M.Charlie

Today, June 1st, is the anniversary of the Farhud, a two-day massacre of Baghdad’s Jewery that led to the eventual exodus of Jews from Iraq to Israel. In 1941, the Nazis incited The Farhud, a massacre against the Jews of Baghdad. Hundreds of Iraqi Jews were murdered in this extension of the Holocaust The Farhud and Kristallnacht are so similar - violent massacres against Jews incited by Nazis that sparked the expulsion and mass murder of Jews from their countries. They really should be taught together. My own grandmother, Hela, lived through the Farhud. She finds it difficult to speak about that time, but she has shared her story with me.Though, she always prefers to speak about Iraq before the Farhud, the place she loved so dearly. On the first day of the Farhud, my grandmother was at a cafe I knew well, she often told me about the lovely little cafe she loved to go to. On June 1st, 1941 she was there like always. Suddenly she hears screaming. She turns her head and sees an irate man screaming “Kill the Jews” in front of a woman with eight children, one merely a baby. To my grandmother’s horror, he begins shooting. One-by-one he shoots the little children as their mother screams. He saves her for last. The cafe owner grabs my grandmother and hides her in the backroom until my great-grandfather came to fetch her. They went to a neighbor’s house, a kind Muslim family who were equally horrified by the frenzy of hate. All night there was screaming and crying. Glass shattering. My grandmother could not sleep. The next day she watched in horror as a disabled Jewish teen was brutally raped. She watched as the man finished and then broke a glass bottle so he could rape her with that too. My grandmother did not speak for the rest of that day, she could only weep inconsolably. My grandmother adored Iraq and the streets she grew up in, the neighbors they were friends with. But she was not safe in Iraq after the Farhud, nor was any other Jew. This is my history and the history of most of the Jews living in Israel today. A majority of us are the descendants of Jews who were violently expelled from the Middle East and North Africa. I will not “go back” to Poland, nor will I advocate for the destruction of Israel, the one place my grandmother felt safe after she had to witness such horrors.