Holocaust survivor Ruth Haran from Kibbutz Be'eri can barely sleep at night. Sometimes she has dreams in which she runs, running out of air and with no direction, not knowing from whom she is fleeing or why. Until a week ago, when something changed, and for the first time she dreamt of her firstborn son, Avshalom, who was murdered by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7.
"My son told me that he is not in the casket we buried him in, and I still can't understand the dream," Ruth says, her voice breaking. "When I woke up, I didn't eat or drink all day. The terrorists murdered Avshalom and desecrated his body. I miss him so much, I miss him asking 'Mom, how's it going?'. I carry his picture with me and speak to him all the time."
Similarly, Ruth's fellow kibbutz member and also a Holocaust survivor, Haim Ra'anan, 89, went through what he described as a second Holocaust on Oct. 7.
"Never in my life did I imagine that as a Holocaust survivor, I would be hiding in fear for my life again. The massacre wiped out about 10% of Be'eri's 1,000 residents. Over 100 were murdered or abducted to the Gaza Strip that day. For me, there was one huge difference between Oct. 7 and the Holocaust.
"During the Shoah, I did not personally know the six million who perished, but in the Be'eri massacre, I knew almost every single person who was killed."
The lives of Ruth and Haim are intertwined with tragedies. They are two of about 865 Israelis from the south who experienced firsthand two of the most horrific atrocities committed against Jews. According to data from the Welfare and Social Affairs Ministry, about 2,000 Holocaust survivors from across Israel were evacuated from their homes in the aftermath of the Hamas onslaught.
Ruth, who barely escaped the horrors of the Nazis in Romania, immigrated to Israel and settled in the south. At no point did she imagine that at age 88, while living in the Promised Land, she would yet again face a horrific massacre, which she too said felt like a second Holocaust. Hamas terrorists not only murdered her son, but also took hostage seven of her family members, including her daughter, daughter-in-law, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
A few months ago, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Ruth led the Public Diplomacy Directorate's international campaign. Gigantic billboards with her pain-filled face with the word "SURVIVOR" below were hung in front of the United Nations headquarters and in Times Square in New York. In a chilling video, she spoke about the horrifying similarity between the acts of the Nazis and Hamas terrorists.
"When babies are murdered in their cots, when women are raped, thrown to the ground and murdered, viciously, satanically, innocents – that's a Holocaust!" she says in the video.
"I'm always asked about the similarities between the Holocaust and Oct. 7, and I answer that in both cases there was a deliberate, systematic, evil, and completely satanic destruction. The Holocaust is the darkest stain in the history of the 20th century. A trauma for all of humanity, which caused the devaluation of human life.
"As time goes by, the memory of the Holocaust becomes more difficult and raises questions of 'why?'. How could such a thing happen? It's a monstrous puzzle that makes it difficult to understand the fabric of human experience. The Nazis tattooed numbers on the arms of Jews in the death camps with one goal: to break their Jewish identity.
"This is exactly what the terrorists did on Oct. 7. When IDF soldiers came to evacuate me from the house – after I had been besieged for about 24 hours – I saw sights I will never forget. The body of a neighbor was lying in the yard and babies and children were strewn on the lawns. I also saw a bloody crib. The terrorists turned our paradise into hell."
"A quiet place, until tragedy struck"
Since Oct. 7, Ruth has taken on another title in addition to being a Holocaust survivor. She is now also an evacuee. While her fellow Be'eri residents have been staying at a Dead Sea Hotel and are preparing to move to Kibbutz Hatzerim, she has spent the last few months in a nursing home in Beersheba. A month ago, she asked to return for the first time to the decimated kibbutz, where she had moved for Avshalom.
"I couldn't stop crying at the destruction and ruin," Ruth said, her voice breaking again. "Parts of my house survived, but Avshalom's house was completely burned down. Nothing was left of it. I moved to Be'eru three years ago, after living 40 years in Omer. I loved the kibbutz life, the orchards, the groves, the fields, and the blossoms. It's a community of good, hard-working, and creative people."
The tragedies Ruth has endured are reflected in her somber eyes. Although she has reached old age, she looks younger than 88 and her mind is sharp.
"My mother once said I was born unlucky because winds of war were blowing across Europe," Ruth recounted, describing her childhood in Bucharest, Romania. "I was the youngest of four children in a time when the Fascist Benito Mussolini ruled in Italy, the dictator Francisco Franco ruled in Spain, and in Romania, the antisemitic Iron Guard movement persecuted Jews."
