Politics

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's remarks today (Monday, 8 April 2013), on the occasion of Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day at the Knesset, during the "Unto Every Person There is a Name ceremony:


"President Peres,

Knesset Speaker Edelstein,

Honored Rabbis,

Ministers

and MKs,
My father-in-law, Shmuel Ben-Artzi ,who left us in November 2011, was a brand plucked from the fire. He came to the country when he was 18, from the town of Bilgoraj in Poland, despite the strong opposition of his father. He was sent as an outstanding student of the Novardok yeshiva in order to open a branch here in Bnei Brak. He soon went to the orchards and decided that he had to redeem the soil of the Land of Israel; he worked in the orchards for seven years. Afterwards, he became a teacher in Tiberias. He was a great teacher, a leading educator. He held a Bible study class for adults for 30 years, for the same people for 30 years.



He was a major Bible researcher but he was also a great writer and a great poet. His first poems were written in the Land of Israel, at the beginning of the war, when they still did not know, when he did not know, that his family had been slaughtered and that European Jewry, which had been so dear to him, had also gone up in flames. But the reek of the ovens somehow reached him.



Here is what he wrote in early 1943: 'It wasn't me, it wasn't me, whose mouth gaped for bread and soup. It was someone else who ate, drank and didn't choke. In my nostrils the smoke of the offering – my innocent people! – did not rise. My eyes did not read the newspaper, my brothers for an innocent death! It wasn't me who dashed his head against that rock. It wasn't my heart that has yet to burst, even if it is as strong as flint. A spirit of dread has entered me and it is lashing out, it was sane! An army of demons has built for itself a fortress in my slack body. It is not my hot and red blood that has clotted. It wasn't me who did not pluck up my soul in my madness.'



I do not think that Shmuel ever recovered from the Holocaust even though he built a splendid family. He never recovered from the murder of his beloved twin sister and her family. He asked that their names be etched on his grave, and it was done, and I will read their names:



His father, Moshe Hahn, his father's wife Ita, his twin sister Yehudit, who was 24.



His brothers Meir Hahn (18), Shimon Tzvi (16) and Aryeh Leib (13), and his little sister Feizele.



His aunt Ma'tel Koenigstein, her son Hillel and her eldest daughter. His uncle Mendel, his wife and their two children.



His uncle Avraham Tauber, his wife and their son and daughter. His aunt Rachel Tauber and her three sons – Avraham, Yaakov and Shlomo, and their wives and children. His aunt Hinda and her husband Yehezkel. His aunt Hendel, her husband and their children. His aunt Paula and her two daughters.



May their memories be blessed."