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Holocaust survivors say the hostage videos published in recent days recall for them their own torture and deprivation under the Nazis eight decades ago.
“Their bodies are painfully thin — nearly Muselmänner — their eyes terrified and vacant, their faces marked by despair and hopelessness. These images take me back to those dark days—to the hell, the hunger, the orphanhood, and the fear,” Israel Shaked said in a statement released by the International March of the Living, which brings Jewish teens to concentration camps in Europe.
“Muselmänner” was a term used in concentration camps to “refer to prisoners who were near death due to exhaustion, starvation, or hopelessness,” according to Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust museum, which said the Nazis killed such people within a matter of days or weeks.
Shaked, who was liberated from the Mauthausen camp, was referring to the condition of Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski, young men abducted on Oct. 7, 2023, from the Nova music festival in southern Israel. In new videos, which their families authorized for publication over the weekend, the men can be seen emaciated and tearful.
David is shown digging what he says is his own grave, in a cruel echo of a tactic deployed by the Nazis.
“I know hunger up close. In the camps, we were given rations of bread and watery soup. We were so hungry, we would even eat grass if we could find it,” said Naftali Hurst, who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald. “I remember the humiliation—the complete stripping of human dignity. I know the fear, the terror.”
Starved prisoners, nearly dead from hunger, pose at a concentration camp on May 7, 1945, in Ebensee, Austria. (public domain)
The videos have sown horror among Israelis, and they were a focus of the Saturday night rallies by Israelis who want the war brought to a close with a deal to release the remaining hostages. There are 50, including at least 20 thought to be alive.
“Evyatar is my little brother, a kind, gentle soul whose only ‘crime’ was celebrating at a music peace festival,” his brother Ilay said at one rally. “The thought of his pain, his hunger, his fear in those dark tunnels — it haunts my every waking moment.”
In February, when hostages Eli Sharabi, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami were released from captivity under the terms of a ceasefire, their gaunt appearance prompted comparisons to Holocaust survivors and caused outrage among Israelis. US President Donald Trump also expressed anger over their condition, saying, “they literally look like the old pictures of Holocaust survivors, the same thing.”
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