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Friday April 20, 2007

Yad Vashem strikes chord for Darfur refugees

by dina kraft
jta

jerusalem | A group of Darfur refugees on a recent visit to Yad Vashem lingered next to a model of the crematorium at Auschwitz, taking in the ghastly sight of bodies carried on cots and pushed into ovens.

“It’s such a sad history, tears fell from my eyes,” said G., 25, whose parents and two siblings were killed by Arab militiamen when they raided his home village. “It made me remember things that happened in my own past.”

His visit to Israel’s Holocaust memorial was the first time he ever set foot in a museum, and he left hoping that one day the victims of the Darfur genocide might build a similar memorial.

“I don’t know when — maybe in another generation far from our own,” he said.

G., who asked that his name not be used, said he escaped on foot from his village the day of the attack. He does not remember how or even where he first ran before he began the long journey through Sudan and Egypt to Israel, where he is seeking asylum.

G. spent 15 months in an Israeli jail because of his status as an enemy national. He eventually was released to Kibbutz Yotvata in southern Israel, where he works in the date fields.

Yad Vashem has been among the more outspoken institutions in Israel advocating for a swift and humane response to some 300 Sudanese who have crossed into Israel in recent years through the Egyptian desert.

Since Sudan technically is at war with Israel, most were put in prison. About half, like G., have been released to kibbutzes and moshavs while they await word on which country might give them political asylum. Israel has yet to officially make such an offer.

During the Yad Vashem tour, some images seemed to hit home especially hard, like a blurry photograph of an SS soldier aiming his rifle at a mother who had wrapped her body protectively around her young child.

Yad Vashem “reminded me of my own people, seeing the killings, the shootings. I want to say that I am sorry that this happened to the Jews,” said M., 24, from Darfur.

The parallels told in the museum felt cruel, including the story of the St. Louis, a ship full of Jewish refugees from Europe that sailed to Cuba in 1939 only to be refused entry. After sailing to the United States and Canada, where it also was refused entry, the ship returned to Germany. Most of its passengers were killed in the Holocaust.

The Sudanese refugees also spoke of no one wanting them and their fears of deportation. In Egypt, many said they were abused and harassed by the authorities, who threatened to send them back to Sudan.

G. said it will take him a long time to digest what he saw at Yad Vashem.

“People were supposed to learn from history,” he said. “But still it happens now. In 1994 in Rwanda and now in Darfur. I thought the world was supposed to learn.”

The chairman of Yad Vashem, Avner Shalev, met with the 11 refugees, and told them he hoped the museum inspired them to one day record and document their own stories, even though the bloodshed continues in Darfur.

“As Jews who have the memory of the Shoah embedded within us, we cannot stand by as refugees from genocide in Darfur are knocking on our doors,” Shalev said. “The memory of the past, and the Jewish values that underpin our existence, command us to humanitarian solidarity with the persecuted.”

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