Tami Braslavski, mother of captivity survivor Rom Braslavski, revealed to the media at Sheba Hospital, where he is being treated, testimonies about the horrors her son experienced in Hamas captivity.
According to her, Rom was held alone for two years, and during part of that time was held with the bodies of dead hostages beside him. Tami said her son reported to former Israeli military commander Gal Hirsch upon his return about the location of the bodies.
Tami said her son was not held in tunnels and that he was force-fed before his release and now suffers from blood sugar fluctuations.
According to her, during the first four weeks, Rom was held in a bad place. "He freed himself from the handcuffs, couldn't light the gas, so he set clothes on fire and caused a fire, and then many Gazans arrived, and he feared lynching."
"He was held in a room one meter by one meter (3.3 feet by 3.3 feet). The smoke came out of the room, and the Gazan mob began pounding on the windows. When Rom didn't answer, they started pounding on the door, and Rom was in a state of hysterical stress. 'What do I do now – if they discover I'm here, I'll die in a lynching.' What went through his head was the Ramallah lynching of the terrorist with the bloodied hands. He said, 'I'm not ending like that' – he went under a blanket, put the blanket over himself, and they broke the windows, something like 40 people, and they saw the handcuffs and understood there's a prisoner captive here."
She explained how he escaped from the trouble, saying that the person who captured him would come once a day, at night, to bring him food and take him to the bathroom, which happened at noon. "Rom said 'Shema Yisrael' and prayed to God and told him 'I can't end like this, you didn't take me out of there to end in a lynching, I'm not going like this,' and then he heard a bunch of keys at the door. His captor suddenly returned and didn't get angry at him and didn't give him punishment – he removed everyone from there and moved him to a slightly better place."
"I'm Jewish, I'm Jewish!"
According to her son's testimony, which she revealed, Tami said Rom's captors abused him psychologically, told him that Iran bombed Israel, that his parents weren't at the protests in the square, and chose to show him specifically only the Kaplan protests, while lying to him that his parents forgot about him.
Not only that, his mother said his captors tried to convince him to fast during Ramadan or read chapters from the Quran and convert to Islam, in exchange for food and improved conditions, but he refused. As evidence of the mental crisis he experienced as a result of the psychological manipulations his captors operated on him, the mother recounts, "And now when he returned, he keeps saying all the time 'I'm Jewish.'"
"I didn't understand why he keeps saying 'I'm Jewish,' 'I'm a strong Jew.' It was so important to him to preserve his Jewish identity because they asked him to convert to Islam and tempted him, if you fast in Ramadan we'll give you food, soap, all kinds of things that for us are banal, but Rom didn't break, and however he came he put on tefillin, we brought him the tefillin to the hospital and he put them on."
"Everyone talks to him and wants to give to him and make him happy, and I asked him, 'Rom what do you need' and he tells me 'Mom, I don't need anything, why would they do this for me,' he doesn't understand the magnitude of the event and how much of a hero he is and how many people want to give to him, he only wants to stand at the window and look at the sky, the air does him good."
She also said that between April and July, between the two videos of him that were distributed to the media, his captors increased the abuse of him. "They would come in several times a day and give him beatings, it's not pleasant for me to say, but he absorbed it. He told me 'Mom, I knew it would pass. I said to myself that it's only a period, and it will pass, it will end, it will end,' and that's how he got through it."
