Never Again by Niyati Evers
“to the people of Gaza: I am because you are. I cannot be because you cannot be. I cannot exist if you cannot exist.”
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The Judaism I grew up with would not have killed children in a Gaza UN shelter. The Judaism I grew up with was about kindness. Not just kindness to fellow tribes-people, but also to those outside our tribe. My dad was the headmaster of the only Jewish high school in Amsterdam. Many of the teachers were not Jewish. Helen, my English teacher, had flaming orange hair, bright blue eyes, and a face covered in freckles. When she blushed, her face was a sea of orange with two blue diamonds in the middle. I loved the soft singing sound of her voice. Even when she spoke Dutch, it sounded like High English mixed with the guttural ‘g’ of the Dutch language.
When I was fifteen years old, I arrived at my English lesson one day to find Helen’s seat empty. The students laughed and shouted and walked on the tables, jumping from table to table. The jumping thing was my invention. Because my dad was the headmaster, I had to prove that I was no daddy’s girl, and I often took the lead in rebellions, even if it was toward my favorite teacher, Helen.
Then my father entered our classroom. I would have stayed standing on the table, my arms folded on my chest, my chin up high, my eyes fixed on the wall above his head. But this day, there was a deep frown between my father’s eyebrows, and his eyes were red. He’d been crying.
Helen’s husband had died and he would teach us instead. We got off the tables and sat in our chairs. Someone asked him how Helen’s husband had died. My father did not answer. He turned his back to us and started scribbling on the blackboard.
For the next three months, Helen did not come to school. One morning, I went into my father’s bedroom. My father was on the phone at seven o’clock in the morning, reading a poem. It was a famous Dutch poem, Having and Being, by Ed Hoornik. I stood in the doorway of my father’s bedroom and listened:
Having is nothing. Is war. Is not living.
It’s being of the world and the worldly gods.
Being is transcending all those things,
It’s being filled with divine pain.
I could make out a female voice on the other end of the phone. Helen’s voice. I asked my dad why he was reading a poem to Helen this early in the morning. Helen’s husband had hung himself and Helen had found his body, hanging from their basement ceiling. Every morning, my father phoned Helen and read her a poem.
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For fourteen years, I lived and worked in post-Apartheid South Africa. Through my bedroom window, across the valley, there was a township of thousands of tiny shacks with tin roofs. Babalwa, the woman who cleaned my house, lived in one of those shacks.
Babalwa was a tall black woman with braided hair. The meaning of her name, as she explained it to me, is “God’s gratitude”. Everything about Baba, my term of endearment for her, was love and life. When Baba smiled, she smiled with her mouth wide open, showing all her bright white teeth. Her round dimpled cheeks would lift all the way up to her eyes and her gold earrings shook on her ear lobes.
Every Wednesday morning, Baba opened the gate to my garden. It was my happiest day of the week. Before I’d met her, I did not know a hug could feel like that. She’d take me in her arms, press me to her breasts, hold me there for a minute or so, then look me in the eyes and plant a big kiss flat on my lips.
One particular Wednesday, when Baba came to my house, I was crying. When I told her that my sister had just given birth and that I missed my family, her eyes welled up with tears. For the remainder of the day, she was quiet, hunched over and staring out the window.
The next week, when Baba entered my home, she did not hug me. She put her hands on my shoulders, looked at me with those big brown eyes of hers, and told me if I was sad, she could only be sad too. Baba’s mother had sent me a message. “Tell Niyati that we are her family now and that she must come and live with us.”
Despite the legacy of Apartheid, Baba and her mother welcomed me, a white middle-class woman from Holland, into their home, and called me family. They are the living embodiment of Ubuntu.
Desmond Tutu explains Ubuntu as the essence of being human. As human beings, we cannot exist in isolation. We are all interconnected. I am because you are.
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Ubuntu, this willingness to go beyond your own tribe and feel the suffering of another person as your own, is the only reason I am alive. My mother was a German Jew, born in Munich, the official headquarters of the Nazi Party. When Hitler came into power in 1933, she left her beloved homeland with my grandparents and fled to Holland. At the age of six, my mother became a refugee.
I am alive today because people refused to look the other way when Jews were persecuted and massacred. These people risked their lives. Together with about 14 other Jews, my aunt’s hiding place was betrayed and she was sent to Auschwitz. She lived, but the man who hid her did not. The Nazis took her protector to a public square, bound his hands behind his back, blindfolded him and stood him against a wall. They lifted their rifles and shot until he fell to the ground.
