Last fall, the feelings came fast, and ran deep for many metro Detroiters. As the seasons changed, the intensity got worse.
On Oct. 7, 2023, the militant group Hamas killed an estimated 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in an attack in southern Israel, the deadliest in the country’s history, and took another 250 people hostage. Nearly 100 Israeli hostages remain in captivity, the American Jewish Committee says.
Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza has now killed more than 41,700 Palestinians over the last year and wounded more than 96,700 others, the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip said last week.
How has life been for those with strong ties to Israel, Gaza and the Middle East? The Free Press interviewed six local people from our communities to understand, a year later, how Oct. 7 has changed their lives. Here is the story of Sophie Klisman, a Holocaust survivor from West Bloomfield.
As a Holocaust survivor who views Israel as a safe haven for Jews, Sophie Klisman has found the past year “disturbing.”
The attacks of Oct. 7 reignited haunting memories and fears of antisemitism for the 95-year-old West Bloomfield resident. Killings at Israeli military bases and a music festival conjured for her the faces of young Israeli Defense Forces soldiers with whom she returned to Auschwitz on a 2019 mission trip.
It was as if she knew the victims of the massacres personally, she said. She couldn’t get them out of her mind. Every hostage death since has felt the same, she said, “so painful — like losing a member of your family.”
“It’s frightening, the antisemitism — because I thought it was gone,” Klisman said. “I thought people realized what the Holocaust did to innocent children, babies and now (the antisemitism is) there and nobody can explain why.”
The Polish-born survivor has a deep love for Israel.
She remembers learning of the country’s 1948 founding on the radio, while living in a United Nations displacement camp in Germany with other survivors unable to return to their home countries, where antisemitism still raged.
She was elated. Finally, Jews had a homeland — one that would go on to take in nearly two-thirds of those displaced after the Nazi genocide. She and her campmates danced the Hora in celebration.
“My thought has always been that if there was a state of Israel, maybe the Holocaust would have never happened, the suffering and the loss of life that I experienced would not have happened,” said Klisman. More than two dozen of her family members were wiped out; only a sister and uncle survived.
In the 75 years since Israel’s founding, Klisman has anxiously followed from afar the various wars that have threatened the country. By the 2019 Auschwitz-Israel trip sponsored by the nonprofit Friends of the IDF, she felt its future was secure.
The mission trip aimed “to celebrate that Hitler didn’t accomplish his wish to kill all the Jews,” she said. “It was so emotional that we have a country that is thriving and growing and we’re here to stay, the Jewish people.”
The massacres of Oct. 7 — which Israeli leaders have called the deadliest day for Jewish civilians since the Holocaust — upended that thinking. Klisman is now again uneasily monitoring the TV news, this time in her apartment complex where the war dominates daily conversation.
She has had difficulty making sense of why Hamas, the group controlling the occupied Gaza Strip, would want to harm Israelis, and sees its motivations as purely antisemitic. Global protests over Israel’s bloody retaliatory assault are antisemitic too, she says, “because if you’re against Israel, you’re against the Jewish people.”
With tensions escalating in the now regional war, Klisman says her greatest wish is for Israel to be preserved as a country where Jews can find some semblance of peace.
“Just Israel, just save it, I don’t care.” she said. “I’m a good human being, I couldn’t hurt a fly, but Israel. …
“And I’m very much for Netanyahu, he’s a strong leader …”
When asked about the war’s fallout — including reports of starvation, disease and a civilian death toll that has drawn genocide accusations in international court — Klisman grows conflicted.
“I feel bad when I see on TV, for the innocent children and women — Palestinians,” she said. “Israel has to be strong and prepared for whatever happens, but, personally I think the killing should stop.”
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Holocaust survivor Sophie Klisman fears ‘frightening’ antisemitism
