I survived the Holocaust. The UK police interviewed me to protest genocide | Israel-Palestinian conflict
It is of vital importance that we now speak against the memory of their own government in the Israeli genocide.
I was seven years old when Germany attacked their unreliable ally in March 1944, Hungary. Because of this, now 87 years. But my memories of hiding as a hunted Jew on false papers, and the ultimate destruction of climate struggle around us, between the captured German army and the Red Army, are still crystal pure memory. I see burnt cars, tanks, dead horses and human bodies, ammunition and helmets thrown, burned buildings, mountains of rubble and broken glass everywhere-as a tragically destroyed gauze today.
For more than a year, it was clear that the plan of Israel was destroyed by the Palestinian society in Gaza to force as many people as possible. This policy has numerous differences from the Plan of Nazi Germany for the destruction of Jewish society in Europe – but it also has many similarities. Because of this, as a Holocaust survivor, I felt forced to join various pro-Palestinian protests in London.
These protests were numerous and often huge. Therefore, it is not surprising that the authorities have imposed increasing limitations to distract people from attending. But I was still surprised when the metropolitan police invited me to an interview.
We do not know how much they intend to go in power with their limitations to the right to protest. But we know that they want to portray London’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations such as forbidden by anti-Semitism. This is despite the fact that these protests included thousands of Jews and that many Jews, including me, addressed the protesters from the stage.
A year ago, in April 2024, I gave my first speech on stage at Hyde Park, where I told a huge crowd about Adolf Eichmann came to Hungary to organize a deportation of 400,000 Jews in Auschwitz. I used to say Io 15 members of my own family who failed there and my father, who was taken to concentration camps by Belsen and Theresienstadt – although he eventually returned. I have completed this speech: we Jews who survived all that pain, murder, humiliation and destruction against the use of the memory of the Holocaust by the Israeli government as a covering and justification for liquid genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Coast.
What is most striking in speech is not what I said, but that the huge crowd listened in such a respected silence, and then clapped with such enthusiasm. Suggesting that such crowds were an anti-Semitic-A, let alone potentially violent-absly. Still, this is exactly what several newspapers did when they published articles without evidence the next day, claiming that the audience threatened to vandalize the Holocaust Holocaust Memorial Park.
Since then, Pro-Israeli politicians and journalists have continued to claim that our protests are “hate march” or “zones without launching for Jews.” Recent claims that our marches threat to London’s synagogues are further development of this relentless – but unfounded – campaigns. Anyone who has witnessed an irresistible warmth and support that our group of descendants of the Holocaust survivors – as well as a wider Jewish block – will regularly experience on marches, understand how unfounded it is.
Most importantly, this whole campaign is deliberately distracting from the main question, which is now to stop the Gaza genocide. While Israel continues its unsembled bombing – killing hundreds of more civilians in Gaza – this is vital that we now speak against the memory of our government in the Israeli genocide.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeere.
