Lilya Zhukovsky has a clear memory of the last time she saw her daughter Marina
Berkovsky alive.
“She said she wanted to leave her keys and phone at home
because there was nowhere for her to keep them at the nightclub where she was
going,” recalls Zhukovsky, a veteran immigrant from Tashkent,
Uzbekistan.
“She told me to go to sleep and then just wake up to open the
door for her. She said I did not have to talk to her but could go straight back
to sleep.”
But, says Zhukovsky as tears form, she never had the chance to
open the door for her daughter, who just a few hours later was blown apart in
one of the worst terrorist attacks of the second intifida – the Tel Aviv
Dolphinarium bombing of June 1, 2001.
“It is hard for me to talk about
this and I am sure it is hard for you to listen,” the 61-year-old caregiver
says. “I have spoken to groups from America and other places and told them my
story about this tragedy that I have suffered. I think it is very
important.
“People think that we, Israelis, do not want to live together
[with Arabs] in peace, but it is not true, we are just scared and no one thinks
about this,” she continues.
It still feels like “it happened yesterday,”
Zhukovsky says.
“It was only the second time in her life that she ever
went out at night to a discotheque,” she says, adding that her daughter, who had
turned 17 just a few weeks before, had been a model student at the nearby Shevet
Mofet High School.
Marina was not the only teenager who died that night,
when a young Palestinian blew himself up in the midst of a large group of young
people waiting to enter the Pasha nightclub on Tel Aviv’s seafront. Out of the
21 people killed, 16 were teenagers and most of them, like Marina, were
Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union. One hundred thirtytwo
people were wounded.
“Sometimes at night when I cannot sleep, I replay
the events of that evening, before I knew she was dead, over and over in my head
like a film,” says Zhukovsky, who has a son and now a five-year-old
granddaughter.
“I did not understand why the phone kept on ringing and
her friends were looking for her,” she says, gesturing around her Tel Aviv
apartment that is in many ways a shrine to the daughter she lost. “Then someone
called and told me that there had been a bomb.”
Zhukovsky remembers
switching on the TV to see the destruction and almost immediately starting to
call local hospitals to see if Marina was in one of them.
“I gave her
description over and over again, but no one had seen her,” she says
wearily.
“In the end I managed to reach the friend whom she’d gone out
with, but she also had not seen her; she told me that the force of the bomb
blast had been so strong that they were separated and she could not find
Marina.”
After hours of phone calls, Marina’s friend arrived with her
mother and the group set off to search the hospitals.
“We brought a photo
but everyone kept telling me that she was not there or they had not seen her,
eventually they told me to go to Abu Kabir,” says Zhukovsky.
The
Institute of Forensic Medicine, which during the bloody years of the intifada
became synonymous with such bombings, is always the last place that a parent
wants to turn, but, says Zhukvosky, she had no choice.
“I still did not
believe that she was dead,” she says. “I thought she had probably gone home and
was waiting for me there. I asked my friends to take me home, I wanted to go and
check.”
But when Zhukovsky opened the front door, the house was empty. It
took another few hours before Marina’s body was finally identified and her
mother given the sad news.
At Abu Kabir, Zhukvosky had been introduced to
volunteers from SELAH – Israel Crisis Management Center, which provides on-going
support and assistance to immigrant victims of terrorism and other
tragedies.
“These people gave us everything from their heart and soul,”
says Zhukovsky, pointing at Natasha, a social worker from SELAH who has become a
guiding light in her life over the past 10 years and who has joined us for this
interview.
“I’ve been with SELAH for 10 years, and as a group we always
hold ceremonies together and different activities at holiday time,” she says,
adding that on Wednesday, June 1, parents who lost their children and others who
lost loved ones in the attack will gather at the site to pay their
respects.
“We do this every year,” says Zhukovsky, fingering a
heart-shaped necklace that depicts an imprinted photograph of her daughter. “We
will meet there at 11 p.m. [the time the bomb exploded] and many young people
will come to pay tribute.”
Asked how she managed to move forward with her
life, Zhukovsky says that she had no choice, “it was either sit at home and just
look at the photos or get up and go back to work.
“At the time my
daughter was killed I worked with an elderly woman who was 98,” recalls
Zhukovsky. “She was a wonderful woman but she had lost the will to live. She
would just sit there and tell me: ‘98 is too old, there is no need for me to
still be alive.’ “I did not understand how this woman did not want to live but
my daughter, who was only 17 and had so much to give, to her family, her
friends, her country – she did not even have the chance to have
children...”
The world is a cruel place, Zhukovsky says. “Of course we
want peace and I do not want to see any more people killed or for them to lose
their children like I did, but I do not think the Palestinians are able to talk
to us now that they are together with Hamas, which says we do not have a right
to be here.”
She finishes: “I am not a political person and I know there
is a lot of pressure, but it is important for us to remain strong. This is our
country and there is no other place for us to go.”