Excerpt

A personal account from Sara Roy’s Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict:

“One story that my aunt Frania has always insisted on telling me took place when she and my mother were in the Auschowitz concentration camp: ‘Where I was the stronger in the ghetto and took care of Tobka [my aunt’s name for my mother], your mother helped me survive in Auschowtiz. Without her I would have died. She saved me because she hoarded and rationed our food, our few pieces of bread, spreading it out over time so that I had something to eat each day. Had it been up to me, I would have eaten it all at once and starved. Your mother also gave me her bread, sometimes part of it, sometimes all of it, which I ate as I cried. Do you know what this meant, to give up your bread to another under such horrible circumstances? Bread was life. People beat each other for it and some were killed for it. Mothers would steal from children and children from mothers, sisters from sisters and so on. In the midst of all this horror and shame your mother gave me her bread, an act of selflessness that I shall never forget. Of course I love her deeply but there is no person in my life for whom I have more respect and admiration.” (Roy, xxii)

By her own account, these Holocaust stories her parents shared with her is why the author is able to sympathize with the plight of the Palestinian people.