SHE STOOD WITH US

There are victims of the Holocaust who to this very day will deny that there were some good people in this world who stood with them in those six years when they had to endure the savagery and barbarism of the Nazis.

I used to hear my father say that often and have never been able to entirely convince him otherwise although he has softened his stance in his later years.

There are two reasons for this.

The first was a scene from an American documentary entitled "The Last Klezmer" in which a Jewish musician who remained in Poland after the war was shown returning to his native town after spending most of his adult life in Warsaw. The scene in question was one of the local gentile women weeping at a memorial to the Jews who had lived among them and who had perished at the hands of the Germans.

The second was an article I read with him that was written by Oriana Fallaci, a brilliant journalist who joined Italy's anti-fascist resistance as a teenager during World War Two, was a fearless war correspondent, covered wars in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Latin America, was shot and beaten in 1968 during student demonstrations in Mexico, interviewed world leaders and terrorists and, later in life took a strong and brave stand against Islamic terrorism.

Oriana Fallaci died yesterday, aged 77.

She wrote the article entitled I STAND WITH ISRAEL: I STAND WITH THE JEWS in late 2002 and it originally appeared in the Italian daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera.

I read the article at my father's house. During the reading, it felt as if every word was rising up and speaking for itself with a special kind of passion. When joined together the words told us that there really were men and women of goodwill on the face of this earth who were not prepared to abandon our people; not then and not now.

Oriana Fallaci stood with us. She is no longer on this earth but will be remembered by my people forever.

May she rest in peace.

"I find it shameful that in Italy there should be a procession of individuals dressed as suicide bombers who spew vile abuse at Israel, hold up photographs of Israeli leaders on whose foreheads they have drawn the swastika, incite people to hate the Jews. And who, in order to see Jews once again in the extermination camps, in the gas chambers, in the ovens of Dachau and Mauthausen and Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen et cetera, would sell their own mother to a harem." - Oriana Fallaci.