Janusz Korczak wrote: "If I were a boy again, I'd want to remember and know everything that I know now. Only I wouldn't want anyone to find out that I was already a grownup once. I would pretend as if nothing were the matter; that I'm the same kind of little boy as all the others."
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Over the past two months being a grownup and understanding the world as an adult, has not been a great privilege. You can be forgiven if for the past two months you have been envious of the naivete of children and their bubble, even if just for a fleeting moment, their wonderful resilience as a tender soul that allows them to turn their backs and put on a smile even while the turbulent world around them is filled with evil monstrosity.
Video: Credit: Schneider Children's Medical Center of Israel
The return of dozens of children and teenagers from Hamas captivity to Israel is the inverse realization of Korczak's dream: The children who returned to us already know, understand, and see, and do not need to grow up further to understand the evil that awaits a normal child upon entering adulthood .
You might be tempted to simply dismiss their ordeal in captivity as nothing more than 50 days they were held in the darkness of Gaza caused them to lose their childhood and adolescence, but that would be misleading and simplistic. In fact, they are now entering a struggle: to assert their children's right to pretend that the world is not bad.
The essence of the testimonies of Eitan Yahalomi, Emily Hand, and other children, published this week, teaches us on just how a child's experience is raw and direct, and from it they have great strength. There is no room for interpretation when it is said that a 12-year-old child was beaten by passersby on the street, or that he was left alone in a locked room for two and a half weeks. There is no need for mediation when a girl recounts that she was not allowed to speak loudly, and that the sense of time was distorted in such a vile way. When it comes to the experience of children, there are no two sides to the coin, you cannot undermine their viewpoint. The truth is simply there, as is.
These testimonies, which will surely pile up and spread as the days pass, provoke thought and necessarily stand for comparison against other testimonies of children, "children of war" – those children who survived the Holocaust and provided immediate testimony to the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland after being liberated. The goal then was to capture the raw memory of horror, even before its late processing, and the testimonies of surviving children of the Holocaust provided very reliable evidence from the psychological side. In one of them, Laila Mitler, a 12-year-old girl, said, "I didn't believe I would ever be free again, but I also couldn't imagine what my death would look like."
Almost 40 children returned this week to Israel, to their homes, to their families. The past week has gone down as one that dovetails with our unique ethos, which sees the life of every Israeli citizen as a strategic asset, no less. It was an unbearable, annoying, tense, disappointing, and exhausting week. But it was an important week like no other, because it put meaning into the slogans of "rebuilding trust" and "the contract with the state." No longer are those just cliches, but they actually have substance and get translated into action. It was a week of saving lives in the most non-abstract way.
Night after night, like a ritual, we saw on the screen the children getting out of the vehicles and going to the Red Cross personnel, and we saw them crossing the border, and we saw the tired look and the disheveled hair, and the small body under the coarse clothing. And we saw the forced smile, and especially the darkened eyes, and we saw their souls and knew that they were not hollow. We hoped that they were not hollow.
The young lives that were saved teach this nation a lesson in modesty and proportions: Israeli society needs the gaze of its children to examine itself. It needs the innocence that meets pure evil to simplify things. Because in a world of countless shades of gray, there is black and there is white, and the eyes of children can naturally distinguish between them. Their testimonies, and their experiences, are the ones that clarify for us even at the end of the eighth week of fighting: there is no compromise in this war.
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