Haifa, end of September 2024: a large city in a war zone, 40 kilometers from the Lebanese border. Hezbollah sends rockets, Israel carries out air strikes; Ground offensive for several days. And before the first anniversary of October 7th, the conflict with Iran will escalate. A video conversation with Holocaust survivor Rachel Hanan, 95. She sits on a yellow fabric sofa in her apartment high on Mount Carmel, next to her son Yaron, who is translating. From the balcony of her apartment she can see the harbor where she came to the country in June 1947. For Rachel, it’s another war in her life. On her 15th birthday, the Nazis deported her to Auschwitz. She survived the concentration camps in Bergen-Belsen, Duderstadt and Theresienstadt; her parents and her brothers were murdered. In Israel she experienced the Palestine War (1947 to 1949), the Suez Crisis (1956), the Six-Day War (1967), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Lebanon Wars in 1982 and 2006. Now the war after October 7th . Rachel Hanan seems surprisingly cheerful given the gloomy situation, she smiles again and again, she shows optimism, not her worries.
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