‘I’m the Annoying Mom’: Gal Gadot Talks Parenting With Conan O’Brien, Teaches Him Hebrew

Shiryn Ghermezian

Conan O’Brien and Gal Gadot on “CONAN.” Photo: Screenshot.

Israeli actress Gal Gadot said her two daughters think of her as a typical mom, even though she plays superhero and princess of the Amazonians, Diana, in the “Wonder Woman” films.

“In reality, I’m the annoying mom who doesn’t let them have enough screen time and says no all the time. I’m that type of person,” she told Conan O’Brien while on his talk show Tuesday. “To them, it’s not like I’m Wonder Woman. Only when there’s friends around I’m still cool, but we’ll see how long that’s gonna last.”

Gadot is pregnant with her third daughter and when the “CONAN” host asked how he could give her well wishes on her third pregnancy in Hebrew, she taught him how to say b‘hatzlacha.

O’Brien also commended Gadot on her new National Geographic series “IMPACT with Gal Gadot,” which highlights extraordinary women making changes in their communities. O’Brien praised the “role models” featured in the show and said he hopes his 17-year-old daughter, Neve, will look up to Gadot and other women who have made differences in the world.

He said about Neve, “I see how influenced she is by seeing and meeting other really impressive women. And whenever I get a chance I try to introduce her to anybody I can — Michelle Obama, you — anyone who my daughter can see, so that she knows she can accomplish pretty much anything in this life. And ‘IMPACT’ is really a great idea. You’re highlighting women who are superheroes because they live in the real world and are making themselves excellent examples for young women out there.”

Gadot replied, “Whenever I speak to these women I’m like ‘You’re the true heroes.’ I read lines and I’m being hanged on the wire and all that, but you are true, true life heroes and I’m very grateful that they let us share their stories….Good stories have the power to [make] change.”

Gadot also spoke about working with her husband Yaron Varsano, with whom she owns the Pilot Wave production company, and her upcoming role as late actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr.

What you won’t read in western media about the Jerusalem riots

Melanie Phillips

Ignore the lies. Here are some important facts

Truth and Falsehood; Alfred Stevens, 1857-66

As I write here in Jerusalem, sirens have sounded and explosions have been heard. It appears that rockets were fired by Hamas at the city. I am posting this now before finding out what is happening.

Further to my piece here yesterday about the Jerusalem riots, here’s some more information you won’t read in the venomously slanted media coverage which continues to obscure the Palestinian Arabs’ incitement and attacks that sparked these disturbances and which continues falsely to blame Israel instead for its behaviour. In this twisted reporting, much of the British and American media continue to parrot the Palestinians’ narrative which, as always, seeks to obscure their own murderous and bigoted aggression by pretending that their Israeli victims are the aggressors while the Arabs are merely defending themselves.

While the Israeli police have struggled to contain the continued Arab rioting, as you can read in these accounts here and here, this is what the senior Hamas Official Fathi Hammad tweeted: 

People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives.  With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it here and just cut off (their heads). It costs just five shekels. With those five shekels, you will humiliate the Jewish state. You shall find the strongest in enmity towards the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists. The Jews have spread corruption and have acted with arrogance, and their moment of reckoning has come. The moment of their destruction at your hands has arrived.  

Anyone spot the little word here that the British and American media somehow always miss? Yup, he’s inciting against the Jews. Not Israelis — Jews. Because the Palestinian Arabs’ war against Israel is a war against the Jews, as it has been for the past hundred years.  This is something that liberal media and politicians simply refuse to acknowledge or report. When they refer to Palestinian “resistance”, they are describing Palestinian Jew-hatred; and when they talk about Israel’s “disproportionate” responses, they are describing Israel’s determination to defend its people against the intended mass murder of Jews. 

Next, this analysis by David Wurmser accurately observes that these disturbances are not a mutually reinforcing cycle of violence but represent a 

concerted offensive serving the strategic aims of a number of Israel’s enemies.

