Not Comparing. Remembering.
- Amir Pansky
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
This pair of words, “Don’t compare”, has become a common phrase, used with a mix of humor and bitterness whenever, well, the comparison is screaming to the heavens. The prohibition is absolute. Completely forbidden. No questions asked. No why, no how, no under what circumstances, and not even a moment’s reflection on why it is so forbidden. And indeed, Amir Pansky, one of the most dedicated activists on the ground, does not compare. He only remembers the stories of his father, an Auschwitz survivor.
Ayala Shalev, Editor, That’s About Us
Not Comparing. Remembering.
Amir Pansky
During my protective presence activism in the Jordan Valley, I meet parents whose children are attacked and beaten by Jewish minors, while they themselves are unable to protect them, and I cannot help but remember my father and his stories. I am not comparing. The stories come to me on their own. Like the story of my father at age fifteen in Auschwitz, who was flogged as punishment, while his own father had no choice but to stand by and watch silently as his firstborn son was beaten.
I am the child of a Holocaust survivor, the sole survivor in his nuclear family.
My father, born in 1928, was eleven years old when the Germans invaded Poland. From his childhood memory, he told how soldiers arrived on motorcycles with sidecars in his town, and that was how the family learned of the occupation. From then on, for four years, until August 1943, when his family was deported to Auschwitz, he lived under German occupation.
For years, the Germans shattered every familial, social, and public structure in their very methodical, organized way.
1 My father, at age twelve, was forced to smuggle food and essential items into the ghettos in which they stayed in order to sustain his family. 2 An inverted world, in which parents could not care for their children, and children seemingly carried the household, doing whatever was required to keep the family alive. The more distant relatives they never saw again.
My father and his family were expelled from their home 3 over and over again. His parents’ shops and shoe factory were nationalized and became Polish or German property. 4
Following Spielberg’s film, my father was interviewed and asked whether they had not resisted the Germans. Fear was reflected in his eyes. The look of an eleven-year-old child that seemed that was frozen for fifty-eight years. His answer was simple: if you so much as touched a German soldier’s hair, or a German settler’s hair, an entire village would be punished. 5 This was called “pacification.” In Avi Bluth’s (an Israeli Major general who currently heads the Central Command) military Hebrew, it is called “restructuring.”
In August 1943, his/my family, was taken to Auschwitz. His mother, brother, and sister were sent directly to the gas chambers. My father and my grandfather became forced laborers. As forced laborers, my father, then fifteen years old, was flogged. His father, my grandfather, stood by in pain, unable to react. 6
Today, after many years, everything is awakening in me.
I did not think, perhaps I was very naive, that I would find analogies to these events in this day and age. Acts carried out by people with an identity card like mine. And in my name.
In some respects, the actions are carried out using methods no less cruel, and perhaps even more so. Abuse without rules. Without laws. Without order. In Israeli terms: things are done under the table. With buddy-style familiarity. Without documentation. Not of the acts, and not of the victims.
By analogy to an iceberg, of which only fourteen percent protrudes above the water, it is reasonable to assume that a large portion of the thousands of young offenders in the West Bank and in Israel do not know what specific gravity is, after being plucked from the Yeshiva high schools to become “shepherds” for pennies.
And to the heart of the matter, having seen everything with my own eyes as a protective presence activist:
1 The State of Israel has been breaking down every social and communal fabric for decades. Arbitrary arrests, prevention of organizing, arrest of leaders or potential leaders, abuse and humiliation of parents in front of their children and vice versa.
2 Parents are unable to provide for their families, exposed to blood libels, imprisonment, and even killing. Economic punishment. Denial of health services, water. Restriction of movement.
3 Entire communities are expelled from their homes time and again (not to mention what is happening in the Gaza Strip). Checkpoints, sealed villages. All avenues of livelihood are blocked. How many readers have stood for hours at an arbitrary checkpoint manned by soldiers of the “Rescue and Salvation of Jews Only” Command (Home Front Command) at Ein Shibli in the Jordan Valley?
4 “Farms” are established on the lands and territories of Palestinian communities. Palestinian homes are nationalized for the benefit of the Jewish people. Herds undergo proper conversion on the very evening of the theft. Those that refuse are executed. See Hammamat al Maleh (July 18th, 2025).
5 Collective punishment has become the second name of the IDF. Major General Avi Bluth even boasted about it at a press conference when he ordered the uprooting of thousands of olive trees, a source of livelihood and cultural heritage for Palestinian families. The army and settlers claimed there was gunfire that wounded a fourteen-year-old Jewish offender driving an ATV in the village of Al-Mughayyir, while I hear about many ATV accidents which outpost minors are driving.
6 I see Jews harassing women while the men’s hands are tied. I see children who defended their families and tried to fend off settler offenders who invaded their homes and walked through them as if they were the owners – and then eight soldiers, police officers, and settlers arrived to arrest the children, as happened this week in Ras Ras Al Ein.
I am not comparing. I am only remembering my father’s memories.
Amir Pansky is a human rights activist in the Jordan Valley and the West Bank since 2010. He has seen, and is seeing, everything.
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