Edtstadler in Israel – Holocaust survivors: “I lay alive in the grave”

“This is my triumph over Nazism!” It’s a small, delicate woman who says it. She is 84 years old. Her hair is short, all white. She reclines in an armchair in a living room in central Tel Aviv. And she talks about her – for us – incomprehensible past and her experiences with the Nazis.

Edtstadler presented citizenship
Next to her is Minister of Europe Karoline Edtstadler. She has traveled to Israel to present citizenship, to visit the Leo Baeck Education Center (an intercultural educational institution in Haifa) and Yad Vashem (the memorial to the Holocaust martyrs and heroes of the State of Israel), and to meet the international delegation address the World Summit on Counter-Terrorism.

Anti-Semitism was the subject of the minister. “I am deeply concerned about the rise in anti-Semitism, not only in Austria and Europe, but worldwide.” The numbers in our home country alone speak volumes, they have skyrocketed. Everything played a role here: Corona, but also the war in Ukraine.

The anti-Semitism hotline of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG) registered – as reported – a doubling of the incidents (there were 257 in the first half of 2021 – 562 in the same period of 2022). “We all need to fight this virus of hate,” Edtstadler says.

She wants to set an example, she explains. Among other things, with citizenship, which she handed over to eight Israeli descendants of victims of Nazi persecution at the embassy residence in Herzliya near Tel Aviv. To date, 14,000 Holocaust survivors have received these messages.

Omri Rotem is a waiter in Tel Aviv – he took great care of us on the first day of our trip to Israel. And only when we leave does he tell us that he has been a proud Austrian for a few weeks now. Speaking of pride, it comes full circle when it comes to making amends, dealing with the past, the here and now, and the future. This delicate little woman has a name. Her name is Aliza Landau. She is proud that she survived. She’s a rock star! And she laughs when she hears this expression in the “Zikaron BaSalon”, which means “Memory in the living room” (an Israeli initiative that has been trying to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive in society since 2011 through personal conversations with contemporary witnesses, and which will soon also be available in Austria).

“I lay alive in the grave”
Although she had nothing to laugh about as a child, she had no childhood. Aliza Landau was 6 years old when, after playing a frenzied game of “hide and seek” in the war feud, she suddenly found herself in a grave dug in a field at the hands of her father, who had been shot by a German soldier. Next to her starving brother. “I was alive in the grave,” says the now 84-year-old. Her last words in this hole in the ground were, “Goodbye!” She kissed the father, the big brother. Then she struggled over the roots of the black hole in the ground. How she managed it – emaciated, at the end of her strength – Aliza can’t remember.

But she knows one thing, her story must be told. Because “something like that should never happen again”, she tells Edtstadler. She nods, “We’ve changed and show that we take full responsibility for what we haven’t done, but have done.”

Aliza smiles with satisfaction when she hears that. “I have three children and seven grandchildren.” Her personal triumph – over Nazism.