The Mirror
We decided to go for a walk. It’s August 2036, and a few days ago my daughter came back from an organised trip to Gaza and the neighbouring Israeli communities, and she’s eager to share her impressions. I’m playing cool but I’m probably even keener to hear.
It’s a warm, sunny day and as we march up a trail on a leafy hill off the center of Warsaw, we walk past several people — an elderly couple, then a mother with two young kids.
She waits for the two energetic boys to pass by to tell me she had visited the Transboundary War Childhood Museum. Modeled after the one in Sarajevo, the minimalist display features supposedly mundane items from kids’ wartime lives. On her mobile she shows me photos of a panda plush toy, a colorful rubber band bracelet, a cardboard box with a white-on-black “GHF” logo.
She herself had such toys around that time, she recalled. And she couldn’t believe the pain, the loss, the suffering that boys and girls, many her age, have endured at the same time she was goofing around in the playground with her two best friends.
The tour guides — an Israeli and a Palestinian — told the group about the atrocities of the war. She heard about both Hind Rajab and Kfir and Ariel Bibas, she says, still rattled.
The guides also stressed that there was no symmetry. There was no power balance — Israel has long been the more powerful party, militarily, economically and politically. If there was a similarity, it was the indiscriminate targeting of civilians, Israeli and Palestinian, children included.
The tour took them through the kibbutzim, hearing about the horrors of that blood-soaked Saturday of October 7. Amid the now flourishing communities there are few traces left. One of the guides pointed to a few bullet holes in a communal dining hall where they had lunch. “It reminded me of some buildings in Warsaw,” she says, referring to World War II scars that survived the decades since.
In fact, she’s still processing everything she heard and saw. But she tells me about the buildings with charred walls. “It’s now safe to walk there, but scary nonetheless,” she says.
The memorial site at the forest near Kibbutz Re’im, commemorating the 364 victims of the Super Nova party, especially moved her. The photos and the accompanying texts depict free-spirit, care-free youth partying. Many around her age. “It was more like a mirror,” she says to me. “I could hear the music in my head. Then the shooting. And the yelling.”
Yes. It’s all very vivid. I was at this memorial site during one of my wartime visits to Israel, I tell her. And it was an unsettling experience, imagining the terror. It was also chilling because, while there, we heard explosions, eight artillery shells shot into nearby Gaza. Formally, there was a ceasefire. But the fire has not ceased. “Good chance that the soldiers who pulled the trigger were your age today,” I say.
She listens, visibly shaken. Then she recalls her group visited the massive monument dedicated to Gaza’s youngest victims. “Just like the one in Yad Vashem,” she remarks. It bears the names of more than 21,000 children who were killed during the war — from bombs or bullets, from untreated injuries or disease, from hunger. “I was really crying there,” she says. And she has tears in her eyes sharing this experience with me. And so do I, listening.
In al Zawayda, where one of the wartime community kitchens stood, there is now a memorial commemorating the famine. She says there were quite a lot of tourists taking photos of the monument that features a group of hands holding empty tin pots. “But I couldn’t,” she adds.
Then she pauses for a while. We keep walking up that hill, ignoring information signs by the trail. “You know, I remember those sirens when we visited Israel,” she says, recalling rushing to grandma’s shelter room at the middle of the night. More than once. Her tiny portion of that horrible war. We both remember her sheer fear. I remember being heartbroken at her late night questions about what could happen, and even more at a loss knowing that for other kids this was a constant reality — much worse, in fact — for 24 long months.
Now, during the tour, the group met with Palestinian and Israeli survivors and heard their painful testimonies. She says she’s not ready to share everything she experienced. She’s still overwhelmed with emotions, she explains. I put a hand on her shoulders.
Even after seeing everything she saw, the scale of destruction was still unfathomable. After hearing and reading so much, the catastrophe, the immense death toll, remain beyond imagination. “Yes, it really is a lot to take in. I’m not sure I’ve come to terms with this entire war,” I confide.
