“Every year at school in Israel we used to get a lecture from a Holocaust survivor,” said Tomer Peretz. “I was always getting bored listening to him like, ‘OK, OK, we got it, OK. So, they killed you guys. Let’s move on …
“‘It’s one of those things that happened and will never happen again.’”
But after Hamas fighters raided Israeli farms and villages, killing and butchering more than 1,400 Israelis and taking more than 200 hostages on October 7, Peretz agreed to tape his own testimony so that others would not just move on.
“Everybody has to do it. It’s a must. I don’t see any other option. People need to know,” he told CNN.
He was giving his testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation, which for years has collected the accounts of survivors of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides in countries like Cambodia and Rwanda.
Peretz, a Jerusalem-born artist who now lives in Los Angeles, was in Israel the first week of October for a family wedding. As the horror unfolded that Saturday morning, he knew that he had to help. He volunteered with Zaka, an organization that collects human remains after terror attacks so they can be buried according to Jewish tradition.
Peretz was sent to collect the bodies at Kibbutz Be’eri, where more than 120 lay dead.
“I was too coward to be on the side of the head. I didn’t want to see faces,” Peretz said of the gruesome process of bagging mutilated bodies and loading them into trucks. “And then my time to touch the body came. It was the first time.” He helped lift a woman’s body, pulling her up by the arm so someone else could slip a body bag underneath. Of a victim, he said: “She had no face … It looked like they, someone … didn’t want to leave a face.”
Sifting through some of the more than 50,000 Holocaust testimonies at the foundation, it’s easy to find eerie echoes, which Peretz once believed could never come again.
“I’d never touched a dead body before. I mean, I’d seen dead bodies,” said Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in her testimony recorded back in 1998. She survived the Holocaust in part because she was a cellist – a rarity at Auschwitz – playing an irreplaceable part in a death camp orchestra. “Somebody else came and we just put the body out. One body. Well, it didn’t take long before that was multiplied by thousands.”
“There were dead people covered by newspapers,” Alicia Rand remembers of the Warsaw Ghetto. “Once a day or so, there was someone coming with wheelbarrows and taking the bodies.” Rand recorded her testimony in April of this year.
“And I see it now that this hatred still lives on,” she told the Shoah Foundation. “And then people did say that it never happened.”
Robert Williams, a historian who now serves as the Shoah Foundation’s executive director, said they had an obligation to Rand and the other survivors to deal with the forms of antisemitism that continued after the Holocaust ended. “For the better part of a year, we’ve resolved that we need to begin taking testimony on contemporary antisemitism,” he said. “Then October 7 happened, and we had to ramp up our efforts very, very quickly.”
Within days, teams on the ground in Israel were taping testimonies. “It is immediate and that comes with benefits, and it comes with risks,” said Williams. “The individual will be able to recount with greater clarity and greater detail what happened to them. The challenge though is the trauma is also very fresh in their mind.”
Amit Ades, a mother of three, remembered trying to keep her children quiet, distracting them with a Sponge Bob movie on an iPad during lulls in the violence as Hamas swept through her community. She described the ‘smell of war’ seeping in through the windows of their kibbutz home. She was ready to fight. “With the knife in my hand and the baby on the other hand trying to keep her not crying so no one will hear us,” she said. “And it went on … it felt like forever.”
Another survivor, Avi Shamriz, told the camera: “My village was destroyed by the Hamas … There is no village to return to.” His young adult son was kidnapped. The family has no idea where he is, or whether he’s alive or dead. “My son, he’s an innocent boy,” said Shamriz. “He didn’t harm them.”
“We thought it will never happen again,” said Maor Moravia. “They did worse than Nazis. The Nazis had … a little human in them just to gas us.” As they were led out of their kibbutz by the Israeli soldiers who eventually came to save them, Moravia told his children to look only at the ground in front of their feet, so they would not see the dead bodies of their neighbors and friends.
Williams said of taking the testimonies now: “It’s about providing a platform for the voices of survivors to echo for future generations.”
Peretz spoke in his account about experiences he is, for now, unable to tell his children.
“Lie to them. Don’t tell them the truth … Just lie to them,” Peretz recalled telling his father-in-law on October 7. That was the only time he cried in nearly two hours of testimony. In all of the videos CNN has seen, all survivors speak with a similar stoicism.
“I don’t want to speculate on what happens in the minds of those who are providing testimony,” said Williams. “But I imagine that the immediacy of the events that they are facing today, the ongoing war, the fact that they are worried about children, friends, family who have been taken hostage, living with the reality that neighbors have been murdered may be so overwhelming that their best way of coping at the moment is to be a matter of fact.”
The Shoah Foundation will return to every subject further down the line, maybe years down the line, to find out how they feel with the benefits of healing and hindsight.
But the foundation will not be taking testimony from Palestinian civilians, currently suffering as the Israeli Defense Forces seek to destroy Hamas in Gaza. “The reason we’re taking testimonies from October 7 is because it was an act of anti-Semitism that is squarely within our mission,” explained Williams. “That being said we are always happy to share our methodologies with organizations who are interested in taking testimony.”
Asked if there is any hope of resolving this now decades-old and seemingly intractable conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, Peretz takes a long pause before answering. “I think so … But I think we gotta go so low, so low,” he said. “Both sides I guess needs to get a big slap before something will come out of it.” This, he said, just might be that moment.
CNN’s Stephanie Becker and Jonathan Park contributed to this story.
