BIG READ: Massacre and memory

When we contemplate the abyss of the deliberate obliteration of individuals and entire peoples, sacrificed to political expediency, we know in the marrow of our bones that massacre is employed not merely to destroy flesh, but to annihilate memory of the existence of those erased.

On the second anniversary of the horrific bloodletting led by Hamas that provoked the reflexive near-extinction of the Gaza Strip, in what SA claimed last year and which the UN’s commission of inquiry has now accepted as a Gazan genocide, the question is beginning to arise of what memory of Gaza will remain — and in what form?

This is especially pressing in light of the cold-calculated attempted total erasure of Gaza, in the words of Rage Against the Machine, a matter of,  “kill them off, take their land and go there for vacation” — a colonial notion made explicit by Donald Trump’s land speculator vision announced in February of a de-Palestinianised, redeveloped future waterfront Gaza Strip as “the Riviera of the east”.

A subsequent cartoon has a smiling white couple lounging on deckchairs, blissfully gazing out at a sailboat off the Gazan coast, with their little boy, building a sand castle, unearthing a trove of human skulls beneath the beach with his plastic spade. 

With archaeology going back about 5,000 years because it is sited on the main trade route from Egypt to Mesopotamia, Gaza is an ancient name. It is derived from Azza, its meaning lost in the mists of time, but from which is, sadly given the Israeli bombings of hospitals, derived the word gauze, for the dressing of wounds. And it was here that by biblical legend, a blinded Samson brought the Philistine temple down around his ears, just as Hamas has done to their own Palestine house now.

Notoriously, there is and has since 1948 been no equity between the houses of Palestine and Israel as their “ancient grudge” continually erupted in “new mutiny”, to steal from Shakespeare.

The current level of devastation and bitterness of the entrenched battle in Gaza, it is often said, has not been seen since Stalingrad in World War 2, but just to the northeast, Syria has been so razed by 13 years of uncivil war that outside Kurdish Rojava, barely any trace of civil society remains in its ruins.

Yet in Gaza’s case — unprecedented and unrelenting — the genocide has been televised, beamed live into the smartphones and laptops of millions worldwide, hour by hour, blow by bone-crushing blow. Those dire images, ephemeral though they may be, constitute a live-streaming memorial. 

To stand aside a child grave, as I have, as entire families wrapped in their white winding sheets scribbled with their names are gently consigned to the Levantine soil by neighbours’ hands in 37ºC heat as the hollow tunnelling sound of the next wave of bombers approaches from Israel, is to know the extreme vulnerability of the civilian in war. 

And I was an adult man, a journalist who had chosen to be there. What do all those little doe-eyed children make of their daily dose of horror? The sight of apartment blocks sheared in half, the nakedness of what was someone’s bedroom hanging implausibly in midair is stunning to the heart and mind — let alone the cradling by crying men of tiny dust-choked bodies, the dolorous roll call of the dead seemingly endless. 

When we were young, we used to dance under strobe lights to Laurie Anderson’s chart-topping O Superman, in which she breezily sings down the phone: “Well, you don’t know me, but I know you / And I’ve got a message to give to you / Here come the planes / So you’d better get ready, ready to go / You can come as you are, but pay as you go …” 

It was only after having experienced aerial bombing first hand that, many years later, on playing the song at home one day that her lyrics became chillingly clear: she was invoking some sort of evil djin calling forth the bombers, mocking their intended victims, as the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is currently phoning residents of Gazan high-rises to gloat that they are about to topple the buildings.

I suddenly started shaking and crying uncontrollably.

It’s that awful naked vulnerability, that sense that there is only now, that there’ll be no tomorrow, that survivors try their damnedest to shake off, like a wet shroud that chills the hollow between one’s shoulder blades.

It is no surprise that the Israeli side of this zero-sum slaughter has already started commemorating and institutionalising their pain of October 7 2023. They have, after all, the money and relative peace on their side of the line to have the luxury of reflection.

One of the most remarkable Israeli projects is Survived to Tell, a virtual reality presentation of locales of the October 7 terrorist attacks as presented digitally by five people who were swept up in the terror of that day. Testimonies are delivered by Nova Festival massacre survivors Millet Ben Haim, an Israeli, and Mazal Taziso, an Ethiopian, released teenage kibbutznik hostage Ofir Engel, Muslim Bedouin policeman Remo Salman El-Hazayet, who saved more than 200 Nova festivalgoers, and reservist Nimrod Palmach, who engaged in battle with Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigades and its allies. 

I have previously had the opportunity to sit with Ben Haim and Taziso and gently walk them through the worst day of their lives again — itself a harrowing experience — and I have visited the Nova Massacre site, now a makeshift memorial, a forest of faces of the murdered, the awful sounds of vengeful Israeli artillery striking Gaza barely a few kilometres away. 

But the immersive experience of revisiting the scene in virtual reality (VR), with a headset and goggles on, and allowing the five to virtually walk me through the scenes — some of the devastated aftermath, but interspersed with their terrified cellphone messages, and their own footage shot on the day — gives some immediacy and grasp to the intangible dread of two years ago. 

Though these are real experiences, they already to my mind began to take on elements of myth. For instance, no curator of any formalised remembrance, whether virtual or physical, wants to recall only the helplessness of the civilians in the crosshairs.  