And there was another aspect to that tour. She tells me she was at awe at the reconciliation process. It will clearly take many more years — the wounds, those visible and those that aren’t, are still open. But much has already been achieved through a range of transitional justice efforts, some led by the Israeli and Palestinian governments, some by grassroots initiatives. This very tour, an Israeli-Palestinian incarnation of the Taglit program, is part of these efforts.
The two guides told the group about the testimony gathering campaign and the joint commemoration ceremonies — and, above all, the truth and justice committees. “It’s real amazing that former IDF soldiers sit in the same room as Hamas militants. And they talk about what they’ve done. And they listen to one another.”
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Yet, she’s still perplexed by the extreme violence she heard about. “I know the facts, I’ve seen the places, but I still cannot understand how people are able to become such monsters,” she says.
Yes, I nod. If you cannot imagine it, it means you are fine. But they are not monsters. The Israeli soldiers and the Palestinian militants are as human as you and me.
And then she stops and asks, “dad, where were we? What did you do during that war?”
I sigh, then I look at her. She’s not judgmental, she’s genuinely curious about what it’s like to live through a truly grim chapter in history. What’s it like, even from a distance, to witness a genocide committed also in our name.
Truth is, besides a few visits — mostly around my father’s death — we spent most of this war far away, in safety, in Warsaw. We’ve managed to lead pretty normal life. She was going to preschool and playing with her best friends. In the winter she learned ice skating, and in the summer we went for walks in the forest. The kind of normal life that kids everywhere should have the chance to enjoy, but a privilege compared to those amid the ruins.
I realize I’m dodging her questions. But I shouldn’t. After all, I had a feeling she would ask. One day.
In my head I’m running through a list of bullet points — an article or two that I published, and others I failed to get out, donations to several families in Gaza and to antiwar groups, social media posts I prefer not to count, a demonstration in Haifa we once attended as a family.
I worked with fellow activists to get the Israeli environmental movement to oppose Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. We’ve organised public meetings, we got over 500 Israeli environmentalists to sign a public statement calling to end the war.
And I talked. I talked to countless friends and family and strangers in Israel. I talked to Palestinian friends. One in particular. I talked to numerous colleagues in Poland and throughout Europe.
And, mostly, I failed. I had the agency, I had the comfort of the distance, but I failed to fully utilize them.
She listens as we reach the hill’s summit. One of the two boys passes us, crying and running to his mom.
“Would you act differently had it been your grandpa’s family in the Warsaw Ghetto?” my daughter asks. I don’t even know how to start answering this.
It’s so close — geographically, that is — and yet so difficult for me to imagine. “I, well, I don’t know,” I tell her. “I really want to believe I would do the right thing. That I would have the courage. That I would even know what to do. That it would actually make a difference,” I say. “It terrifies me to imagine myself as a helpless witness.”
We’re both crying. I cover my face. In shame or guilt, I cannot tell. “I’m sorry, honey,” I say. Then she hugs me and says, “OK, Aba. You tried.” And I’m not sure if she means to comfort me or it’s rather veiled disappointment. I look at her and she gives me a half smile and we each retreat into our thoughts in silence.
“Alright, dad, let’s go, it’s getting late,” she says.
We’re now alone on top of the Warsaw Uprising Mound. It’s a World War II debris heap turned into an urban park. Its peak offers a descent view of the Polish metropolis that’s our home. Warsaw, past and present, at our feet. Wars, too.
It is getting late. She’s standing by me, slightly restless. Then, I slowly get up and we start descending down the stairs and back to our reality.
Epilogue
It’s October 2026 and I dread this conversation. It’s a text that I started writing over a year ago. And I’m tearing while typing.
This text is not supposed to be my line of defense. Rather, it is soul searching — Heshbon Nefesh, in Hebrew — about what now. I’m telling myself I need to be recommitting to rise to the moment. This war must end and I need to be able to tell my daughter I did not fail.