These include the United Arab List [an Israeli Arab political party and the political wing of the Southern Branch of the Islamic movement — go figure], the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Turkey and Iran — “attended by a considerable footprint from US territory”. 

Describing the sequence of events, which started in early April with unprovoked Arab attacks on Israeli Jews followed by small demonstrations by extremist Jews along with 

one or two localised acts of anonymous Jewish graffiti-spraying with hateful slogans, and the destruction of a few trees,

 Wurmser produces this revealing nugget: 

These incidents were isolated and limited.  Israeli authorities investigated and will prosecute them. Moreover, subsequent investigations, even by leftist human rights organizations like BeTzelem, have been forced to admit they had been misled and thus must retract some of their accusations of Jewish violence, particularly arson, which turned out to be acts of Palestinian arson. [my emphasis] The actual Jewish demonstrations and disturbances were quickly suppressed by Israeli police and largely disappeared.

Note: the British and American media generally swallow eagerly whatever BeTzelem and other anti-Israel NGOs tell them. 

Meanwhile, Israel is showing that it won’t take the malevolent and dangerous meddling by the Biden administration lying down. The Times of Israel reports:

Israel’s National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat pushed back when his US counterpart told him on Sunday that Washington was concerned over violent clashes between security forces and Palestinians in Jerusalem.

According to media reports, Ben-Shabbat told US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan during a phone call that international intervention in the events, which have seen daily rioting in the Old City and other locations in the capital, is only rewarding those who are inciting the unrest.

Israel is handling the events “out of a position of sovereignty, responsibly, and with common sense despite the provocations,” Ben Shabbat said, according to a diplomatic source familiar with the conversation who was cited by Hebrew media reports.

Ben Shabbat went on to say international interference was “a prize for the rioters and those sending them who hoped to put pressure on Israel.” He told Sullivan that it would be more helpful if the pressure were directed at those who were inciting the violence. 

No chance of that, alas, from the Biden administration whose behaviour, as I wrote here yesterday, has effectively given a green light to the Palestinians to renew their attempts to murder Jews and use their patsies in the British and American media to further demonise and delegitimise Israel as a means to its eventual destruction.

Finally, for all those who may believe the rubbish they’ve been fed in the past few days about the proposed evictions from Sheikh Jarrah and how the murderous behaviour of the Palestinians Arabs is supposed to be justified “resistance” to this “discrimination” against them, you can read the truth here from law professor Avi Bell, published by the Kohelet Forum. Because of its importance, both in enlightening people about the actual facts and also in opening people’s eyes to the appalling extent of the perfidy by British and American media and public figures in disseminating these incendiary lies about Sheikh Jarrah, I reproduce it here in full.

Understanding the Current Sheikh Jarrah (Jerusalem) Property Dispute; Professor Avi Bell

1) A call for discrimination 

The current dispute in Sheikh Jarrah involves several properties with tenants whose leases have expired, and in a few cases squatters with no tenancy rights at all, against owner-landlords who have successfully won court orders evicting the squatters and overstaying tenants. The litigation has taken several years, and the owners have won at every step. The squatters and overstaying tenants have appealed against the eviction orders to the Supreme Court. The only decision that stands before the Israeli government is whether to honour the courts’ decisions and enforce the eviction orders if affirmed by the Supreme Court, or whether to defy court orders and deny the property owners their legal rights.

Critics claim that the Israeli government should (or even that international law requires the Israeli government to) deny the owners their property rights, but these claims are not based on any credible legal argument. Rather, the critics focus on the fact that the owners in the disputed cases are Jews while the squatters and overstaying tenants are Palestinian Arabs. The critics demand that Israel discriminate against and disregard the property owners’ lawful property rights due to their Jewish ethnicity. It’s obvious that critics of Israel would pay no notice to the dispute if the owners were Palestinian and the squatters and overstaying tenants were Palestinian. Likewise, it’s clear that critics of Israel would demand rather than oppose Israeli enforcement of the courts’ judgments if the owners were Palestinian and the squatters and overstaying tenants Jewish.

Critics of Israel in this case have adopted the bigoted position that property rights should depend on ethnicity and that Jewish ethnicity should be the grounds for denying legal property rights. In doing so they have distorted Page 2 of 5 the facts, perverted international law, and attempted to intimidate Israel’s courts and law enforcement officials into adopting the critics’ bigotry.

2) The legal basis of the parties’ property rights

The legal rights of the parties themselves were resolved decades ago, in favor of the property owners. The owners in these disputes acquired their rights through an uninterrupted chain of transactions from predecessors in title in the 19th century. These legal rights were acquired under Ottoman law, and remained good through all different government regimes since then (British Mandatory, Jordanian occupation and purported annexation, and Israeli). No one seriously disputes the validity of the transactions through which the current owners acquired rights from their predecessors in title.

The tenants in these disputes acquired their leasehold rights through a chain from the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property in the 1950’s. Their rights as leaseholders (not owners) were reaffirmed in several court rulings culminating in 1982, when Israel’s civil courts issued rulings adopting settlement agreements between the leaseholders’ predecessors in title and the owners. The rulings and settlement agreements established that the tenants had “protected leaseholds” under Israeli law (a status superior to ordinary leaseholds under Israeli, Jordanian and British law) but that the owners still had good title ownership. The tenants enjoyed and continue to enjoy the benefits of the protected tenancies until today; this is why their leaseholds continued uninterrupted for more than half a century, until the recent expiration of the leases (in some cases due to serious breaches of the terms of the lease, in others due to the natural expiration of the lease rights). The squatters, of course, possess no legal rights at all.

The only break in the owners’ uninterrupted chain is the sequestration of the properties from 1948-1967 by the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property. Jordan, which had illegally occupied east Jerusalem and the West Bank during its illegal invasion of Israel in 1948, denied Jews the right to exercise any property rights over land in the Kingdom during the entirety of its 19-year occupation (Jordan has continued this discriminatory practice to date). Having expelled all Jews from the lands it occupied, Jordan transferred custody over all Jewish-owned property to the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property. In accordance with the British legislation on enemy property on which the Jordanian law was based, Jordan’s sequestration of enemy property only extinguished owners’ rights completely if the state seized title by eminent domain or if the Custodian transferred title to someone else. Importantly, in the case of the Sheikh Jarrah properties, the Jordanian Custodian did not purport to transfer ownership of the properties to anyone else. Instead, the Custodian leased some of the properties to Palestinian Arabs (the predecessors in title to the current overstaying tenants).

After the Six Day War of 1967 ended Jordan’s occupation of east Jerusalem, Israel adopted legislation that vindicated the private property rights of persons of all ethnicities. The 1970 Law and Administrative Arrangements Law (Consolidated Version) preserved the rights of private parties who Page 3 of 5 received title from the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property, notwithstanding the illegality of Jordan’s occupation. (Persons who received rights from the Jordanian Custodian were all Arabs, since Jordanian law denied property rights to Jews.) Where the Jordanian Custodian had held custody over the sequestered properties through 1967, the 1970 law assigned custody to the Israeli Administrator General and Official Receiver with instruction to release custody to the property owners. And where Jordan had seized the property by eminent domain for public use, the 1970 law assigned ownership of the property to the state of Israel for continuation of the public use.

Ironically, if the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property had assigned title to the predecessors of the current Palestinian Arab holdover tenants over the lands it seized from Jewish owners, Israeli law would have respected the resulting title. The reason the holdover tenants in Sheikh Jarrah lack ownership today is not because the state of Israel has denied the Palestinian Arabs any rights they acquired, but, rather, because the government of Jordan declined to give the Palestinian Arabs title to the land Jordan had seized.

3) Media distortions of the dispute 

Many of the media accounts of the recent court judgments regarding the properties in Sheikh Jarrah have distorted the facts. Contrary to claims in some media accounts, Israel did not grant anyone ownership to any of the affected properties on the basis of ethnicity. Israeli law respects and upholds the property rights of persons of all ethnicities. Israel has even respected the property rights created by prior regimes that explicitly discriminated against Jews in their property laws—the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate of Palestine, and the Jordanian occupation regime.

Contrary to claims in some media accounts, Israel has not created different rules for “enemy property” based on ethnicity. The ethnic dimension to the current-day property disputes is historic discrimination against Jews by a country other than Israel: Jordan denied Jews all ability to exercise property rights during its illegal occupation of east Jerusalem 1948-1967. Israel has declined to continue Jordan’s discriminatory practice, but it has respected the legal results of Jordan’s actions. Ironically, Israel has been so respectful of the private property rights of Palestinian Arabs that it continues to uphold private Palestinian Arab property rights that are based on Jordanian discrimination against Jews.

Contrary to claims in some media accounts, the Israeli government has not decided to evict anyone in the current disputes. It is private parties, rather than the government of Israel, that have brought their claims to court. Landowners have done what they do throughout the civilised world—they have exercised their private rights to evict holdover tenants by going to court and winning an eviction order. The landowners rightly expect that Israeli police and enforcement authorities will respect the law and carry out eviction orders. Contrary to claims by pro-Palestinian advocates, the state of Israel has not issued any eviction orders against Palestinians in these disputes.

Contrary to the impression created by some media accounts, there has Page 4 of 5 been no recent adjustment of the parties’ property rights in favour of Jews or to the disadvantage of Palestinian Arabs. The parties’ rights were established by voluntary transactions over many years and reaffirmed in a legal compromise and court rulings many decades ago. The Palestinian Arab litigants in these cases are now attempting to overturn more than a century of property transactions and overturn long-settled law in order to prevent the Jewish owners exercising their lawful rights. The only involuntary transaction in the chain is the Jordanian 1948-1967 sequestration of Jewish property which is the source of the Palestinian Arab lease rights that have been upheld by the courts.

Contrary to the impression created by some media accounts, the property disputes do not involve any exotic or unusual Israeli laws. The leasehold and trespass legal issues at stake are similar to those found throughout the world, other than the unusually strong rent control and tenant protections given to the protected tenants (Palestinian Arabs in this dispute). The ownership laws at issue are likewise similar to those found throughout the world, and simply follow the chain of voluntary transactions. The only exotic element in the case is Jordan’s 19-year sequestration of all Jewish-owned properties as “enemy property,” which has been respected to the detriment of the Jewish property owners.

Contrary to the statements in some media accounts, none of the properties in the current dispute has been seized by the state of Israel. None of the property disputes turns on Israeli laws of land use or land planning or absentee property.

Contrary to the statements in some media accounts, the question in the land disputes is not whether “Jews owned the property prior to 1948.” The ethnicity of the owners is not legally relevant to the dispute, and does not serve as the basis of any legal rights in this case. The historical ownership is relevant only because it is part of the chain of title leading to the current owners’ title. What has been litigated is the current rights of current property owners.

4) Official distortions of international law 

Likewise, many critics of Israel have fabricated provisions of international law to insist that Israel is required to discriminate against Jews in east Jerusalem because, in the critics’ view, east Jerusalem is territory belligerently occupied by Israel. These claims are not only without foundation in international law, they also undermine international legal authority by creating a fake international law intended to be used in bigoted fashion.

Contrary to the claims of the critics, nothing in the law of belligerent occupation, or any other provision of international law, requires Israel to adopt and enforce the racial and ethnic land discrimination that is part of Jordanian law. In fact, Israel would violate international law (such as provisions in the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) were it to continue the Jordanian ethnic discrimination, or adopt the distorted views of international law proposed by critics of Israel.

Contrary to the claims of the critics, there is nothing in the Geneva Page 5 of 5 Conventions or any other part of the laws of belligerent occupation that forbids Israel to carry out court orders enforcing private property rights of landlords to evict their overstaying tenants. The claim that property rights of Jews must be disregarded while other property rights must be upheld or even enhanced has no basis in the law and is morally offensive.

Contrary to the claims of critics, international law does not require, or even permit ethnically-based denials of the legal rights of property owners due to alleged flaws in other Israeli laws. Some critics have claimed that Israel’s land planning laws, land use regulations and 1950 Absentee Property Law are problematic or biased. Whatever the merits of such claims, the claims of the parties in the current Sheikh Jarrah disputes have nothing to do with Israel’s land planning laws, land use regulations or the 1950 Absentee Property Law. Nothing in international law permits Israel to deny individual Jewish landowners their legal rights as punishment for the alleged guilt of their polity in adopting other, unrelated laws.

Contrary to the claims of the critics, permitting private Jewish landowners to exercise their rights in court does not constitute “illegal settlement activity.” No reasonable interpretation of the various provision of the Geneva Conventions and other treaties cited with respect to the legal dispute on “settlements” could possibly lead to the conclusion that international law requires stripping Jews of all private property rights in land in areas that critics of Israel call “Occupied Palestinian Territories.” While critics of Israel like to pretend that international law forbids Jews to reside in any lands claimed as part of the “Occupied Palestinian Territories,” that claim has no foundation in international law.

Dżihadyści Al-Szabaab w Cabo Delgado, północnej prowincji Mozambiku, obcinają teraz głowy dzieciom zaledwie 11-letnim. Ta grupa terrorystyczna zabiła ponad 1300 cywilów i wygnała niemal 670 tysięcy ludzi od czasu, kiedy zaczęła taki w kraju w październiku 2017 roku, informuje Departament Stanu USA. Na zdjęciu: obóz 25 de Junio dla uciekinierów w Metuge, gdzie przebywa obecnie 16 tysięcy ludzi z Cabo Delgado, 9 grudnia 2020. (Zdjęcie: Alfredo Zuniga/AFP via Getty Images)

Obcinanie głów dzieciom w Mozambiku

Judith Bergman
Tłumaczenie: Małgorzata Koraszewska

Dżihadyści Al-Szabaab w Cabo Delgado, północnej prowincji Mozambiku, obcinają głowy dzieciom zaledwie 11-letnim. Personel wojskowy i humanitarny pracujący na tym terenie mówi, że nigdy nie widzieli takiej brutalności, jakiej dopuszczają się terroryści w regionie, gdzie ludzie “często są siekani na śmierć i okaleczani maczetami”, jak również są “masowe obcinania głów w stylu Państwa Islamskiego”.

“Ubiegłej nocy zaatakowali naszą wieś i spalili domy. Kiedy zaczęło się to wszystko, byłam w domu z czwórką moich dzieci – jedna z matek opowiedziała organizacji Save the Children. – Próbowaliśmy uciec do lasu, ale złapali mojego najstarszego syna i obcięli mu głowę. Nie mogliśmy niczego zrobić, bo zabiliby nas także”.

“Kiedy zabili mojego 11-letniego syna, zrozumieliśmy, że nie jest bezpiecznie pozostać we wsi – powiedziała inna matka, która musiała uciekać z pozostałą trójką dzieci. – Uciekliśmy do domu mojego ojca w innej wsi, ale kilka dni później zaczęli atakować tam także”.

“Widziałam jak moja córka próbowała dobiec do łodzi z dwojgiem innych dzieci. Zabrali moją córkę i wielu innych. Potem podpalili naszą wieś” – mówiła Fatima Abdul, 43-letnia kobieta, która uciekła i teraz jest bezdomna, śpi na plaży.