So Palmach’s cellphone footage of the desperate battle he and a handful of colleagues wage against the terrorists, while sending a message home that he believes may be his last, naturally stands out. It reminds me of the sheer bravery recounted in Michael Elkins’ book Forged in Fury about the teenage Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland who built an armed resistance organisation known as Din, Hebrew for judgment, to take the fight to the Nazis.

But what of the Gazan civilians ensnared in Israel’s shockingly disproportionate response to what it now terms “Black Sabbath”?

Who will their heroes be? Probably their first-responders digging through rubble and sniped at by the IDF. For are there any who plausibly still honour the callousness of those militants who joyously chanted “Allahu Akbar” while displaying the underwear-clad corpse of 22-year-old tattoo artist Shani Louk? Back then, many Gazans cast them, like Din, in the heroic role of “the resistance” — but now, amid utter ruination, is that even conceivable to the majority?

Last March, a veteran Palestinian journalist, who did not wish to be named, told me in Ramallah: “If there was an election in Gaza tomorrow, Hamas would lose — but if there was an election tomorrow in the West Bank, Hamas would win.” 

The differential in his point is direct experience: despite the intensity of feelings aroused by the slaughter, for most of those in the West Bank, the conflict is far enough away (though a mere 83km as the vulture flies) to be readily mythologised; for most of those in Gaza, it is an unmitigated disaster. 

But politics aside, other than Cardinal Matteo Zuppi’s remarkable seven-hour August 14 prayer vigil for the souls of the 13 Israeli and 12,211 Palestinian children murdered since October 7, who will read the names of the Gazan dead? And with 252 journalists among 66,000 people at last count killed by the IDF in Gaza, who remains to bear witness? 

The carpet-bombing of the Gaza Strip into a moonscape of rubble begs another question: what will in future years be a site of remembrance for Palestinians? While the Nazis attempted to eliminate evidence of the Holocaust at the death camps of Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, Auschwitz remains to this day as an immense physical memorial to what the marked-for-extermination Roma and Sinti called “the Devouring”. 

Many atrocity sites worldwide are likewise suitably marked by physical memorials and museums. For instance, at one embarkation point for African slaves headed for the American colonies, the Senegalese island of Gorée, is a memorial, the “Point of No Return”.

The Nazis cynically nicknamed the route to the gas-chambers in their extermination camps the “Pathway to Heaven”, and the converging railway lines inexorably drawing the viewer’s eyes to the terrible terminus of Auschwitz is probably the most infamous yet indelible image of a point of no return, the ultimate mournful milepost, standing on the brink of utter annihilation, am dem abgrund, at the abyss.

But many other points of departure are unmarked, unremarkable, whose saturated evil is only visible to initiates of the eerie atmospherics of irrevocable oblivion. Among these are the remote dirt airfields of Namibia from whence about 420 detainees (by my conservative calculation) were strangled, drugged, bludgeoned, and thrown from light aircraft by Special Forces officers into the Atlantic Ocean from 1979 into the late 1980s. They are unmarked by the slightest trace of memorial.  

I have discussed this memory vacuum with Lebanese writer Rasha Salti, whose mournful meditations on the war-haunted nature of her home city, bullet-riddled and with many buildings still standing vacant after decades, are captured alongside spooky photographs by Ziad Antar in Beirut Bereft: Architecture of the Forsaken and Map of the Derelict.

As a result, she and I decided on a multimedia project, Not Night, but an Absence of Stars, to rectify that. My contribution includes a series of photographs of the abandoned Toscanini diamond mine in Namibia, one of the primary departure points for the Recces’ death flights.

One of the key roles of artists, as Iman Hammouri, director of the Popular Art Centre in Ramallah and a cultural rights activist, stresses, is as bearers of memory in the face of massacre. She writes that the centre “was established with the clear and determined vision to preserve Palestinian identity … it was a defiant cultural response to systematic efforts by the Israeli occupation to erase Palestinian heritage”.

But there’s more to it than that, as an international gathering of archivists I sat in on recently underlined. They agreed that curating massacre and memory is not just of use to the nostalgic or the historian; rather, it is a means of documenting war crimes as they occur, igniting and informing public debate — and intervention. 

One of the speakers, Albanian filmmaker Armando Lulaj, has documented the unique and fragile private archive of Esat Shala, of the Kosovo village of Krajkovë, who was 12 years old when his sister was murdered during the Kosovan genocide in 1999.  

Since then, Lulaj tells me, Shala “has collected hundreds of photos and more than 5,000 hours of footage on VHS tapes and other media that he keeps in his room. The videos show atrocities of all kinds committed [against] children, the elderly, men and women….

“In his nightmares he sees an old white horse pulling in the middle of a highway a cart full of lit monitors broadcasting disturbing images from his archive…. Just recently, after more than 20 years, he unearthed footage of his sister’s execution alongside her boyfriend.”

In a country where there is no national archive or official commemoration of the genocide, Shala’s collection is a rare record of critical importance to memorialisation — but maybe one day also to a reckoning. Perhaps electrifying ethical conversations worldwide on what it means to be civilised will prove to be the lasting memorial to nightmarish Gaza.

• Schmidt is an award-winning investigative journalist and nonfiction author, who has worked in 49 countries on six continents.