Ruth's family suffered from relentless persecution by the Nazis. "After the Germans flooded half of Russia and all of Ukraine, we traveled by train for weeks to Uzbekistan."
In 1945, at the end of World War II, Ruth's family moved to Kishinev, Moldova, which was under Soviet rule, and her father was appointed a medical inspector to eradicate typhus.
"Unfortunately, my father contracted the disease and died. My mother searched for a week to find a Jewish cemetery until she found one in Bessarabia. After the burial, we returned to Bucharest with money an uncle sent us, but my mother had already decided we would immigrate to Israel. Judaism was part of us throughout the Holocaust. We always remembered our religion and celebrated all the holidays."
At age 18, while serving in the military, Ruth met her late husband, Haim. The two wed in 1958 and soon after their firstborn, Avshalom, was born.
"He was wonderful," Ruth said of her son, crying. "A special child and a special man. After him, my son Ronen was born, who lives in Australia, and my daughter Sharon Avigdori, who was abducted to Gaza and has since been released. I moved to Be'eri after undergoing surgery. I had cancer and I hope I've recovered."
Q: Weren't you worried about the proximity to Gaza or the rockets?
"I've lived in the Negev all my life. Be'eri was a comfortable, quiet place until tragedy struck. That morning, [when the sirens first began] I almost didn't go into the shelter [due to how often sirens are heard in communities bordering the strip]. I heard knocks on the door, so I opened it. There were two Hamas terrorists there. I wasn't afraid. I looked them in the eyes. Suddenly they turned around and left, because someone called them, and I ran inside."
Q: Where did you find the courage?
"Maybe because of my childhood and what I went through. My father was a pacifist and an idealist, and I'm like him. He gave me good tools to cope. When I think of Oct. 7 now, it angers me and pains me. Why was I lucky but not my son? Someone watched over me during the Holocaust and on that day too, but not over my son whom everyone loved. He was killed after leaving the bomb shelter to warn people not to come to Be'eri."
On Oct. 7, which was the Simhat Torah holiday, Avshalom, 66, and his wife Shoshan, 67, hosted his sister Sharon and her daughter Noam, 12, as well as their daughter Adi, 38, and her husband Tal Shoham, 39, and their children Naveh, 8, and Yahel, 3.
Except for Avshalom, everyone was taken hostage. Everyone, except for Tal, was released in November as part of a temporary ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. Tal remains captive in Gaza.
"I didn't sleep until they returned," Ruth shared. "I carried a prayer in my heart that they would return healthy and whole. In the past I was a family therapist, I established a center for the treatment of sexual abuse in Beersheba, and I hear that's what happens to women in captivity. I was very worried for my female family members, all of whom are beautiful, and I'm glad that this did not happen to them.
Q: After all you've been through in nine decades, do you have any optimism left?
"I'm full of admiration for the people who run the nursing home I'm staying at and for those who live here, who are middle-class Holocaust survivors. There are so many good people here and it gives me strength. So does the younger generation. I see the girls fighting for their captive fathers and the beautiful, strong, and conscientious widows. Everyone has such high values and it's touching. Perhaps from this, a better people will emerge, assuming we don't let some ministers in the government ruin our lives."
"Terrorists entered the homes of all my children"
For 20 hours, from 6 a.m. on that cursed Saturday morning until they were evacuated at 2 a.m., 89-year-old Haim Ra'anan barricaded himself, along with his caregiver, son, and grandson, in the shelter of his house in Kibbutz Be'eri. His wife was not home as she had traveled with her two brothers to Tel Aviv.
They couldn't go out, or even make a sound, and the rumors reaching them on WhatsApp were horrifying: terrorists had invaded the kibbutz, entered homes, murdered, and abducted friends.
Even the evacuation itself took a while.
"Strong soldiers put me in a wheelchair and began taking me out," Haim recounted. "It took us an hour and a half to travel 300 or 400 meters to the assembly point at the kibbutz gate. Throughout the evacuation, we heard the gunfire and saw the explosions and burning buildings. At that moment, you're not thinking about it, you're still in survival mode.
"The whole story took place under fire, amid combat. Someone living in my building was shot in the stomach and eventually died. Each time the soldiers looked around and said, 'Wait here for a moment, we need to check the area and see if everything is okay.'
"All my grandchildren live along that street. Every time we reached where a granddaughter lived, I told the soldiers: 'Have you evacuated this house yet? What's happening with them?'"
