Celeste GENERALSTRIKE Holms

A Holocaust survivor was given a house stolen from a Palestinian family. When she saw their dishes still on the table, she refused to live there. Her entire family had been exterminated in the Holocaust. She had survived, but arrived in Israel with almost nothing. For a long time, she lived in a tent, in desperate conditions. Then the Jewish Agency offered her a beautiful house by the sea in Ajami, Jaffa. When she entered, she saw something she could never forget. The plates and dishes of the Palestinian family who had lived there were still on the table. The family had been driven from their home. Their belongings remained, as though their ordinary lives had been interrupted without warning. She understood immediately what had happened. She returned to the Jewish Agency and demanded to be taken back to her tent. She would rather live in poverty than take another family's home. Her granddaughter, Israeli filmmaker Hadar Morag, recounted the story in an October 2023 interview with the Italian newspaper il manifesto. It took place against the backdrop of the Nakba of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes. In Jaffa, Palestinian properties were subsequently allocated to Jewish immigrants. Morag's grandmother had lost her own family to one of history's greatest crimes. But according to her granddaughter, she refused to let that suffering become a justification for benefiting from someone else's dispossession. Morag concluded her account with a question: “How could we have become what we opposed?” Source: Hadar Morag, il manifesto, 29 October 2023.