I do not know my mother. She died when I was 3 years old. She and my grandfather survived the war by hiding from the Nazis on an Amsterdam canal. I don’t know which canal, or how big the room was where they stayed, or who brought them food. For three long years, she was invisible. She did not exist. Any sound she made could have meant the end. Like the children of Gaza, death could have come for her while she slept.
I do not know who hid my mother and my grandfather. But it is thanks to the profound and courageous act of kindness of these people, non-Jews who looked beyond the safety of their own tribe and followed the depth of their humanity and conscience, that my mother could give me the gift of life.
Palestinian fathers, mothers and children will be able to relate to my mother’s experience. They too are refugees. Except to this day, the Palestinian people do not have a state they can call their own.
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I imagine my dead mother on the other side, cradling the spirit of a dead Palestinian girl. A little girl, just like she was, when she fled her native homeland in 1933. This is what I hear her say: I know what it’s like to be trapped. To have no escape from soldiers with their guns. To hide in a tiny room, not knowing whether you or your parents will be alive the next day. To lie in bed, too afraid to close your eyes because death may come to you in the night.
I know what it’s like to ask yourself what you have done to deserve this. Why the people in uniforms hate you. To have no protection from fear, because no one can protect you and nowhere is safe.
I know what it’s like to close your eyes and see the color red, because all that is left of your world is the blood of your people. All you hear are the voices of your dead uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters. All you smell is the stench of death.
I know what it’s like to lose your home. To feel your heart ripped out of your chest. That even if you survive, you have died with your brothers and sisters.
I know your suffering because your suffering is mine. I know the longing of your people for a homeland where you can be free and safe because the longing of your people is the longing of my people.
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The Judaism I grew up with was about love. I was 15 years old when An Interrupted Life, the diaries of Etty Hillesum, were published. Etty was a Dutch Jew who died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz when she was 29 years old. Etty knew the Nazis planned the annihilation of the Jewish people. Her writings describe how she looked death in the eye and made peace with her impending death. Her last words, written on a postcard and tossed out of the train that took her from Westerbork transit camp to Auschwitz, read: “We have left the camp singing.” She wrote about her hope she would survive:
“…One needs to help extend the supply of love on this planet earth. Every little bit of hate that one adds to the already existing overload of hate, will make this world more desolate and more uninhabitable. And of love I have much, very much, so much that it really adds weight and is not small any longer. (…) I know that a new and kinder day will come. I would so much like to live on, if only to express all the love I carry within me.”
Etty wanted to share her love with the world. Not just with other Jews. With the whole of humanity.
I will not betray the memory of my dead ancestors. I will not stand by, silent, while my people kill and maim hundreds of Palestinian children.
The Judaism I grew up with was about fairness and recognizing the humanity in others. My father taught me never to hate all Germans, because the evil acts of some do not make an entire people evil.
The Judaism I grew up with was about remembering our ancestors. It was about NEVER AGAIN. We were once demonized as “the other.” NEVER AGAIN does not apply only to Jews, but to all the persecuted, marginalized, and brutalized people of the world, including Palestinians. It is time we weep, not only for the pain inflicted on Jews throughout the centuries, but also for the pain we inflict on the Palestinians.
We need to wake up from this collective trance that keeps us locked in a self-image where we are the good guys, the righteous victims -- even as we bomb, kill, and maim thousands of people locked in a tiny enclave with nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. This is not an equal fight. We hold the power.
As a Jew, I say to the people of Gaza: I am because you are. I cannot be because you cannot be. I cannot exist if you cannot exist. The only homeland I’d ever want is one where your children and our children, Arab children and Jewish children, can live as equals and do not have to hide from the knock of death, coming to get them in the middle of the night.
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This article was sourced and edited by contributor Kevin Meyer, whose last edited work of non fiction entitled, "How to Talk About Gaza" by Erin Roycroft, can be read here.
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Niyati Evers traveled the world through the men in her life. In 1998, she left her hometown of Amsterdam and moved to Cape Town to marry her first husband. After a few years, she celebrated her separation from him with a divorce party, yet stayed on living and working in South Africa for 12 more years. She now lives in Portland with her whacky artist husband Robert and the spirit of her beloved late dog, Gabby. She is honored to be a writing student of Tom Spanbauer, Sage Ricci, and Kevin Meyer and to be surrounded by a bunch of mad, savvy, tattooed writers who keep her on her toes.