In July 2020, I was surfing the Internet looking for people with whom I could share my stories. I am a descendant of Holocaust survivors, a mother of five and grandmother of one. I left Europe in 2017 with a part of my family to come to Israel. My first step in Israel made me feel at home. But why did we leave Europe? So many reasons. A husband who was living a different agenda, a son, 14 years at that time, who was a victim of discrimination and afraid to go to school. A mentality in the Netherlands, where we came from, which did not fit ours.
I did have friends, but I really never fit in properly. I did not belong in the Jewish community in Amsterdam. The moment I came to Israel, I understood why. The Jewish community in Amsterdam is still very much affected by the Holocaust. There is denial, there is sorrow, there is an atmosphere of: if you do not talk, you do not feel. Members of the Jewish community hardly have family, or at least, big families. When I was searching the Internet, however, I found somebody who felt exactly the same way. Our families came from the same place. We had both danced ballet and her father was one of the greatest Jewish writers I know. We decided to speak up.
My friend Joosje Asser conducted investigating in all kinds of archives, and I heard there were a lot of very shady things going on. It did not feel right. Since Joosje is a writer who worked with a team on a series about the Jewish Council of Amsterdam, I learned a lot. I learned about the collaboration of the Dutch with the Nazis, I learned about the royal family’s connection to the Nazis. I learned about the very bad attitude of the Dutch government after the Holocaust – and also that of the Dutch Jewish community, some of whose members seemed to care only about themselves and money in their pockets. I was horrified! I could not believe I had lived there for my whole life, without knowing what really went on.
My family used to be a big family. My grandmother was happily married and she was the only daughter of a family of eight. She had five brothers. She gave birth to my mom in 1936 and my uncle in 1942. The times were changing for all of them. When my mom was born, there were already ugly things going on. People had to move from other parts of the country to the ghetto. Food became a luxury. Jews were not allowed into places. My mom could not go swimming; she could only stay outside the pool and watch. And then it got worse. They had to go into hiding. My grandmother’s older brother found a place for her two children and they never saw each other again. My mom was really lucky, my uncle not so much. My grandparents were murdered three days after they went on the train to Auschwitz.
Joosje’s family had her own terrible story and we spoke about it frequently. So again I searched the Internet, looking for somebody to get our stories published, to bring the stories that need to be told out into the open. Suddenly there he was. I met a very special person in one of the platforms I was searching. His name is Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. He became my friend.
Shoaib, as I call him, comes from Bangladesh and his story is incredible, almost unbelievable. Shoaib told me that he is a Muslim and a Zionist. He stands for Israel and the Jews. He literally fights our battle. In 2003, as he was getting ready to board a flight to Israel (He was invited to attend a Tel Aviv seminar of the International Forum for the Literature and Culture of Peace), he was arrested at the airport in Dhaka because the Bengali government thought he was a member of the Mossad and charged him with sedition. He spent seven years in jail, where he was tortured, threatened really badly, and not allowed to go to the funeral of his mom.
His family went through awful times. But his belief was and remains strong.
When he came out of jail in 2018, he picked up where he left off and ever since, his English-language Weekly Blitz newspaper is growing and showing that antisemitism or Jew-hatred is not acceptable at all. He is the editor and owner of the tabloid, which has been published every Wednesday since 2003.
He will help us show how bad the situation is in the Netherlands, where my family once owned a beautiful home in Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter. Shoaib and I talk a lot. We talk about his life and the things he does for our country that he loves so much. When South African immigrant Eli Kay was murdered near the Western Wall in Jerusalem last year, his newspaper made sure that they ran the article faster than anyone else. He writes about Israel before other papers around the world.
My Zionist friend from Bangladesh, thank you so much for being our friend! ■
The writer lives in Rishon Lezion with her son, who serves in the IDF.