"Our existence has something cruel and bestial. All that is human has been reduced to zero. Memories of beauty are erased; past artistic joys are inconceivable in our current state." This is how Hanna Lévy-Hass defined life in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the diaries she wrote while imprisoned there, where tens of thousands of people died between 1945 and 1948.
A text whose spirit does not differ much from what is read in the Gaza memoirs written by a group of Palestinian writers. Their stories describe an environment as disturbed and terrifying as the one reflected by Lévy-Hass, whose work managed to survive the extermination of Bergen-Belsen and was first published in English in 1982.
"Life in Gaza is an exhausting and relentless reality. Each day presents itself as a new battle to navigate the deadly detonations and cacophonies of Israel. Here I am, like a stone in the middle of the river, eroded and worn down by the constant flow of destruction, ignored and left to my fate," reads the account of Ahmad Samih Sbaih, a 22-year-old Palestinian from the Gaza neighborhood of Al Daraj.
Ahmad Samih is one of over a dozen Palestinian authors who will share space with Lévy-Hass's daughter, Israeli journalist Amira Hass, and other authors of the same background in the project promoted by the Spaniard Gonzalo Delgado, which aims to "strengthen the bridges that exist between the victims of different genocides, and therefore includes testimonies from descendants of Holocaust survivors who affirm that their place is alongside the victims, not the perpetrators."
Although separated by decades, Gonzalo Delgado does not hide that the idea for the project came to him after reading The Black Book, written by Soviet journalists Vasili Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, a compendium of the Nazi barbarism that befell the Jews and other communities stigmatized by extremists.
Grossman's account of the Treblinka camp, which he liberated with the Moscow troops, was used as evidence in the Nuremberg tribunal that judged the atrocities of the European country's regime.
"The genocidal campaign on Gaza has made it really difficult to differentiate which stories emerged from the pen of Ehrenburg and Grossman, and which from that of Ghaydaa al Abadesa, Ibrahim Yaghi, or any of the young people perpetuating the testimony of this perverse repetition of history," Delgado insists in the book's prologue.
Many of the authors participating in this project are former students of the Gazan poet Refaat Alareer, an intellectual who established the We Are Not Numbers movement in 2015 to promote the English-language creation of writers from that territory. Alareer died in December 2023, along with numerous members of his family, in an Israeli bombing of the home they occupied in Gaza, an incident that the NGO described as an "apparently deliberate assassination."
According to the NGO, the attack focused solely on his apartment, located in a three-story building, and "occurred after weeks of death threats that Refaat received online and by phone from Israeli accounts."
Deema Fayyad, 21, was one of Refaat's students and began writing within the space created by We Are Not Numbers. She made her debut last January, coinciding with the ceasefire declared by the Israeli army. The young Palestinian had to flee her residence in the Jan Yunis camp a year earlier and ended up taking refuge in Deir el Balah. Shortly after, in February 2024, Israeli planes literally flattened the family residence in Jan Yunis.
Through WhatsApp messages, she explains to EL MUNDO that at the beginning of this year, she thought the worst was behind them. "We believed we had survived," she says.
"I fell in love with writing. It is very important because it is documenting and communicating all the suffering of Gazans to people outside. And it is refuting the lies of Israeli propaganda. We know that many foreigners are outraged by what is happening in Gaza, and writing has been a key element in reaching this point," adds the young university student.
"The world remains silent, but our pencils do not," echoes poet Madera Mushtha from the Gaza neighborhood of Shujaiya, also via WhatsApp. Her words cannot hide the clear buzz of Israeli drones flying over the Gaza sky.
The collection is a review of the brutality and dismay that Palestinians in Gaza have been facing for almost two years. From writings that refer to the continuous displacements they are forced into under Israeli military pressure, to the everyday scenes of death that accompany them.
There are accounts that highlight the almost epic work that doctors and healthcare workers carry out in what remains of Gaza's healthcare system, or that describe the torture suffered by Palestinian prisoners in the Ofer prison, one of the Israeli centers that now rival in sad fame with the dungeons of the regime of Bashar Asad. It also recalls the brutal attack that ended dozens of lives at Café Baqa, one of the last bastions in the Strip that sought to preserve the memory of what that place was before October 7, 2023.
The authors confirm how activities as common in our world as studying for university exams or getting pregnant become monumental challenges in the face of all kinds of shortages.
Writing itself has become a juggling act. Deema, for example, lost her computer when her house was bombed, and now she has to use her phone to draft ideas that she then writes with a pen on paper. "It is difficult and tiring for the eyes to focus for hours on that small screen," she comments.
Deema chose to write about the controversial humanitarian aid drops, which have been discredited by the UN and most humanitarian groups, and criticized by the Palestinian population for their minimal impact in halting the crisis and the fact that they have crushed several people in the coastal territory.
According to the young Palestinian, when these actions resurged in July - the first wave of airdrops was recorded last year - she decided to denounce "how horrible it is to be starved to death and then have crumbs of food thrown at you, provoking deadly fights among a desperate population."
"We feel deeply humiliated," she adds.
There are also those, like Ibrahim Yaghi, who emphasize the double standard maintained by most Western media in describing the conflict in the former Palestine Mandate, accusing them of being part of "a system designed to perpetuate" the stereotype and not "recognize that Israel is not a victim, but an occupying and colonial power."
"Misinformation is not a mistake, it is a strategy. And the media's perspective is not neutral, it is a complicit view," the young man points out.
The relationship between Palestinian literature and the resilience of that community is as long as the list of renowned creators who actively participated in the struggle to rid themselves of Israeli occupation. From Edward Said - whose intellectual talent rivaled the influence of his political activism - to figures who alternated between writing and advocating for armed struggle like Ghassan Kanafani or Bassel al Araj.
The collection of texts includes an annex where the writings of Israeli authors who acknowledge the suffering of Palestinians will be compiled, an endeavor that Delgado admits is challenging, given the majority position of Jewish society in this state, which almost unequivocally supports the controversial actions of its armed forces.
On Tuesday, Ron Gerlitz, director of the Israeli association Achord, released a recent survey indicating that 76% of Israelis identify "totally or partially" with the assertion of the most extremist sectors that claim "there are no innocents in Gaza."
"Israeli society is on the brink of the abyss or already in it. Dehumanization and the perception that there are no innocents on the other side is what has led to terrible situations throughout history," warned Gerlitz himself on social media when commenting on the findings of his survey.
"This is just the climax of a long process in which Palestinians were dehumanized. Now we can kill each other en masse," admits Amira Hass, a journalist for the Haaretz newspaper—one of the few voices questioning the actions of Tel Aviv and its army—in a telephone conversation.
"My mother wrote not only to document the Holocaust, but as a form of therapy, to maintain her sanity. The same as these Palestinians. And, like what my mother did, it is an act of resistance and resilience," she concludes.