The aftermath for survivors: the Holocaust, and October 7

The New Neo Posted on by

The terrible plight of returned hostage Eli Sharabi – the man who was released from Hamas captivity last Saturday in a state of extreme emaciation and weakness, only to discover that his wife and two teenage daughters had been murdered in cold blood by Hamas right after he was kidnapped in October of 2023 – immediately called forth Holocaust comparisons from many people, including me. This was not only because of his obvious starvation and debility, but also because of the devastation wrought on his family (his brother also was kidnapped, and had died in captivity).

So although Sharabi is having a reunion with relatives, there won’t be any reunions on earth with his wife and daughters except by their gravesites. It’s a blow of such magnitude it’s hard to fathom, but many Holocaust survivors (including Otto Frank) endured similar suffering and losses: the torment and horror of the camps, and then the tragedy of learning that their families were gone. The road to recovery was difficult, and if you have read many tales of Holocaust survivors, you learn that some don’t make it back to wholeness.

I’ve written before about Holocaust survivors and their differing reactions; some do a great deal better than others. Part I of the series can be found here, and Part II can be found here. Part I is about a survivor who had an unusually optimistic nature and made quite a smooth transition, and Part II is about the brilliant Italian writer Primo Levi. I urge you to read them both, but especially the essay about Levi.

Levi may or may not have killed himself forty years after his war experience. He was in his 70s and suffering from depression, but the fall which caused his death may have been an accident. No one knows. In that essay, I quote some passages from his masterpiece Survival in Auschwitz. I cannot recommend the book highly enough.

But it is the sequel to that book that I’m going to be talking about now; its American title is The Reawakening [*see below]. It tells the tale of his year-long journey to get home and to recover from enormous emotional and physical devastation. He was very fortunate in some ways – his family had survived, and he was young (25) and was able to marry and rebuild his life.

This passage from the book (translated from the original Italian) describes the moment when – having been left behind ten days earlier at the camp, expected to die with hundreds of others because of severe illness, when the Germans abandoned the camps and led the rest of the inmates on horrific death marches, so determined were they to cause the death of all the remaining inmates – Levi sees his first liberators, four Russian soldiers on horseback:

To us they seemed wonderfully concrete and real, perched on their enormous horses, between the grey of the snow and the grey of the sky, immobile beneath the gusts of damp wind which threatened a thaw.

It seemed to us, and so it was, that the nothing full of death in which we had wandered like spent stars for ten days had found its own solid centre, a nucleus of condensation; four men, armed, but not against us: four messengers of peace, with rough and boyish faces beneath their fur hats.

They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime, the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.

That’s a sample of the quality of Levi’s writing and the depth of his thought: the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist …

The Holocaust haunted him. At the very end of the book The Reawakening, he sounds a chilling note about how extraordinarily difficult it is to endure experiences such as those of the camps, and how life-changing, and how hard to shake. This was written in 1961:

I reached Turin [his home town] on 19 October [1945], after thirty-five days of travel; my house was still standing, all my family was alive, no one was expecting me. I was swollen, bearded and in rags, and had difficulty in making myself recognized. I found my friends full of life, the warmth of secure meals, the solidity of daily work, the liberating joy of recounting my story. I found a large clean bed, which in the evening (a moment of terror) yielded softly under my weight. But only after many months did I lose the habit of walking with my glance fixed to the ground, as if searching for something to eat or to pocket hastily or to sell for bread; and a dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals.

It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, without tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed to chaos; I am alone in the center of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager [German expression for concentration camp] once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream: my family, nature in flower, my home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, Wstawàch.

* As I said, the second book is called The Reawakening in the US, but the actual title in Italian is better translated as The Truce, and that’s what it was called in other countries. I think the difference is meaningful. The American title emphasizes hopefulness: the author has come back nearly from the dead, returned to life, and has many adventures. Although the book is hardly light, it’s lighter than Levi’s Auschwitz masterpiece, which was called Survival in Auschwitz only in the US; in other countries it was published with a title that seems to have been Levi’s choice: If This Is a Man.

In each case, the original title is more poetic, more ambiguous, and less upbeat. Yes, the quotes in this post refer to Levi’s reawakening to normal life. But as he describes in his nightmare, it’s not a totally successful reawakening. Sometimes he’s still in the nightmare, and has trouble knowing which world is real. Perhaps they both are real: thus, The Truce.

Please watch: Dershowitz says it perfectly

The New Neo Posted on by

As my regular readers are almost certainly aware, I have a law degree from a university that’s supposedly not too shabby. But it was a long long time ago that I sat in a law school classroom. I didn’t like most of my classes, although there were a few exceptions that I liked very much, such as what had traditionally been known as Jurisprudence. I finally realized even while in school that I probably wouldn’t be practicing law, for a host of reasons; one of them was the fact that at the time I was fairly shy.

Nevertheless I did somehow take in a lot of valuable knowledge, and I don’t mean “valuable” in the sense of earning money at the law – which I never did – but “valuable” in life. The same skill that got me through some exams where I didn’t really know the answer – that is, using a combination of gut intuition and some knowledge – stood me in good stead in life, when a friend would ask me a legal question and I’d answer, “Well, my knowledge of law is very old, and I’m not a member of the bar, and I don’t know the specific law at this point, but here’s my best guess … ” . And of course that rusty old knowledge enables me to at least understand most of the legal questions that pop up again and again when I blog.

If people had told me I’d be voluntarily writing legal papers several times a week, at my age, I’d say they’d lost their minds. Yet here we are.

Anyway, that’s all an introduction to the fact that I feel the weight of the need to write of what I think the issues are with Trump’s efforts at shrinking the federal government, versus what the MSM wants the public to think. The answers will be different for each agency, depending on what is being attempted by Trump and company, and whether the agency is wholly under the executive branch or whether Congress was involved (and in what way Congress was involved). It’s not simple; it’s complex, and the courts will undoubtedly get very involved, with some of the questions almost certain to end up being decided by SCOTUS. And all the way, the MSM will try to stir up hysteria on the left by claiming that Trump is doing something Hitlerian and dangerous.

I have some general thoughts on the matter that I was trying to formulate and organize when I happened to click on the following video by Alan Dershowitz, and I discovered – as has been the case so many times – that he summed up exactly what I was thinking, only he says it more elegantly and succinctly. I’ve cued up about a 21-minute segment that covers it nicely, and I urge you to listen (you can speed it up if you like; that’s what I usually do).

You might want to send it to people you know who are frantic about what’s happening. Will it help? I don’t know, but perhaps there’s a chance.

Hamas says no more hostages will be released until further notice

The New Neo Posted on by

The better to torture Israel and to pressure Israel to concede more.

The announcement:

In a post on X, Abu Obeida, spokesman for the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, said that the handover of the prisoners “who were scheduled to be released next Saturday … will be postponed until further notice, and until the occupation commits to and compensates for the entitlements of the past weeks retroactively.”

He added: “We affirm our commitment to the terms of the agreement as long as the occupation commits to them.”

Abu Obeida detailed various alleged violations of the agreement by Israel over the past three weeks, including “delaying the return of the displaced to the northern Gaza Strip, targeting them with shelling and gunfire in various areas of the Strip, and not allowing the entry of relief supplies in all their forms according to what was agreed upon.”

In response to Hamas’ announcement, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said he had instructed the country’s military to “prepare at the highest level of alert for any possible scenario in Gaza.”

The defense minister described Hamas’ postponement as a “complete violation of the ceasefire agreement and the deal to release the hostages.”

[Hat tip: Ace.]

My two cents:

Hamas senses vulnerability in Israel because many of the hostage families, alarmed at the condition of the last three hostages released, are demanding that Netanyahu give in to anything and everything in order to get their loved ones back. On the other hand, Hamas realizes that the debilitated state of the most recent hostages released doesn’t make Hamas look good – not that they’re all that concerned with looking good, but it’s possible there is something about the hostages’ obvious starvation that concerns even Hamas’ usual allies in the West.

In addition, Hamas may feel that, with Trump in charge in the US, they don’t want to release too many hostages and lose their best bargaining chips. Without the hostages, what have they got? Very little. Plus, in the next stages of the exchanges, many of the returned hostages are going to be deceased. That almost certainly includes the Bibas family, and Hamas is worried about backlash involving the bodies of those children. Better to not return them at all.

[ADDENDUM: New details about the most recent released hostages can be found here. For example, Levy was only allowed to shower every few months, and he was without shoes the entire time – his kindly captors gave him shoes for the handover, however. And this is unsurprising: “the hostages were given more food in recent days in an attempt to improve their health before their release.” Plan ahead, I always say – but they didn’t start feeding them more food early enough, because their starvation remained dramatically obvious.

In addition, one of the previously-released hostages is reported to have said that he or she was kept chained and could neither stand nor walk, and in fact had lost the ability to walk. However, “Only close to my release did the terrorists remove the chains, and I learned to walk again.”]

