. Those who want to remind us of the humanity of the Palestinians are gagged, arrested, driven away with water cannons, and accused of anti-Semitism.

However, there are many Jews in the ranks of these demonstrations. Some of them are even Holocaust survivors or direct descendants of those who experienced that horror.

Stephen Kapos is one of them. He was just seven years old when Nazi Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944. In April 2024, he gave a speech in Hyde Park, London, to talk about how the Nazis deported 400,000 Jews to Auschwitz and about his 15 relatives, including his father, who were sent to concentration camps. “We Jews, who have survived all this pain, death, humiliation and destruction, stand against the use of the memory of the Holocaust by the Israeli government as a cover and justification for the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank,” he said, before a crowd that listened in silence and applauded enthusiastically at the end.

Almost a year later, Stephen Kapos was taken in for questioning by police in London for his part in another peace protest in Gaza. Despite being 87 years old and walking unsteadily with a cane, Kapos was accused of trying to break through a police barrier. But it will be harder to accuse him or the thousands of Jewish Voice for Peace members of anti-Semitism. And that is also why those who now chant “never again for anyone” are so important.

“What is a massacre?” my daughter asked the first time she saw a billboard calling for an “end to the massacre in Palestine.” I hesitated in my answer. How do you explain evil to someone who has never seen it? I don’t know how long ago that was. But it was too long ago. Because now, as we pass the billboard, she asks anxiously, “Isn’t the massacre over yet?”

I am ashamed to tell you that it is not, but I am even more afraid that it will soon end in the worst possible way, when I see in the news that there is a plan for a total occupation of Gaza by Israel.

The “final solution” that the Allies sought in the Second World War is now moving forward in the face of almost generalized indifference from those who witness a conflict that – whatever the reasons given by both sides – is in practice leaving thousands of civilians trapped, without access to water, food, medicine or any kind of aid. Pushed towards a certain, cruel and silent death. While we pretend not to see.