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Alona Frankel's Acceptance Speech
Upon Receiving the 2005 Buchman Prize

Translation from the Hebrew by Margo Eyon

Hello everyone,

I am pleased and proud that the Jacob Buchman Foundation, the panel of judges and Yad Vashem has found my book "Girl" worthy of this important award - the Buchman Prize.

This is the first time in my life I've ever visited the Yad Vashem museum. I've never been here or in any other museum, institution or site in remembrance of the Jews murdered by the Germans in the Second World War. And here I stand before you, in the place I avoided visiting up till now, to receive a prize.
What a paradox.
Ever since I was informed of receiving the prize, I've spent a great deal of time wondering what I could tell you on this occasion.
This is very difficult for me.
I feel obligated to try and understand, to clarify for myself, this difficulty that I'm experiencing: a grudge against or perhaps fear of the institutions, museums and memorial projects.
Why am I so put off? Me, a child of that war.
Maybe, as one who underwent the atrocities, I'm afraid I wouldn't find any expression equal to the task of conveying the awful truth.
Maybe it started with my coming to Israel, from my first encounter with the "veteran" Israelis and among them the Sabras - the native-born Israelis.

After the war, after the Red Army liberated us and we were saved, my mother, my father and I, and it was permissible to walk, to speak and even to cry; and there was food - all sorts of people began showing up, human beings, Jews, who had also managed to stay alive.
Every last one of them had a story.
Stories of horror, suffering, miracles and mourning.
And the people listened to each other's stories. I also heard the stories.
I believed that was what the world was like.
Until, for various reasons, Zionism not being one of them, we sailed on the immigrant ship "Galila" to the State of Israel. I was a twelve-year-old girl.

It was on December 31, 1949. It was very cold. The next day, it snowed in Tel Aviv.
Aunt Salka, the only one of my mother's large family in Oswiecim that the Germans didn't kill, welcomed us graciously to her small apartment on Ben-Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv. Aunt Salka decided to throw a reception in our honor.
She opened the door joining the two little rooms, set a table between them laden with the finest foods possible in that time of austerity, and invited her friends and my mother's from the Hashomer Hatsair youth movement in Oswiecim. Everyone came.
I met them for the first time.
Everyone was a "veteran" Israeli. Parents to magnificent and heroic Sabra children, members of important kibbutzim, proud pioneers.
One of them, Bronka, had lost a son in the War of Independence. The boy's name was Uri.
Excited reunions. Hugs, kisses. A cloud of slight embarrassment hung over everything.
They ate some of the angel food cake that had a faint odor of gasoline wafting from it. They drank tea.
My mother began telling her story.
She told, she told and she told.
She told of the shock of the invasion.
She told of the escape under bombing.
She told of the humiliation.
Of the ghetto she told.
The hunger, the fear, the horror,
the diseases, the lice, the roundups for transport.
Roundups of children.
She told how they hid me, the girl, in a tiny bunker that my father had designed and built behind our stove. I crawled into it through the oven door whenever there was a roundup of children, the smell of ashes in my nose.
Of the extermination in the ghetto she told.
The transports.
And the hiding place on the Aryan side.
She told how I was smuggled out as a Christian girl with counterfeit papers, by a foreign woman.
And about the hideout.
The anxiety, the horror, the Gestapo searches,
the consumption, the lice, the hunger.
Hunger.
And then
the liberator's bombs
the disease, the orphanages.

And still she went on and told about friends they all knew from the Hashomer Hatsair movement.
How Zimek was tortured and died in the Yanowski camp,
how Ephraim was beaten and hanged.
How Berek was murdered in the gas chamber
in their hometown, Oswiecim - Auschwitz.

She told, she told and she told.

And I, a girl, sit on my own in the back, in the corner. I know the stories. Of course.
After all, I believed that was what the world was like.

As usual, I see and am not seen. I watch. No one pays any mind to a girl.
The embarrassment starts becoming thicker and denser. The seated adult are moving impatiently in their chairs, exchanging glances, whispering, raising an eyebrow, both eyebrows in an expression of disbelief, amazement. They curl their lips in disgust. They eat crumbs from the smelly cake, sip their tea, and with a subtle knee nudge their neighbor, to draw his attention to a particularly unrealistic detail. Such as, for example, the impossibility of not having even one breadcrumb. Or that the Germans hunted children on the playground in the Lvov ghetto and murdered them.
Children.

At the head of the table reigns Bronka, the bereaved mother: Mater Dolorosa.
Everyone is still shocked and in deep mourning over Uri, her son.
Uri the blond boy, smart, tall, successful, perfect, the hero.
The soldier boy who fell.
Fell.
Fell in war.
He was not murdered
not hung
not tortured to death,
not poisoned with gas and his corpse incinerated in a crematorium,
didn't starve to death, on a climb, from exhaustion.
He didn't go like a sheep to slaughter.
He fell
a proud death.

I was ashamed of my mother naively telling all this history that everybody was disgusted to hear, that no one was interested in listening to. All were uncomfortable, maybe even bored. These were not stories that interested them.
What could they do with such stories?
And all their families too, who hadn't come back.
Maybe they would have to think about them as well.
Shameful, humiliating stories.
After all
they are here
the "veterans," the Sabras,
building a new life here.
A blond life.
A heroic life.
A triumphant life.

She should stop telling already, my mother.
Stop it stop it stop it
I wish with all my heart and soul.
So she won't disgrace herself.
So she won't disgrace the story.
Since these people, the "veterans," the Israelis, they just don't understand anything.
They just don't know anything, and this doesn't interest them at all anyway.
They think they're so great


And we're new immigrants. And they will change my name for the second and third times. And they will curse me in all kinds of guttural languages, and call me names:
Undercooked, Holocaust refugee, Diaspora girl, Pollack hag, bar of soap.

Maybe it was then that I lost my trust in the honesty and ability of the "veteran" Israelis and the Sabras to commemorate the Diaspora murder victims.

The war children like me are all grown up.
When I understood that I am the last one on earth who can name the figures in the photographs in the old shoebox, the photos of my family members whom the Germans murdered, I decided to try and tell what I know, what I remember, or remember being told.
To tell the story.
The story that was never a secret, but never found a totally attentive audience.

Now there is the book, and I - I continue to contain the smells, the sights and the anger. The sorrow, the grief, the bewilderment and the astonishment. The experience of abandonment that was more difficult than all the rest.
None of this tremendous burden has lessened, or been lifted from me, or been diluted by the text of the book.

The book continues to surprise me, especially the appreciation and compliments it has received.
I believe, I hope, that there are people who are truly listening.
Maybe something in the world has changed.
Maybe I'm the one who has changed.

I want to let you in on something: that in my innermost heart of hearts, I still don't believe that I will ever have the strength, the patience and the courage to write this story, my story, this book.
I believe,
I hope
that you, here at Yad Vashem, have found the correct tone in researching, teaching, and commemorating the awful history that I lived through as a girl, and that you, here, in the museum,
are listening.

Thank you once again.


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