The exposure and reform of the Deep State is the goal, and speed is of the essence

The New Neo Posted on by

The USAID was somewhat of a warmup.

DOGE has also turned its spotlight on the Treasury Department, which makes perfect sense if you’re trying to figure out where the money gets spent and where it gets wasted. A federal judge of the leftist variety has temporarily blocked their efforts:

In an egregious and unconstitutional assault on executive authority, Judge Paul Engelmayer has unilaterally forbidden all of Trump’s political appointees—including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—from accessing Treasury Department data. This ruling, concocted without legal precedent or constitutional justification, is nothing short of judicial sabotage. Worse, it was issued ex parte—meaning Trump administration lawyers weren’t given notice, weren’t allowed to argue, and weren’t even in the room. Only Democrat attorneys general were heard, ensuring a predetermined outcome.

Engelmayer’s order is legally indefensible. He cites no statutory basis because none exists. He offers no constitutional rationale because the Constitution directly contradicts him. Instead, he fabricates a fiction: that the duly appointed Treasury Secretary is nothing more than a ceremonial figurehead, akin to a powerless monarch, while unelected bureaucrats—who answer to no voters—control the nation’s finances. This is judicial tyranny masquerading as jurisprudence.

The implications are staggering. By stripping the executive branch of access to its own financial data, this ruling effectively transfers control of the federal purse to the permanent bureaucracy—the so-called “deep state.” That is a direct assault on the Constitution’s separation of powers, which vests executive authority in the elected President and his appointees, not in career government employees.

This is lawfare at its most brazen: a raw, partisan power grab dressed up in legalese. If allowed to stand, this decision sets the precedent that any left-wing judge can unilaterally strip the President of his authority and hand it to the administrative state. That is not democracy. It is not law. It is judicial dictatorship.

It’s only for a week, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be extended. It’s at the very least a delaying tactic, and of course the administration is challenging it:

In an Emergency Motion to Dissolve the TRO, filed early this morning, the Trump administration demonstrates not just the legal impropriety of the Judicial Branch removing political control from the Executive Branch, but also that there was no widespread access by political appointees. The Emergency Motion only addresses the removal of authority from political appointees, the underlying merits will be addressed in papers in opposition to the plaintiffs’ overall motion. …

There was no emergency. There was no threat to personal information. There was none of the drama the plaintiffs’ motion papers invoked and the emergency duty judge used to justify the political interference by the judiciary in the functioning of the Treasury Department.

So far, one of the major Treasury Department problems revealed is the extent of the department’s failure to address fraud:

… in a Saturday post on X, [Musk] wrote:

Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.

When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!! This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.

What was being done about it? Very little, apparently; here’s Musk’s explanation of the reason for that:

Nobody in Treasury management cared enough before. I do want to credit the working-level people in the Treasury who have wanted to do this for many years but have been stopped by prior management.

Everything at Treasury was geared towards complaint minimization. People [who] receive money don’t complain, but people who don’t receive money (especially fraudsters) complain very loudly, so the fraud was allowed to continue.

That makes a certain amount of twisted sense. The focus was not on saving money for the taxpayer. The focus was on the smooth running of the department, and so the path of least resistance was chosen.

Musk said that the Treasury Department has agreed to require a payment categorization code (which helps with audits), a rationale for the payment, and a do-not-pay list of entities found to be fraudulent. These are so basic as to be – one would think – no-brainers. But apparently they are new policies.

And then there’s also this article, explaining some of the workings of DOGE. If true – and I think it’s mostly true, anyway – it’s fascinating:

The following is about plans that were made prior to the election

While media focused on campaign rallies and political theater, a quiet army was being assembled. In offices across DC, veteran strategists mapped the administrative state’s pressure points. Think tanks developed action plans for every agency. Policy institutes trained rapid deployment teams. Former appointees shared battlefield intelligence from previous administrations’ failures.

By Inauguration Day, over 1,000 pre-vetted personnel stood ready—each armed with clear objectives, mapped legal authorities, and direct lines to support networks. This wasn’t just staffing; it was a battle plan decades in the making.

Not your father’s GOP.

More:

The secret wasn’t just speed—it was precision. Instead of waiting for Senate confirmations, the transition team prioritized non-Senate-confirmed positions. …

This urgency drove innovation. When DOGE’s young coders breached Treasury’s payment systems, pre-positioned legal teams neutralized resistance within hours. When career officials tried revoking system access, they discovered DOGE’s authority came from levels they couldn’t challenge. When leaks surfaced, rapid-response units fed counter-narratives to alternative media almost instantly.