Dekapitacje stały się powszechną potwornością w Cabo Delgado, ale ta praktyka nie jest nowa. W listopadzie dżihadyści obcięli głowy 20 chłopcom i mężczyznom w miejscowej wsi. Dżihadyści znani są jako al-Szabaab na tym terenie, ale w odróżnieniu od al-Szabaab, którzy działają w Somalii i są związani z Al-Kaidą, grupa z Mozambiku, znana także jako Ansar al-Sunna, jest związana z Państwem Islamskim (ISIS). Ta grupa terrorystyczna zabiła ponad 1300 cywilów i wygnała niemal 670 tysięcy ludzi od czasu, kiedy zaczęła ataki w kraju w październiku 2017 roku, informuje Departament Stanu USA. Stany Zjednoczone ostatnio uznały tę grupę za grupę globalnego terroryzmu i nałożyły sankcje na jej przywódcę, Abu Jasir Hassana. Podczas gdy Mozambik jest krajem o chrześcijańskiej większości, Cabo Delgado jest głównie muzułmańskie.

W dodatku do skrajnej przemocy “cholera w Cabo Delgado i COVID-19 w całym kraju stanowią olbrzymie wyzwanie dla słabego system opieki zdrowotnej w rejonie, gdzie jest bardzo ograniczony dostęp do wody pitnej, kanalizacji i higieny – według Biura Narodów Zjednoczonych ds. Koordynacji Pomocy Humanitarne. – Ponad 2,7 miliona ludzi w ostatnim kwartale 2020 roku znalazło się w obliczu poważnej niepewności żywnościowej, przynajmniej 840 tysięcy spośród nich w samym regionie Cabo Delgado, Niassa i Nampula”. ONZ ocenia, że Mozambik potrzebuje 254 miliony dolarów, by złagodzić kryzys humanitarny.

Rząd Mozambiku nie był w stanie uporać się z atakami i zatrudnił prywatnych kontrahentów wojskowych (PMC) do pomocy. Była wśród nich Grupa Wagnera, związany z Kremlem PMC, podobno własność Jewgenija Prigożyna, przedsiębiorcy z bliskimi związkami z rosyjskim prezydentem, Władimirem Putinem, oraz południowoafrykańska Dyck Advisory Group. Grupa Wagnera podobno opuściła Mozambik po odniesieniu ciężkich strat.

W raporcie opublikowanym 2 marca, Amnesty International informowała, że wszystkie zaangażowane tam grupy popełniały zbrodnie wojenne. “Ludność Cabo Delgado jest schwytana między siły bezpieczeństwa Mozambiku, prywatne milicje walczące obok sił rządowych i zbrojną grupę opozycyjną, znaną jako Al-Szabaab – z których żadna nie respektuje prawa do życia ani żadnych reguł wojny” – powiedział Deprose Muchena, regionalny dyrektor Amnesty International na Afrykę Wschodnią i Południową. “Wszystkie trzy popełniły zbrodnie wojenne, powodując śmierć setek cywilów. Międzynarodowa społeczność nie zajęła się tym kryzysem, kiedy rozszerzał się do zbrojnego konfliktu na pełną skalę w ciągu ostatnich trzech lat”.

Terrorystyczna rewolta grozi nie tylko Mozambikowi i jego ludności w dodatku do sąsiedniej Tanzanii, która walczy z dżihadystami na granicy; niektórzy analitycy oceniają, że “rewolta w Mozambiku ma potencjał destabilizacji Afryki Południowej i ośmielenia islamistów w całym regionie”.

Al-Szabaab przechwycił szereg miast w Cabo Delgado, ale dokonał znacznie ważniejszego przełomu w sierpniu 2020 roku, kiedy ta grupa podbiła kluczowy port w prowincji, Mocimboa da Praia, w pobliżu rodzącego się przemysłu eksploatacji pól gazowych kraju. Obecnie Mozambik ma podobno trzecie co do wielkości złoża gazu ziemnego w Afryce, po Nigerii i Algieriii.

