Martin Lange // Photo credit: David Cliff / NurPhoto / NurPhoto via AFP
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7:54 a.m., November 4, 2023
As the fighting continues in Gaza, the IDF, the Israeli army, has made a new assessment of the hostages. There are still 242 of them in the hands of the Palestinian Islamist movement. Among them, Alex Danzig, a 75-year-old historian, a figure of peace and reconciliation between Israel and Poland.
He is one of 242 detained by Hamas. Alex Danzig’s life changed for the first time in 1957. He was nine years old when his parents, survivors of the Shoah, decided to leave Poland to settle in Israel. But he will never forget his country of origin. As in 1973, in the middle of the Yom Kippur War, when he celebrated a Polish goal, his fellow paratroopers even having believed in a ceasefire announcement.
“Help us bring Alex home”
An engineer by training, Alex Danzig returned to Warsaw at the end of the 1980s and finally found his vocation: to renew the dialogue between Israel and Poland. A non-existent dialogue in the two countries since the Holocaust and decades of communism. He organized the first trips of Jews to Poland, opened the doors of the camps to them, without ever stigmatizing: “to say that the Poles were anti-Semitic is a lie”.
The historian also trains dozens of Polish teachers to teach the Holocaust. Colleagues who are now mobilized on a Facebook group called “Help Bring Alex Home”, help us bring Alex home. On October 7, Alex Danzig was on the phone with his son when Hamas fighters raided his Niz Oz kibbutz. Almost a month later, only the testimony of a recently released hostage can attest that he is still alive.