Franklin Foer
In Eli Sharabi’s first hours of freedom earlier this year, a social worker led him to a room stocked with shampoo, toothpaste, and soap. In Gaza’s tunnels, he had gone months without bathing; now he could scrub off the grime of captivity. He had sustained himself through his 491 days as a hostage by picturing the moment when he would rush into the arms of his wife and daughters. But the tunnels had sealed him off from the world. Standing in daylight, he learned that Hamas had murdered his loved ones in their home’s safe room on October 7. The social worker hovered as he showered and changed, to protect Sharabi from himself.
Today, the last of the living Israeli hostages were liberated after more than two years—and their release has liberated the Israeli psyche from its fretful obsession with their fate. Having invested themselves so deeply in the hostages’ story, Israelis greeted the moment as an ecstatic conclusion that helps justify the terrible toll of their nation’s longest war.
The hostages’ release is, indeed, an epochal moment, one that may not end the war in Gaza but will certainly redirect its course. I, however, find myself thinking more about the intimate details of what the hostages have experienced. I filter the possibilities not just through Sharabi’s recollections, which ultimately tell a story of extreme perseverance, but also through what I know about my own grandfather, who escaped death during the Holocaust by hiding in barns and forests. Although he tasted the sweet fruits of survival—marriage, children, a new life on a new continent—his mind always doubled back to what he lost. The Nazis murdered his first wife and daughter. Survival was torment, and he ultimately lost the will to live. He killed himself in the grocery store that he owned in Washington, D.C.
How does a human being survive two years of torment? And how do they make sense of their life once they resume? Within months of his release, Eli Sharabi summoned the courage to ask these questions of himself in a short book, Hostage. The manager of a kibbutz roughly two miles from Gaza, Sharabi was dragged from his home, away from his English-born wife and his daughters, ages 16 and 13. “A sea of people who start thumping my head, screaming, trying to rip me limb from limb,” he remembers.
Arriving in Gaza, his captors first confined him to a home belonging to a family, where children did homework and women cooked as Hamas operatives watched over him and a Thai worker, also kidnapped on October 7. During this initial chapter, they were fed well and sometimes even able to feel the Mediterranean breeze through an open window.
No comments:
Post a Comment