Survived the Holocaust, killed by Hamas

HOLIT, Israel—The wall was blackened where a rocket-propelled grenade punched a hole into Moshe Ridler’s bungalow.

“Then they threw a hand grenade into the room, to make sure he was dead,” said Eli Hazen, a volunteer collecting bodies in Holit, a kibbutz two kilometres from Gaza.

Ridler was 91, he said, and a survivor of the Holocaust.

“That Holocaust,” Hazen clarified. “He did not survive this Holocaust.”

A walker was still in the corner of the room where Ridler died on Oct. 7 — a day that has reminded many Israelis of 1940s Europe.

The door-to-door pogroms were all too familiar. Israelis saw in them the impulses behind the Holocaust, just in a different uniform.

For Ridler’s family, the parallels are even more conspicuous.

“In my worst nightmares I never imagined such an end,” said his daughter Pnina Hendler, who also lives in Holit.

Until recently, Ridler didn’t talk much about his wartime experiences, even to Holocaust archivists, Hendler said in an interview.

But he began to open up to his grandchildren about 10 years ago, as they took an interest in their collective past.

“It was an unusual childhood,” Ridler once said.

“I was born in 1931 in the city of Hertsa in Romania,” Ridler told his grandson, Amir Tessler, for a school project in 2017.

As Romania aligned itself with Nazi Germany, Jews were cast as agents of Communism and became the targets of mass deportation and massacres.

Ridler was in Grade 3 when he and his family were rounded up with the other Jews of Hertsa.

“My mother fell ill on the way to the concentration camp and was laid to rest,” Ridler said. Her burial place remains unknown.

They were taken first to the Romanka camp in Kopaihorod, Ukraine, he said. His sister Mina died there at age 15.

Eventually, his father, Zelig, was taken to a forced labour camp in Odessa, while his 19-year-old sister Paige was sent to a work camp in Tulchin, Ukraine.

Separated from what was left of his family, Ridler, who was then 11, overheard a group of young men talking about their escape plans.

“At first, they didn’t want to take me,” he said. “I was a skinny and small child, but I threatened them that if they didn’t rescue me, I would go and inform on them.”

Once out of the camp, he ran through the night. He woke by a fireplace. A Ukrainian family had found him in their field.

They knew he was a camp escapee. He had run 30 kilometres south to Luchynets before dropping. He was so cold they had put him by the fire to thaw.

“They hid me, dressed me as a Ukrainian boy,” he said. “I went out to pasture with cows from their farm and behaved like a member of the family.”

Eighteen months later, he was reunited with his father, who had been liberated, and they returned home.

Ridler studied dental technology, but he wasn’t happy in post-war Europe, and he heard the state of Israel had been created, a homeland for the long-persecuted Jewish people.

In 1951, Ridler moved to Israel and applied for a position in the border patrol. During the interview, he falsely claimed he spoke Hebrew, his daughter said.

Handed a Hebrew newspaper and told to read, he held it upside down. But the commander was so impressed with his self-confidence, he got the job.

He later became an Israel Police detective and when he retired, he worked with the Jewish Agency, where he managed two absorption centres that helped Ethiopians immigrate in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Three years ago, Ridler moved to Holit, a kibbutz of about 230 people founded in 1982 at the western tip of Israel, where it intersects with Gaza and Egypt.

He was getting weaker and forgetful, and his daughter thought he would have a better quality of life with her in the kibbutz.

The family hired a caregiver, Petru Boscov, a foreign worker from Moldova, who could speak to Ridler in Romanian.

“He became one of the family,” Hendler said.

Ridler swam in the community pool every afternoon. He visited the grocery store and “flirted with the girls, and he told stories,” his daughter said.

He became the “grandpa” of Holit. “He danced with his walking stick,” Hendler said. “He really enjoyed his life on the kibbutz.”

On Sept. 30, the family got together at the pool. They swam, ate lunch and posed for a group photo. Ridler played checkers with his granddaughter.

“The little ones were very attached to him,” Hendler said. “They went to his house to play on his piano and talk to him.”

He relished his 18 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, she said. They were his victory over the dark forces that had tried to erase his family in Europe.

The air sirens went off at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 7, as Hamas launched a massive missile barrage from Gaza.

Hendler was visiting her daughter in the northern city of Tiberias, but as part of the kibbutz security team, she got to work.

Sirens were hardly unusual in Holit. Residents would run to a shelter until the all clear a few minutes later. But something was different this time.

As the alert dragged on, Hendler told residents to get into their safe rooms and stay quiet. Her sister phoned Ridler’s caregiver with the same message.

Before long, Hendler was receiving messages that gunmen were in Holit.

A seven-year-old was hiding in the closet after her mother was shot. A 15-year-old was wounded in the stomach, and both his parents were dead.

Hamas seemed to be going house to house, shooting everyone. Hendler asked the army to send a helicopter to evacuate the wounded.

“Help is on the way,” she assured her neighbours.

But no helicopter came. Hamas had grenade launchers, and it was too dangerous. It was 4 p.m. before the army arrived to evacuate the residents.

Meanwhile, Hendler was growing worried about her father. He didn’t answer the phone. At 11 p.m., she got a call telling her that he and Boscov were dead. It took 10 days to identify Ridler’s body.

In all, Hamas killed 11 Israelis and two foreign workers on the kibbutz. Israeli-Canadian Adi Vital-Kaploun, 33, was among the dead. She was shot in front of her two boys.

Holit is a ghost town now. Many of the homes have fire damage. There is broken glass and debris everywhere. It smells like soot.

Outside Ridler’s back door, his fire-blackened mattress lay in the dirt. It likely caught fire when the grenade exploded.

A rocket-propelled grenade had punctured the heavy steel shutter that covers the safe room window. There were blast marks on the opposite wall, and on the tile floor.

The caregiver’s Moldovan passport and Israeli entry card, dated Sept. 9, 2022, were on the kitchen counter, with a few shekels and an Aeroflot boarding pass for a flight from Chisnau to Tel Aviv.

Ridler’s family photos were on top of the piano in the living room. One was a sepia portrait of his parents and sisters, taken in Romania before the Holocaust.

His daughter doesn’t know the details of how he died. She hoped it was over quickly, before he understood what was going on.

His house faced the security fence that surrounds the kibbutz, and may have been the first to come under attack. If so, he would have been spared from watching Hamas destroy Holit.

Since the attack, Hendler has been staying at a hotel on the Dead Sea. She plans to return to Holit to help rebuild, and is trying to find donors to support the effort.

“We are not going to give up,” she said.

At the funeral on Oct. 18, Ridler was laid to rest in the Neve Yarak cemetery northeast of Tel Aviv, next to his late wife. Most of the kibbutz was there. It was live-streamed for family in Miami and South Africa.

Hendler said she wasn’t sure whether his grave marker would identify him as a Holocaust survivor, but it would say that Moshe Hersh Ridler was a victim of the Holocaust of Oct. 7, 2023.

Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca