“We just cried”
Rescue worker reports “truck full of bodies”
October 12, 2023, 6:48 a.m
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Hundreds of bodies are being recovered by rescue workers after the end of the fighting on Israeli territory. The helpers, actually hardened, are struggling with nerves given their large number. “There were trucks full of bodies,” says a volunteer from the Zaka rescue service.
A rescue worker in Israel reported unimaginable scenes on site after the massacre by Hamas terrorists. “We thought we were strong, we thought we had seen everything, but we were convinced otherwise,” says Avigdor Stern. The 39-year-old is one of hundreds of volunteers from the Zaka rescue service who have been helping for days in the border area with the Gaza Strip to completely recover the dead in order to pay their last respects.
He was in the synagogue when he heard about the worst bloodbath in Israeli history. He actually wanted to celebrate the Jewish holiday Simchat Torah (Joy of the Torah). “But we couldn’t dance, we just cried,” he says. After the holiday, he and his colleagues drove to the villages in the border area and found kilometers of devastation. “At that moment our lives changed forever,” says Stern, who lived as a rabbi in Konstanz on Lake Constance for several years. “Such a mass of corpses, a corpse and another corpse and another corpse,” says Stern. There were so many that the body bags weren’t enough. They had to be requested from all over Israel. “There were trucks full of corpses,” says Stern, describing the scenes on site.
He and his colleagues had already seen a lot – victims of tsunamis, earthquakes, accidents, attacks, but this dimension was one that no one had expected. “Women, men, children, babies, I can’t explain it at all,” says the Zaka helper and shows a photo with a small body bag. Written on it is “Baby.”
In the Jewish faith, every part of a body must be buried, Stern explains. This is how people are paid their last respects. This is Zaka’s job. “We knew we couldn’t stop, we knew we had to do this now.”