See a video of the flyover memorial ceremony at the bottom of this page
IAF commander talks
about a mission that shaped Israel's future decisions
The Israel Air Force's flyby over the death
camp in September 2003 has proved to be of tremendous significance for the
military. Eshel and others involved in Flight 301 discuss the mission's
implications and why they're haunted by a flight that never actually occurred.
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| The Israel Air Force flyover above Auschwitz. |
Flight 301 was one of the most unusual operations ever
carried out by the Israel Air Force. Almost exactly 10 years ago, on September
4, 2003, three F15 planes took off from the Radom-Sadkow military airfield in
Poland and flew 200 kilometers southwest. In stormy weather, they passed over a
series of sleepy Polish villages until they reached Oswiecim. After turning
west, they descended from an altitude of 10,000 feet to 1,200 feet, emerged
from the clouds and assembled in formation. At precisely the designated hour,
noon, the Israeli fighter jets passed over the red-brick gate of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. They flew over the infamous train
tracks, over the infamous selection platform, and over an Israel Defense Forces
memorial ceremony taking place amid the crematoria. A plunge, an eastward turn,
a northward turn, a photograph. After three minutes in the skies of Auschwitz,
for three hours the three F15s flew back to Israel, landing at the Tel Nof air
base.
The record of the Radom-Auschwitz flight rests, to this
day, in the left-hand drawer of the IAF commander’s desk. While Maj. Gen. Amir
Eshel is planning possible strikes in Lebanon, a possible strike in Syria and a
possible strike in Iran, he keeps beside him the operation journal and the
navigation map of Flight 301.
Eshel considers the flyby he himself led a decade ago the
flight of his lifetime. This intelligent, energetic, short man attaches
tremendous importance to the few moments in which he flew a blue-and-white jet
above the dense green fields, in which the rectangular cement panels of the
barracks and stone ruins of the gas chambers are still imprinted. For the man
now tasked with overseeing Israel’s skies, and, to a great extent, Israel’s
security, the flight over Auschwitz tells the whole story. It encapsulates our
tragedy as well as our strength and our life imperative.
Amir Eshel is not alone. While the man who led the
Auschwitz-Birkenau flyby is the current IAF commander, the man who commanded
the simultaneous IDF memorial ceremony in the concentration camp grounds was
former IAF commander Ido Nechushtan. The one who approved the flyby is former
IAF commander Dan Halutz, and the one who publicized the picture of the flyby
is former IAF commander Eliezer Shkedy.
Flight 301 wasn’t a marginal event that took place on the
Israeli fringe, but rather a core event orchestrated by the center of the
defense establishment. Four different air force commanders were involved in it.
Three air force commanders − Shkedy, Nechushtan and Eshel − ascribe great value
to it. The IDF’s strongest and most important corps produced and embraced the
event and placed it in the heart of its consciousness.
Years ago, U.S. columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that
Israel is Yad Vashem with an air force. The big surprise is that the air force
itself thinks of Israel as Yad Vashem with an air force. But why? Why do the
most cool-headed and performance-focused Israelis feel a need to fly to
Auschwitz; to document their flight to Auschwitz; and turn the Auschwitz flight
into the Israeli icon of the new millennium?
What made the corps that in recent years has come back to
occupying a central place in our lives dedicate itself, with such tenacity, to
such an odd aerial operation, with its surrealistic element of time travel and
its morbid element of a journey into the inferno? Why do the people who work
around the clock to ensure Israel’s strategic supremacy devote so much time and
energy to a symbolic flyby, the likes of which has never been carried out by
any other air force?
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| Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel in front of a photo of the Auschwitz flyover he led in September 2003. |
A personal trauma
Eshel was born in Jaffa, in 1959, and grew up in Ramat
Gan. His father’s extended Iraqi family was numerous, while his mother’s
Russian family was not around, and the discrepancy between the two bothered the
young sabra. Eshel began his military service in 1977. He became a Skyhawk
pilot and an F16 pilot and later commanded leading combat squadrons. In the
1990s and 2000s, he served as commander of the Ramon Air Base; commander of the
Tel Nof Air Base; head of IAF intelligence; air force chief of staff; and head
of the IDF planning directorate.