Rozbudowa tych pól gazowych, która ściągnęła do kraju wielkich zagranicznych inwestorów, wśród nich francuską firmę Total, jest warta, jak się ocenia, 60 miliardów dolarów i rewolta al-Szabaab spowodowała poważne jej zakłócenie. Total prowadzi tam projekt konstrukcyjny warty 20 miliardów dolarów, ale dochodzą informacje, że firma ewakuowała w styczniu około trzy tysiące członków personelu po napadzie terrorystycznym w grudniu na miejsce odległe od projektu o zaledwie kilka kilometrów.

Równocześnie działalność al-Szabaab potencjalnie zagraża globalnej żegludze przez Kanał Mozambicki, przez który przepływa około 30% globalnego ruchu tankowców.

Mozambik szuka pomocy w krajach Zachodu do walki z rozszerzającym się terroryzmem. We wrześniu 2020 roku rząd napisał do Unii Europejskiej prosząc o pomoc w szkoleniu swojej armii, by zapanować nad rewoltą i UE przyznała pomoc z “logistyką szkolenia i technicznego szkolenia w kilku konkretnych dziedzinach, jak również wsparcie w uporaniu się z humanitarnymi problemami, włącznie z opieką medyczną”, ale nie wysłała misji szkolenia wojskowego.

Portugalia, byłe mocarstwo kolonialne w Mozambiku, wysyła około 60 osób personelu do szkolenia żołnierzy piechoty morskiej i komandosów, jak podaje “Politico”. Portugalia, która obecnie sprawuje podlegającą rotacji prezydenturę UE, stara się także przekonać UE, by wysłała wojskową misję szkoleniową, by pomóc rządowi Mozambiku. 15 marca Stany Zjednoczone wraz z rządem Mozambiku rozpoczęły dwumiesięczny, wspólny program szkolenia, w którym siły specjalne USA będą przez dwa miesiące szkoliły żołnierzy piechoty morskiej Mozambiku.

Memory Plays Tricks About Mengele

JONATHAN MARK

New biography examines the Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death.’

Mengele was less an anomaly than “a product and the promise of the German scientific establishment,” Marwell says.

In the Talmud, when Hillel was challenged to teach the entire Torah “while standing on one foot,” Hillel answered, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but “Remember” might have been a better answer. “Remember” is found 169 times in the Bible, including “remember Amalek,” about the merciless people mythically linked to everyone from Haman to Hitler. Holocaust memories, in particular, are sacred, but what if truth is elusive, lost in memory’s fog?

Ask Auschwitz survivors about their first day in hell, waiting to be directed to the gas chambers or to camp slavery, and they’ll almost certainly tell you about the Nazi making the selection. “It was Mengele,” survivors remember with a shiver. Dr. Josef Mengele, the most notorious Nazi in the most notorious concentration camp.

Mengele wasn’t the first of the “doctors from Hell,” as one chronicler described them. He didn’t innovate, but he epitomized.

Marwell writes, “If Auschwitz is the symbol of the Holocaust, then Mengele … has come to serve a similar role for the death camp itself. Perhaps for this reason, much of what is known of Mengele’s time in Auschwitz [May 1943 to January 1945] is more trope than truth.”

In his book, Marwell seeks to uncover the truth. Director emeritus of The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to The Holocaust, he has done more than most others to unravel the mystery of Mengele, from his early career as a promising pre-war medical researcher to his post-war disappearance into South America, the most notorious Nazi to evade capture or punishment.

Marwell worked on the Mengele case for the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s. By then, the Nazi doctor had died by drowning — presumably while suffering a stroke — on Feb. 7, 1979. The exhumed body was only proven to be Mengele’s many years after the fact.

Was Mengele evil above and beyond what we know of Auschwitz? “It’s much more satisfying to write him off as some kind of anomaly,” answered Marwell, “presumably motivated by an obsessed, grotesque interest in sadism, when he was much more a product and the promise of the German scientific establishment, and in a way that’s a more frightening picture.”

