FFor me, the world changed radically on October 7th. At almost 50 years old, my life has been rocked in ways that I still can’t fully put into words. The horrors of the massacres, which are only revealed little by little and which took place thousands of kilometers away, have haunted me in my dreams every night since then. New fears and anxieties accompany me every day. It takes a lot of strength to resist and stay strong.
Until a few years ago, I secretly thought that one day I would experience some sort of aha moment and finally know the reason for my hidden pain. Like people who eventually become conscious of childhood trauma caused by a loss, an act of violence or another repressed pain. After I wrote my first book at the age of 42 and wrote to myself about the suffering of my grandparents, who had all been in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, I thought I was liberated. Freed from the gravity, from the burden of the Holocaust. At readings I would proudly proclaim: “Writing has opened new doors to my soul every day through which air can now penetrate.” What pathetic nonsense.
One crack and everything would be out of joint
As a child of Czech-Jewish emigrants, I grew up in Frankfurt in peace, freedom and prosperity. Assimilated and unobtrusive. Tolerant and liberal. Open and understanding. Justice-loving and committed. Proud of my multicultural city, where diversity is the order of the day. I learned my Czech accent as a small child and my Jewishness, which I didn’t know much about anyway, wasn’t visible. I have actually been friends throughout my life primarily with non-Jews. In the city kindergarten, in elementary school, in high school, in my hobby of acting, during my studies and also in my first relationships: almost exclusively non-Jews. I seem to have completely relaxed assimilated into the German majority society and felt cared for and understood.
“Since October 7th, I have felt more Jewish than ever before.” – A sentence that I have not only heard from Igor Levit and many other Jews since then, but that I myself feel more intensely than I would have ever thought possible . An invisible familial thread spins, knots, weaves, pulls and connects us Jews tightly into a fabric that we all know must not have a tiny hole in it. One crack and everything would be out of joint – it would be the end, the end of all Jews. “Man, why do you Jews always fight each other like that?” Here’s the answer to that old question: It’s simply self-preservation. A survival instinct. A strategy to avoid sinking.
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