Q: Were you in touch with your family that morning?
"Yes, but in essence, I only knew everyone was okay when I got to the bus. I don't know how to describe that luck. In the apartment next to one of my granddaughters, the father and baby were killed by gunfire. The terrorists didn't enter my house but did succeed in entering the homes of all my grandchildren, without exception. Luckily, they all survived. For one granddaughter, they started burning the house, and she and her family escaped through the window and went to the shelter of other neighbors. A miracle."
"I had no childhood"
Haim was born in 1935 in Hungary. When World War II broke out, his father was already in pre-state Israel, paving the way for his family's immigration.
"My entire childhood, that I didn't have essentially, I was far from my father," he described. "The only picture I have from that period is of me with my mother in the Jewish ghetto, wearing a yellow patch on our clothes. As a child in Hungary, when the violence and hatred toward Jews increased, we were forced to wear a yellow patch and our family home was marked with a swastika to identify us as Jews. It was done to dehumanize, terrorize, and isolate us from the rest of society.
"Eight decades later, I was horrified to see the Star of David painted again on Jewish homes across Europe to mark and intimidate them in the wake of the devastating Oct. 7 massacre. It's so similar to the antisemitic marking of homes that I experienced in my childhood, it's chilling. I never imagined something like that could happen again in Europe."
Q: What do you remember from your childhood in Hungary?
"Like I said, as a child living in the Jewish ghetto, I essentially had no childhood. It was robbed of it because of persecution and war. We were always looking for food, living in constant tension about how the day would unfold. Would we be deported? Would we have enough food to last another day? Would we survive the harassment, terror, and killings?
"One day, my family heard that the militia was looking for us. We couldn't escape the ghetto, so we just waited for them to come. It didn't take long before we heard a knock on the door. When we opened it, we saw three militiamen at our doorstep. As they entered, one of them removed his hat, and, to our surprise, my grandfather recognized him.
"He was a distant relative who had come to our home with official papers from the Swedish embassy that granted us a certain diplomatic protection. With those precious papers, we were able to move to the 'international ghetto' in Budapest, which was designated for Jews and their families who held protective papers from a neutral country. We managed to survive there until the Soviets arrived, and we were among the lucky few because nearly 80% of Hungarian Jewry perished."
The precious documents were issued by Swedish architect Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. Interestingly, Haim now temporarily resides on Wallenberg Street in Tel Aviv.
He is a grandfather to 19 grandchildren and a great-grandfather to 14 great-grandchildren, and his age during the Holocaust was the same as one of his grandchildren with whom he sheltered on Oct. 7.
Q: What did you go through on that terrible morning?
"I heard continuous sirens in the kibbutz. At first, I thought it was 'just' another rocket attack from Gaza, like the ones we had already grown accustomed to. No one could have predicted the massacre that took place. Shortly after, we began receiving reports that Hamas terrorists were all over the kibbutz and trying to break into shelters. The terrorists set fire to many homes to force the residents out, but many preferred to die in the fires than be murdered by the terrorists.
"I was extremely lucky that the terrorists did not reach my home and that my entire family living throughout the kibbutz survived the massacre. I don't know what I would have done if one of my grandchildren or great-grandchildren had been abducted to Gaza."
Addressing European ambassadors
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Haim was invited to speak before the ambassadors of the European Union in Israel, as part of a project that was also featured in Germany and the United States.
Haim shared with the ambassadors how he grew up in Hungary, survived the Holocaust against all odds, and was one of the founding members of Kibbutz Be'eri that was decimated by Hamas on Oct. 7.
He called on the diplomats to make sure history does not repeat itself and urged them to fight against the spread of antisemitism and support Israel's efforts in returning the hostages home.
"In the shadow of grief and sorrow – optimism and hope as well"
Haim and Ruth were photographed for the Humans of Israel – 7th of October project, created by photographer and lecturer Erez Kaganovitz.
"Since the terrible attack on Israel on Oct. 7, my world, like that of many others in the country and around the globe – stopped," he told Israel Hayom. "On that day, and in its aftermath, hundreds of stories of heroism and hope emerged from many sectors of Israeli society. People like Haim, Ruth, and many others, did everything possible to survive and save lives.
"Following countless inspiring stories I was exposed to, I decided to create the exhibition, which tells the stories in a unique way and brings – in the shadow of grief and sorrow – optimism and hope as well."