Since May 2012, he has been the IAF commander, and during
this time the corps has become more active − in fact, foreign media sources say
the IAF has been active throughout the new, wild Middle East. If Israel has a
military option on Iran, Eshel contributed greatly to building it, Eshel is
maintaining it, and Eshel is the person who, when the time comes, will activate
it, or not.
In 1987, Eshel experienced a personal trauma during a
routine training drill in Germany, when he found himself feeling completely
helpless when faced with a German nurse in a white uniform. He says that right
then, he made up his mind to return to Auschwitz with strength, in a plane.
Sixteen years later, the Polish Air Force invited the IAF to participate in an
aviation exhibition in the city of Radom, some 100 kilometers south of Warsaw.
Brig. Gen. Eshel saw his opportunity and urged commander
Dan Halutz to accept the invitation − on condition that the Poles would allow a
flight from Radom to Auschwitz. From that moment on, the base commander became
an amateur historian. He read everything there was to read about the Final
Solution, about the chance it could have been halted, and about how this chance
was not acted upon.
He made himself intimately familiar with the aerial
photos taken by an Allied squadron over Auschwitz in the spring and summer of
1944. He became obsessed with a question that drove him mad: Why didn’t the
American pilots who photographed Auschwitz bombard the camp from the air? Why,
out of 2,800 missions carried out by the Allied forces in southeastern Poland
between March and November 1944, was not a single mission dedicated to
destroying the railroad tracks or the crematoria?
Eshel is a pilot with a keen sense of history and a deep
sense of symbolism. So he insisted that his partners in the Auschwitz flight
come from a Holocaust background, and also carefully selected the
Holocaust-related items that he would carry with him in his cockpit − pages of
testimony from 21 of the victims of the Transport that arrived at Auschwitz
from France precisely 60 years before the flyby.
Together with journalist Eitan Haber, he composed the
brief text that he would recite above the extermination camp. At the same time,
Eshel worked as the professional planner of a meticulous air force operation.
Again and again he drilled the Auschwitz flyby above the Tel Nof air base,
which he used to simulate the concentration camp. Finally, on August 28, 2003,
the brigadier general led the official IAF delegation to Radom. It also
included a fueling plane, a Hercules plane and the 669 search and rescue unit.
For the next four days, he worked tirelessly on
coordinating the one-time flyby with the Polish authorities, who had been taken
aback by the Israeli plan. A few opposed fighter planes over Auschwitz on
principle, while others were against the option of an earlier practice flight
and of a flyby at low altitude. They wanted Polish planes to escort the Israeli
jets.
In the end, though, Eshel got his wish. On a very stormy
day, he took off, together with two more F15s and five other air force
personnel (including the
late navigator Shimshon Rozen), from the
Radom air base, into the heavy cloud cover over southern Poland.
The photography mission
Avi Maor was born in 1956, in Moshav Ein Vered. His
parents were both Holocaust survivors who had lost most of their families in
the war. No one talked about the Holocaust at home or on the moshav. As a
youth, Maor refused to acknowledge that the Holocaust was a part of his past
and played a part in shaping his identity. He refused to go on any “roots”
trips to Poland, insisting that his roots were in Israel, not Poland.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, Maor commanded a Phantom squadron,
an F15 squadron and the Ramon air base. More than a decade ago he also served
as the air attache in Washington. But when Amir Eshel put the Auschwitz flyby
on the table, Maor wanted in. “That’s the way I am willing to go back there,”
he said. “Only that way. In an F15.”
