Mark Webber - December 13, 2004
Feelings about Parent's Deaths
How did you feel about all this? I mean, you must have...
Well, I felt uh, bitterness uh, and astonishment and disappointment in the leadership of this uh, kibbutz movement. I felt that uh, first of all, I was blaming them for taking too many risks and chances with survivors. I felt that a survivor should have been treated with a lot more care and security than to just take chances and trying to open up--I know that they were on orders, and they had uh, a task to bring the survivors over to the shores of the Mediterranean, but not to risk lives. Killings were going on, although we didn't know so much--I, I was not uh, reading so many papers at my age, and all this. And even the adults, they were busy with all the meetings that they constantly had about uh, explaining things, what it's going to be like for us, how cheerful is life--the life is, how welcome we're going to be in uh, Palestine and all that. So uh, but couldn't get that out--to this day, I still am unforgiving of what--how, how, how insensitive the movement was towards the lives of the survivors.
And did you just take for granted that the Poles were, were that way and it didn't, it didn't...
Well, I wasn't surprised. We knew that in Poland is a country of anti-Semitism--of, of anti-Semites. Probably more than in any other European country.
So your anger was directed at the kibbutz, kibbutz organizers?
Not just any, any Jew. It didn't make a difference if they're leaving--don't forget, all the time when we lived in Poland before the war, the uh, the um, anti-Semites were telling the Jews, "Get out of here! Go to Palestine!"
But I mean you, you, you said that you were bitter and angry at, at the kibbutz organizers, not at, not at the Poles.
Well, of course I was angry at the Poles, but Poles is a given, you know. They--if they see a Jew they would go and kill 'em. I'm not saying all the Polish people are that way, but a good number of them were. There, there were many of them that were very protective. Especially--I've heard that over a thousand Jew survivors who were killed in Poland after the war, mostly in the towns where they came, came only out of secure--of, of curiosity to see if there's anything left from their homes, from uh, their synagogue, or maybe somebody is alive, or something like this. So over a thousand people were killed, so authorities--Jewish authorities, Palestinian authorities, should have taken more--and that's why I, I blame mostly them for it.
© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn