Eszter: It was back in 2015, when I opened my grandparents’ old wooden closet in Budapest, Hungary that I found a bunch of postcards that I have never seen before, dated from 1940. I was cleaning out their flat after my grandmother passed away. They were the last postcards my great grandparents exchanged before they were killed by the Nazis. My great grandfather in a forced labor camp and my great grandmother in Auschwitz. Most of the content of their letters was about agriculture- what’s happening on the family’s land and how the animals are doing. Only then did I realize that I am their only great grand daughter who found a similar passion and relationship to land. All of a sudden I could connect to them through this untouched memory. Is it destiny or pure coincidence that I developed a connection to the Southern part of the Negev desert, in a small kibbutz in Israel called Neot Smadar? I will never know, but the fact that I am now the Israeli co-director of Combatants for Peace is for sure connected with my journey and understanding of land.
I want to tell a story not about the Holocaust but about something that happened around the same time in 1948 and remains mostly unknown. In the aftermath of World War Two, Central and Eastern Europe fell under the control of the Soviet Union and they forced the entire region - including Hungary - to develop satellite communist-totalitarian regimes. In 1947-48, parallel to the birth of Israel, the War of Independence and the Nakba, all private land was taken away by the state. Those who survived the Holocaust and other Hungarians who survived the war, all of a sudden found themselves kicked out of their homes, without land, and were mourning another loss after having lost so many loved ones already. It took the fall of the Berlin wall and 45 years later until the newly elected democratic governments decided to face this injustice, and most of the Eastern European countries found a way to offer some kind of symbolic recognition. I remember the confusion and joy my grandparents felt when they got this symbolic amount of money. It was of course not enough, it wasn’t compensation for the memories gone, nor the people who lost their lands and houses or those who died so tragically, but it was something. It felt like the start of a healing process.
Rana: When it comes to our Palestinian-Israeli context, the pain and tragedy of the Nakba remains unacknowledged, ignored and violently denied. There is a disconnect from the historical facts of 1948. As a descendant of a refugee family that was expelled from their home in Haifa in 1948, I constantly feel that our story; a story of loss and displacement, is fleeting and that it is my responsibility as the third generation to keep protecting the stories of our ancestors in our personal and collective memory.
My grandparents have lived their lives longing for home. They were made refugees in their own homeland. Sometimes I wonder how they felt during these moments. Were they scared or shocked? Did they feel lost when their identity was ripped away from them? How did they decide what to take with them? How did my grandma feel leaving her needlework behind? Her plants? Her memories? No one ever offered compensation for their losses or even acknowledged their ownership.
Our Joint Nakba Remembrance Ceremony is one answer to this problem - we need to acknowledge the pain, the grief and the loss the Palestinians are suffering. We need to acknowledge injustice to achieve true liberation for all. For us, the trauma is ongoing: our grandparent’s generation was there and lost loved ones, their land, their homes. And even if time has passed, the trauma, anger and frustration are still passed down to the next generations.