During the air show in Radom, Maor went to search for his
mother’s house in a small village near Treblinka and visited the bare spot in
the beautiful forest where the Treblinka extermination camp once stood. The
kaddish that was never said before, he recited in Majdanek. But up until the
last moment, his gut feeling was that Eshel’s ambitious operation wouldn’t
actually happen. Dan Halutz was trying to convince the Poles from Israel, and
ambassador Shevah Weiss was exerting pressure in Warsaw, but the Poles were not
at all keen on the idea. The obstacles they placed before the plan seemed
insurmountable.
But somehow, on a morning when the clear weather turned
stormy, Maor found himself at the end of the runway at Radom, awaiting takeoff.
In his cockpit was the only item his father brought to Israel from his previous
life − a tallit (prayer shawl). And there were also black-and-white photos of both his
mother’s and his father’s lost families.
The sky outside the cockpit canopy was like milk.
Practically zero visibility. You lock radars and fly in a row, with two
kilometers separating each plane. Even from an operational standpoint, it was a
difficult flight. Approaching the destination, the planes had to move closer to
one another inside the clouds. Contrary to normal practice, they had to form
the initial formation inside the clouds, and then descend to a low altitude.
Come out of the clouds and tighten the formation. There is the gate. The train
tracks. The platform. It’s deathly silent in the cockpit.
Avi Levkovich was born in Petah Tikva, in 1962. His
parents were Holocaust survivors from Hungary. Hungarian Jewry was being
exterminated at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the summer of 1944, when the bombers that
didn’t bomb were passing over the camp in the skies above. After enlisting in
the air force, he became a pilot of the Skyhawk, Kfir and F15, and now is a
pilot for El Al. But when Eshel was conducting the preliminary training
sessions over Tel Nof, he decided that Levkovich and his navigator were the
ones who could obtain the desired photograph of the planes flying over the
camp.
So after the flight through the milky sky and the initial
formation in the clouds and then the construction of the tighter formation and
the descent to a low altitude, and after the gate, the train tracks, the
platform and the crematoria, it was Levkovich’s job to break away from his
Number 1 and Number 2 planes. It was the job of Levkovich and his navigator to
photograph the two F15s flying diagonally over the women’s camp and over the
men’s camp and over Crematorium 2 and over Crematorium 3. The lush green of
Auschwitz-Birkenau. The neat rectangles of Auschwitz-Birkenau. And the
impossible-to-photograph silence in the cockpit.
Holder of the portfolio
Ido Nechushtan was born in 1957, in Jerusalem, to parents
who had been underground fighters in the Haganah. He attended the Leyada High
School and began his IDF service in 1975. After piloting the Skyhawk, Phantom
and F16, he served as a commander of combat squadrons, commander of the Hatzor
air base, head of air force intelligence, and air force chief of staff. From
2006-2008 he was head of the Planning Directorate, and from 2008-2012 was IAF
commander.
In early 2003, Brig. Gen. Nechushtan was the one who
received the mission file for the flight to Auschwitz. The original idea was to
have the air force conduct a flyby salute over all the concentration camps. But
when the Poles’ objected to having war machines flying over the sensitive
sites, the planned operation was reduced in scope. Nechushtan decided to add an
element on the ground: While the three F15s flew over Auschwitz-Birkenau, 200
IDF soldiers and officers would hold a ceremony of witnesses in uniform.
Nechushtan himself headed this delegation. While Eshel’s
team was at the lively and colorful Radom air show, Nechushtan’s group was
visiting mournful sites such as the Janusz Korczak Orphanage in Warsaw, and the
Treblinka and Majdanek concentration camps.
One evening, the delegation’s commander showed the group
a presentation he’d prepared on his laptop the night before. In the spring of
1944, three things happened, Nechushtan’s presentation explained: The Allies
achieved air supremacy over Auschwitz-Birkenau; the Allies obtained accurate
information about what was happening in Auschwitz-Birkenau; and Hungarian Jewry
was sent in sealed train cars to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Operationally, they could have been saved. In human
terms, 500,000 people could have been saved. Politically, the decision to save
them was never made. The world knew about the existence of the site where
10,000 people were being murdered daily. The world could have shut down the
extermination camp, and the world did not do so.