Mengele pursued his experiments, Marwell writes, “not as some renegade propelled solely by evil and bizarre impulses but rather in a manner that his mentors and his peers could judge as meeting the highest standards.”

The Holocaust was a two-tiered phenomenon, perpetrated by lower-class street thugs and upper-class intellectuals and scientists in academia, law, government — and Auschwitz. The intellectuals claimed to understand the “Jewish race” scientifically and medically. At the Wannsee Conference, the pivotal 1942 summit of high-ranking Nazis formulating the Final Solution, eight of the 15 participants had doctorates. At all camps, not just Auschwitz, the “selections” were always assigned to medical doctors, to give the veneer of medical triage to the decisions of who was too sickly, too old or too needy to be worth saving.

Mengele’s experiments on children, little people, twins and Roma were cruel and grotesque — he was quite interested in eyeballs and shipped a crate of them to a lab back in Germany — but such medical experiments were hardly unusual in the camps.

Nor was Mengele, who operated almost exclusively in Auschwitz II (Birkenau), the only such doctor in Auschwitz. In Auschwitz I, the main camp, Dr. Carl Clauberg, a research gynecologist, conducted painful or deadly sterilization experiments on hundreds of Jewish women. Clauberg also conducted experiments on women (his test “rabbits”) in the Ravensbruck camp.

In Auschwitz III, there were electro-shock experiments. Dr. Bruno Weber tested drugs on prisoners. In Dachau, Dr. Hubertus Strughold had prisoners submerged into ice-cold water, or left naked in freezing temperatures, all experiments supposedly justified by military or academic necessity.

Mengele was hardly a solo practitioner. He answered to SS Dr. Eduard Wirths, the chief medical authority in Auschwitz, who answered to Dr. Eno Lolling, the chief physician of all concentration camps. Few remember their names.

Marwell points out that Mengele “was almost certainly planning to use his Auschwitz research as the basis for his … post-doctoral thesis.”

Mengele, writes Marwell, explained to another Auschwitz doctor, Hans Delmotte, who tried to refuse selection duty, “the necessity of eliminating the Jews.” Mengele compared it to a battlefield doctor, making selections, knowing he can’t treat everyone. Added Mengele, Berlin had already decided “to eradicate the Jews.” They were as good as dead, so why be so bothered? Delmotte resumed his selection duty, and killed himself at the end of the war.

Dr. Horst Fischer was another hesitant selection boss, asking why these ragged, powerless Jews had to be killed. Mengele explained that “it was precisely from this reservoir of people that the Jews drew new power and refreshed their blood. Without the poor but supposedly harmless Eastern Jews, the civilized West European Jews would not be capable of survival. Therefore it is necessary to destroy all Jews.”

All of this excited Mengele. He “thrived in Auschwitz,” writes Marwell. Mengele never denied what he did or accepted guilt. When confronted by his adult son long after the war, Mengele argued that the selections were not his policy, and Auschwitz existed long before he arrived.

And yet it was Mengele who lodged in the memories of so many survivors. Marwell cites historian and former Auschwitz inmate Hermann Langbein, who identified “the Mengele effect,” a form of “memory displacement,” in which, says Langbein, “I heard survivors say that Mengele did this or that to them, even though Mengele had not yet arrived in Auschwitz at the time.”

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Elie Wiesel even wrote of Mengele’s monocle, though Langbein, who worked with Mengele almost daily in the SS infirmary, said Mengele never wore a monocle. Hungarian survivors say Mengele spoke to them in Hungarian, a language he did not speak.

Israeli historian Na’ama Shik suggests that survivors’ accounts decades after the fact could be shaped by what “they have read and heard” in the years since. Langbein adds, “If a member of the SS is repeatedly named in public in connection with especially monstrous deeds, it is possible that survivors will project their experiences on to him.”

Marwell’s biography places Mengele exactly where he belongs: not as a singular perpetrator of evil, but as one of the many cogs in a monstrous machine.