There was a reason USAID was targeted early:

Created by Executive Order in 1961, USAID could be dissolved with a single presidential signature. No congressional approval needed. No court challenges possible. Just one pen stroke, and six decades of carefully constructed financial networks would face sunlight. …

EPA climate initiatives? Not just mapped—found unauthorized programs in 47 states. Education’s DEI maze? Not just exposed—revealed coordination across 1,200 programs. Intelligence community black budgets? Not just traced—uncovered patterns hidden for 30 years.

“The administrative state runs on two things,” a senior advisor explained, watching patterns emerge across DOGE’s screens. “Control of information and money flows.” His eyes tracked new connections forming in real-time. “We’re not just exposing their networks—we’re rewriting their DNA.”

They bureaucrats have gotten very very used to secrecy and consider it their right. So to them, DOGE’s investigations are terrible terrible violations that threaten all their work. Of course, the fact that USAID exists at the whim of the executive is forgotten.

More:

For the permanent bureaucracy, this wasn’t just change. It was an extinction-level event. Their power came from controlling who got paid, when they got paid, and what they got paid for. Now those controls were evaporating like dawn burning away darkness.

The pattern was devastating in its simplicity:

(1) Map the money flows

(2) Deploy aligned personnel

(3) Expose the networks

(4) Restructure the systems

There’s much much more at the link. According to the article, one of the side effects has been the unleashing of money for some local projects that had previously been stalled by red tape.

As the ever-eloquent President Biden would say, all of this seems like a big F***ing deal.

[ADDENDUM: More lawfare against Trump here.]

Trump: a penny no longer made is a penny earned

The New Neo Posted on by

Or perhaps more than a penny is earned by this move of Trump’s:

resident Trump announced Sunday that he asked the Treasury Department to stop producing pennies, calling the 1-cent coin wasteful.

He said in a Truth Social post that he told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to end minting the small-value coins with former President Abraham Lincoln’s image on them.

“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies. Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time,” Trump said.

The cost of making a penny was nearly 3.7 cents in fiscal 2024, the 19th consecutive fiscal year the coin has cost above face value to make, according to the U.S. Mint’s annual report.

Such a thing would never have occurred to me. But it’s a great idea that’s very easy to understand. I have a sneaking affection for the penny, but I cannot remember the last time I actually used one. They’re not being taken out of circulation, though. It’s just that new ones won’t be produced.

Work in progress: those security issues

The New Neo Posted on by

I apologize once again for the fact that the blog has been intermittently going down. The cause is still apparently brute force bot attacks which overload the server. I’ve added several layers of security as my host has suggested, but it’s still happening from time to time. My goal is to completely eradicate the problem, and I’ve been working on it, but in the meantime it may occur now and then.

Please be patient and keep trying if you have trouble accessing the blog. I’m determined to fix it.

The three hostages released today were obviously starving

The New Neo Posted on by

Now it isn’t pretty young women who are being released, but middle-aged civilian men. The hostages returned today are described here:

The day began in Deir al-Balah in Gaza, where Hamas handed the hostages– Ohad Ben Ami, Or Levy and Eli Sharabi– over to Red Cross officials –the fifth group freed under a fragile Gaza ceasefire.

Emaciated and disoriented, all three [civilian] men were forced by their captors to address crowds gathered at their handover ceremony. A banner across the edge of the platform erected for the exchange declared “total victory” for Hamas in Hebrew and bore images of destroyed and rusted Israeli military vehicles. …

“He looked like a skeleton, it was awful to see,” Ohad Ben Ami’s mother-in-law, Michal Cohen, told Channel 13 News as she watched the Hamas-directed handover ceremony. …

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog also denounced the treatment of Israeli hostages as a “crime against humanity” after the men were paraded on stage.

“This is what a crime against humanity looks like! The whole world must look directly at Ohad, Or, and Eli — returning after 491 days of hell, starved, emaciated and pained — being exploited in a cynical and cruel spectacle by vile murderers,” the Israeli head of state said in a statement on X.

Here is a photo where you can see how thin they are:

And here are before and after photos. The “befores” are on the bottom, of course:

And yet the international community has been complaining that it’s the Palestinians who are starving. I have yet to see one in the crowds who looks as though that’s true.

Ben Ami was taken from his kibbutz home along with his wife, who was released in earlier exchanges.

Levy was kidnapped from the NOVA festival, where his wife was murdered on 10/7. They have a 2-year-old son, who is now 3 and has been with his grandparents.