On the morning of September 4, the witnesses in uniform
strode into Auschwitz-Birkenau. The march is done in threes. There is a Torah
scroll, wreaths of flowers, Israeli flags. Musical interludes. The El Maleh
Rahamim prayer of remembrance. A very respectable ceremony in keeping with the
air force’s high standards.
But at Auschwitz-Birkenau it’s different, Nechushtan
feels. Something happens to you. You feel it through the earth. It’s like with
Jerusalem. You feel that you’re in a different sort of place. You’re in a place
that bears within it all the tragedy of the Jewish people. You’re standing on
the train tracks and your legs freeze. The hairs on the back of your neck stand
up. You think of the ashes. You know this is your first time here, and your
last. It’s impossible to fully take in this place where you are standing.
The ceremony itself is held at the end of the train
track, between the crematoria. The audience is facing the famous red-brick
entrance gate. Shevah Weiss speaks, a bereaved father speaks, and the head of
air force intelligence speaks. When he finishes speaking, the air force
intelligence chief turns around so that his back is to the audience and he,
too, is facing the red-brick gate. Will they show up or won’t they, he wonders.
Ten seconds behind schedule, Eshel’s voice booms from the
loudspeakers: “We are pilots of the Israel Air Force in the skies over the camp
of atrocities. We arose from the ashes of the millions of victims, we carry
their silent cry, we salute their heroism, and pledge to defend the Jewish
people and its country, Israel.”
And then Eshel’s formation is over the gate, sitting
pretty. Emitting the thunderous noise of the F15 engines as it makes a
30-second pass over the railroad tracks, the platform and the crematoria. Not
leaving a single dry eye in the audience. Including the eyes of the air force
intelligence commander.
Distributing the image
Eliezer Shkedy is the son of Moshe, who, in 1944, as an
18-year-old, leapt from a train near Budapest. Moshe Shkedy’s father, mother
and sisters were murdered and cremated at Auschwitz-Birkenau; he was the
family’s sole survivor. His son Eliezer entered the IDF in 1975 and went on to
pilot the Skyhawk, Mirage and F16, to command combat squadrons and the Ramat
David air base, to be air force intelligence chief and air force chief of
staff. From 2004-2008, Shkedy was the IAF commander.
In 2002, Brig. Gen. Shkedy headed an IDF delegation to
the concentration camps in Poland. Although his grandfather, grandmother and
aunts all perished at Auschwitz, it was the visit to Majdanek that really shook
him. The fact that the camp actually exists. The camp commander’s office, the
camp commander’s house. The entry to the gas chambers. The smells. And the
mountain of ash. The bones in the mountain of ash. “You see it, and suddenly
you realize what you are seeing. The feeling stays with you for months,” he
says.
So when Dan Halutz, Ido Nechushtan and Amir Eshel began
formulating the idea of the Auschwitz flyby, Shkedy was an enthusiastic
supporter. He didn’t have a key role in the planning of the operation, but he
followed its progress closely, on a daily basis. And when it seemed likely that
the only way to go through with the operation would be to defy the Poles,
Shkedy phoned Eshel and ordered him to go ahead with it: “Young man, the last
time the Poles told us what to do was 60 years ago. Do what you need to do.”
In 2006, Shkedy was the air force commander during the
Second Lebanon War. According to foreign sources, in 2007 he was the one who
initiated and commanded the operation to destroy the Syrian nuclear reactor at
Deir al-Zor. In 2006-2007, he prepared the operational plan for what would come
to be known as Operation Cast Lead (in Gaza). But amid all of this, Shkedy was tasked with a much weightier
mission. According to various assessments, Shkedy was the first air force
commander to formulate a serious military option in regard to Iran. In late
2007, the tension over Iran reached its first peak. The U.S. Bush
administration was concerned that Israel would surprise it with an attack. But
in early 2008, the tension dissipated and action on the Iran challenge was
deferred.
