When Hamas militants launched a surprise dawn attack on Israel just over a week ago, killing 1200 Jewish citizens, Holocaust survivor Sarah Saaroni was transported straight back to the horrors of World War II.
‘‘I felt it all so deep inside of me. Israel is a part of me,’’ the 97-yearold says.
Saaroni, who became one of Israel’s first citizens when it declared independence in 1948, is calling for a resolution to the conflict to avoid the loss of more innocent lives.
‘‘Who is really the victim in all of this?’’ the great-grandmother says. ‘‘It is the innocent people on both sides. The children, the families. It is innocent people who always lose the most.’’
Saaroni, who now lives in Melbourne but still has family in Israel, has been watching gutwrenching scenes of the war from afar, dreading the rising death toll.
As Israel prepares to invade the Gaza Strip, home to 2.3 million people, thousands of whom are fleeing to the south of the city, Saaroni is calling for an end to the bloodshed and for humanity and peace to prevail.
‘‘You cannot live in a world with hatred,’’ she says. ‘‘You will destroy yourself and those around you. In a war, nobody wins. Everyone has the right to live where they want to live, and how they would like to live, in peace.’’
If she could speak to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the leaders of Hamas, Saaroni says she would tell them: ‘‘Live and let live. We all belong to one, big human race. We must find a way to live alongside each other.’’
The UN and aid groups have warned that the mass migration within Gaza, Israel’s siege and a potential broader conflict in the Middle East will cause untold human suffering. For Saaroni, it feels like history repeating itself.
‘‘These are all people,’’ Saaroni says. ‘‘The world is so beautiful; if only we could all live in peace. You don’t have to love everyone – you can like your neighbour, or even dislike him, but don’t hate another human being.’’
For more than 40 years after World War II ended, Saaroni could not bring herself to discuss the horrors she experienced.
She grew up in Poland, and as a teenager, her family was forced to move into a Jewish ghetto riddled with disease, where there was no running water and not enough food or medicine. People were captured and taken away to concentration camps.
When Saaroni was 16, her parents sent her to Germany with false papers that said she was a Polish Christian. It was the last time she saw them.
In Germany, the Nazis arrested Saaroni after it was discovered she was Jewish. She was interrogated, tortured and condemned to the Majdanek concentration camp. She narrowly escaped this fate by fleeing a train full of prisoners during a transfer in Leipzig.
After the war, Poland no longer felt like home. Saaroni joined a group of more than 1000 young Jewish refugees, pretending to be Greek, who crossed war-torn Europe’s borders and headed for Palestine.
On the way, they were captured by the British at an Italian port and sat on the boat for six weeks. They staged a hunger strike, which made headlines across the world. In May 1946, they arrived in Palestine, legally. Saaroni was reunited with her beloved brother Gidal.
In Palestine, Saaroni joined the underground defence movement Haganah and took part in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948.
Saaroni migrated to Melbourne in the 1980s. She taught herself to sculpt, and her pieces, inspired by the war, are exhibited in synagogues and museums around the world.
It was only after writing her memoir, Life Goes on Regardless, about her experiences growing up in the Polish ghetto and the war, that she finally felt free. ‘‘I looked out the window and suddenly I saw colour,’’ she says. ‘‘Before, everything was grey. I could see the fruit on the trees, the butterflies, the birds singing.’’
In her home in Kew, which is full of carved sculptures, Saaroni finds a photo, kept in a treasured folder of pictures of her family, artwork and newspaper clippings. The image shows a bronze statue of a tree that she sculpted, which is displayed at a holocaust museum. She calls it the Tree of Life. The tree sits on top of a mass grave. The tips of the branches are carved like human hands rising from the roots below and arms outstretched towards the sky.
‘‘They are reaching for new life,’’ she says.