That story is tragic enough. But I think you’ll agree that even more tragic is the situation of Sharabi:

Sharabi, who will turn 53 in February, was at his home in kibbutz Beeri with his British-born wife and their two teenage daughters when Hamas attacked it on October 7, 2023. The armed men shot their dog, before locking the family in their safe room and setting it on fire. The bodies of his wife and two daughters were later identified.

He was taken to Gaza along with his brother Yossi. The Israeli military said early last year that Yossi was killed and his body was in the hands of Hamas in Gaza.

While in captivity, Sharabi did not know that his wife and children had all been viciously murdered. There is a beautiful photo at the link of Sharabi with his wife and children; I couldn’t bear to duplicate it, so you’ll have to click on the link to see it – and please scroll down there and compare how he looks in the photo with his wife and daughters compared to his emaciation in the next photo at the link.

Also please note in the following excerpt the psychological sadism of the Gazans [emphasis mine]:

Released hostage Eli Sharabi’s first request when he was back in Israel was to see his family, because he was unaware that his wife and two daughters were murdered in the Hamas onslaught on October 7, 2023, Hebrew media reported. …

According to Channel 12 news, Sharabi was notified of his wife and daughters’ deaths after his return from the Gaza Strip. He was initially reunited with his mother Hannah and sister Osnat, and subsequently with other members of his family, including his brother Sharon. His family was reportedly given advice on how to break the terrible news. …

Hamas announced the death, to great applause, as masked terrorists paraded Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Or Levy in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah before handing the emaciated hostages to the Red Cross on Saturday morning.

At the handover ceremony, Sharabi had been asked in Hebrew how he was feeling by the masked Hamas gunman running the show, and said into the microphone, “I feel very, very happy today to return to my family and friends, to my wife and my daughters.”

All the while, of course, Hamas knew what had happened to his wife and daughters.

I think of Otto Frank, who survived concentration camps hoping that his wife and two teenage daughters had survived. When he returned home, after a while he got the news from others who had known them in the camps that he alone had survived to tell the tale. It was after that that Miep Gies, the valiant woman who had helped hide and feed the Franks and the others in the Annex, gave him Anne Frank’s diary, which she had saved in hopes of her homecoming that never was.

RIP to all those murdered on 10/7, and love and strength and blessings to the families.

Surrogate presidents Musk versus Hunter

The New Neo Posted on by

The left is all worried and outraged that Elon Musk, appointed by Trump as an advisor and “special government employee” – with a security clearance – is informing Trump on government waste, and making recommendations. Although it’s Trump making the decisions, the narrative is that Elon Musk is the real “unelected” president, a foreigner and a multi-billionaire.

So, now that they can’t say that Trump is an illegitimate president since he won so handily, they’ve pivoted to the story that Trump, that tremendous autocrat and wannabee dictator, isn’t really in charge and instead it’s Musk who is an illegitimate president running the show.

I don’t know how many people are buying this tale, but I can guarantee that some are. I very much doubt, however, that the people in the MSM who write these things believe them.

Meanwhile, the MSM isn’t all that curious to know who ran the Biden White House all those years that Joe was cognitively compromised. They don’t seem all that interested in this sort of report [hat tip: commenter “Barry Meislin]:

Once a proud fundraiser for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, [Lindy] Li has turned into an insider spilling the Democratic Party’s most closely held secrets—and, boy, does she have stories.

… Back in December [2024], she revealed new dirt on Joe Biden’s mental decline. “The president has not been cognitively fit to assume the duties of the Oval Office for a number of years now,” she told Fox News. “And it breaks my heart because I know President Biden and I love the man, but he is in no shape or form able to carry out the duties that the Commander in Chief requires …

But it’s her revelations about what happened in the White House in the aftermath of Biden’s devastating performance in his June debate on CNN with Trump that are truly jaw-dropping.

According to Li, Joe Biden, already staggering from public scrutiny, effectively lost control of the White House after that fateful debate. The event reportedly prompted an audacious power shuffle at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—one spearheaded by none other than Hunter Biden.

Li alleges that, following Biden’s disastrous debate drubbing, Hunter essentially took over White House operations. Speaking with podcaster Shawn Ryan, she painted a picture of dysfunction at the highest levels of government: “After the [CNN] debate, Hunter basically commandeered the White House. He sat in on all of the White House top-level meetings. We had a former cocaine addict sitting in on the most sensitive meetings of the most consequential and most important government in world history. Does that sit right with you?”

Ryan’s immediate reaction—“No”—reflected what many are surely thinking.

“Without security clearance mind you,” Li added.

Hunter as Edith Wilson – who cares?