Upon concluding his stint as air force commander in April
2008, Shkedy was looking for a symbolic way to express all that was done during
his tenure, and all that remained to be done in order to defend Israel’s
security. He chose to make use of the photograph of the three F15s passing over
the red-brick gate of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Every squadron commander and every
base commander in the air force received a copy of the photograph of the flyby.
Every general in the general staff received a photograph of the flyby. The Shin
Bet security service chief, the Mossad chief, the defense minister and the
prime minister received a photo of the flyby.
On each copy of the photo, Shkedy added these carefully
chosen words: “The Israel Air Force over Auschwitz − on behalf of the State of
Israel and the Jewish people. To remember, not to forget, to rely only on
ourselves.”
The Iranian context
The Auschwitz flyby took place within the context of
2003: the second intifada, suicide bombings, targeted assassinations. A wave of
anti-Semitism sweeping Europe, just when Israeli civilians were being murdered
on buses, in cafes and nightclubs. The isolation of the Shin Bet, IDF and IAF
while they were defending the Jewish state from a terror offensive was
unprecedented. And in the backdrop, there was also the Ilan Ramon tragedy.
Flight 301 took off just seven months after the
horrifying explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia. In Israel as a whole, and
within the air force in particular, there was great awareness of the symbolic
images that Ramon took with him into space. So the pilots who were sent from
Tel Nof to Auschwitz also had the feeling that they were Israeli astronauts
being sent on a symbolic mission to some kind of outer space. But for them,
this outer space wasn’t beyond the atmosphere that surrounds Earth but a
different era in which darkness descended upon the planet.
The distribution of the Auschwitz flyby photograph took
place within the context of 2008: Iran. In Natanz, the first thousand
centrifuges (that were not
supposed to become operational) were already
active. The Israeli government was becoming increasingly frustrated by Western
powers not lifting a finger to halt the ayatollahs’ march toward
nuclearization. The army brass worried that the Mossad would not be able to
accomplish the strategic mission it was tasked with by prime ministers Ariel
Sharon and Ehud Olmert. So the air force began to think Iran, plan Iran and
drill Iran. At the request of IAF commander Shkedy, the corps’ history department
conducted a careful comparison of the statements of Ahmadinejad and those of
Adolf Hitler. The results were chilling.
When Amir Eshel flew over Ido Nechushtan’s ceremony at
the order of Eliezer Shkedy, none of the three was thinking about Iran. The
Shi’ite superpower’s nuclear ambitions weren’t on the air force’s operational
map. But five years later, Iran was on everyone’s mind and filling schedules.
Now there was a new resonance to the question of why the Allies didn’t bomb the
railroad tracks, and to the question of whether we’re really on our own. The
photographic message that Moshe Shkedy’s son left in every defense
establishment office in Israel took on a new and very powerful meaning.
The view from above
On Amir Eshel’s desk is the booklet of photographs
produced by air force intelligence 18 years ago − a shot of the synthetic fuel
plant next to Auschwitz prior to an Allied bombing; a shot of the synthetic
fuel plant next to Auschwitz following the Allied bombing; a shot of a column
of people walking on the Auschwitz train platform that the Allies didn’t bomb;
a shot of the bombs that were dropped from above the extermination camp but
weren’t meant for the camp, but rather for the synthetic fuel plant. “I’ve
pored over this I don’t how many times,” the air force commander tells me. “In
1944, they knew what was happening there. They knew, they knew. Let me remind
you. In May, the Budapest Transports begin. This reaches Roosevelt and
Churchill. Attack it, stop it. But both Churchill and Roosevelt received this
information and didn’t do anything with it.”
But why is the IAF commander in 2013 so preoccupied with
the question of 1944, I ask. “Because I’m one of the six who saw Auschwitz from
above,” Eshel replies. “It’s a unique perspective. At first I didn’t see
anything. I was focused on guiding the plane toward the entrance gate and on
being right in position. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get to the lower
altitude. I wasn’t sure we’d arrive on time. After that, I read the text. I was
focused solely on that. But after we finished the 30-second pass and began the
turn and climbed to 2,000 feet to get the picture, I suddenly started to think.
Not to think, but to really encounter this thing, with all of its implications.
The first thing I noticed was how green everything was, how peaceful. Like a
beautiful park. But at the same time, you know that here is a man-made hell.
Here is a crazy death machine that only human beings could devise. And this
contrast is inconceivable. Just inconceivable.
“The second thing that hit me was the thought of this
aerial photo showing people walking on the train platform in 1944,” he
continues. “Suddenly I was seeing with my own eyes that very same platform on
which they walked. And amid all this green, the platform is kind of yellow. And
it’s all there. The gate, the crematorium, our people standing there for the
ceremony. And then the third thing hits you: Thousands of people saw this view
from above. Just like this. They didn’t know, but they saw. They were there.
And it puts this question in your head: Why didn’t they bomb? Why? It drives
you crazy.”
Do you have an answer?
“I don’t know, I don’t want to say,” he responds. “But
it’s not because they were anti-Semites. It’s because it was comfortable for
them. I think they didn’t bomb because it was easier for them not to bomb.”
But you’re a technical guy, a man of
technology, focused on the next mission. Why are you so involved with this?
“I don’t know,” replies Israel’s number-one pilot. “It’s
part of how we’re programmed. We’re born with it. It’s in our DNA. Maybe I’m a
little more sensitive about it, but it’s not my story and it’s not about me.
It’s our story. Because that’s the fourth thing that hit me during that flight.
Because of its uniqueness, it afforded a perspective that we usually don’t
have. Think about it. In 30 seconds we completed a journey that represents some
60 years. And since it’s all so fast and strong and so powerfully felt, you
think to yourself, what power this nation has. Do we even understand it? Do we
really understand what happened here and what is still happening here? I’m no
one’s political commissar, but when you come out of the everyday cynicism,
there’s no way to describe it. There are no words. Here is where we walked with
yellow patches on our sleeve. And now we’ve come back with a huge Star of David
beneath the cockpit. It’s inconceivable, simply inconceivable.”
What you’re trying to tell me, I say to Eshel, is that
the picture you produced over Auschwitz 10 years ago is essentially a kind of
science fiction.
“This picture is much more than science fiction. It’s the
most profound picture there is. It’s hanging in my office for good reason.
There’s a good reason I talk about it with every foreign visitor who comes
here. Think about it. In 1944, no one could ever have imagined such a picture.
No one. And what you see here is where we were 70 years ago. At Ground Zero.
And look where we are 70 years later. Therefore, it’s not a picture about the
past. It’s a picture that looks toward the future.
“Nothing is guaranteed, of course. But I think that
people don’t truly appreciate the tremendous strength we have here. They just
don’t grasp it. So we brought this picture of the flyby above the gate to say,
‘Wait a minute, look where we were and where we came from, and where we’ve come
to.’ Yes, it’s technological. It’s the air force. But it’s not just
technological and it’s not just the air force. It’s the thousand feet
separating what was then and what is now.”
One could view this as kitsch: the Holocaust and kitsch;
the air force and kitsch; the Holocaust, the air force and kitsch. One could
see it as a new version of “1944 syndrome,” from the other side of the fence.
But one could also say that the Auschwitz flyby and the
photograph of it were also about meeting a profound Israeli need. Ever since
the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli story has been coming apart. Because of the
occupation and because of the internal rifts and because of the cynical
criticism, that sense of common meaning has gotten lost. Therefore, in their
own way, the three senior pilots felt that they had to restore meaning to the
story.
With Israel having lost the ability to tell its story to
itself, the air force commanders felt a need to put this picture in the place
of the crumbling story. And being men of action who know how to carry out a
mission, they did it. They mustered the resources of the air force in order to
place at the center of the Israeli consciousness a photograph that is a
substitute for a story. And they live in front of this photograph, they work in
front of this photograph. Day in and day out − Lebanon, Syria, Iran.
The phone rings and Amir Eshel answers it. He nods,
smiles, asks the bureau chief to open the windows in the adjacent conference
room. A few minutes later he glances at his watch, halts the conversation and
ushers me into the conference room. After a brief wait staring at the open
windows, there suddenly appears − between two central Tel Aviv office towers −
a great fiery candle, rising skyward. You don’t have to be Werner von Braun to
realize that this is not a shot from the Iron Dome antimissile system, or an
Arrow missile. “Is Mars in our hands?” I ask the air force commander. “The
aliens surrendered unconditionally,” he replies with a sly grin.
In the 1960s, Ezer Weizman and Motti Hod were in charge
of Operation Focus (Moked) − an unusual and brilliant strike on the Arab airports as the
opening shot in the Six-Day War. Over the past decade, one could say that
Shkedy, Nechushtan and Eshel have been tasked with the preparation of Operation
Focus for the new millennium. Although they seem to hold dovish stances and are
not keen on the idea of a strike on Iran, they are the ones who had to prepare
for such an eventuality. “Our job is to create capabilities, and that’s what
we’ve done,” Eshel tells me. “We’re ready.”
Are you proud of the capability that you’ve
built?
“I’m proud that we have incredible Israeli industries
that are able to produce things that no one else in the world can. We’re an arm
of the high-tech nation, that uses high-tech to defend against regional
dangers. We’re not complacent and we’re not eager for battle, but we’re
confident. We’re doing the best that’s possible, to be the best in any Focus 2
or Focus 3 that should happen.”
And the threat? Does the threat of Natanz and
Fordo remind you of the threat of Auschwitz and Treblinka?
“No. We’re not in the situation of the 1930s or the ‘40s.
The threats are significant, but we have survival capability that you can feel
in this room. It’s our privilege to carry the strength that was produced in
this country under our wings. You know, maybe that’s why we flew to Auschwitz.
Because we see something that others don’t always see. With the capabilities
that we’re familiar with, we see just how unbelievable our story is. And we
wanted to share this experience with all of Israel. We brought back from
Auschwitz the symbol that says it all.”
September 4, 2003
The song that was performed in this Holocaust Remembrance ceremony, Eli Eli, was written by Hannah Senesh.
The Life of Hannah Senesh
Hannah Senesh was born in July17, 1921. She wrote the song Eli Eli, one of her well-known poems. Hannah Senesh made aliya to Israel from Hungary at age 18 (1939), went to the agricultural school at Nahalal and joined kibbutz Sdot-Yam.
In 1943, at the height of World War II, she volunteered along with 37 other Jews who lived under British mandate for Palestine (now Israel), to parachute in to Yugoslavia to make contact with local partisans and later with Hungarian partisans. The primary mission was to assist in the rescue of downed British aviators and then as a secondary goal to rescue Hungarian Jews. In 1944 she parachuted into Yugoslavia. After staying with the partisans, she crossed the border to Hungary (June 1944), where she was caught, tortured, and executed by the Germans (November 7, 1944).
Hannah Senesh is known both for her heroism and her poetry. In March 26, 1950 her remains were brought from Budapest and buried in the Har Hertzel military cemetery, Jerusalem, Israel. Habiba Reik and Raphael Reese who were part of the 37 paratroopers are buried next to her. Kibutz “Yad Hannah” was named after Hannah Senesh.
Eli Eli - Lyrics in Hebrew and in English
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