Once she was a child (Noffey Haneffesh: Soul Landscapes)

Soul Landscapes tells the universal story of childhood in times of upheaval, as conveyed by some of the most extraordinary international woman writers. Done mostly on location, these intimate encounters mirror a rainbow of human existence shaped by injustice, turmoil and struggle, and still victorious: six year-old Russian Svetlana Vasilenko awaiting death while caught between the Powers dueling with nuclear bombs; the little Italian child Dacia Maraini starved in a Japanese concentration camp; twelve-year-old. Belgian Am?lie Nothomb, reading by candlelight in a Bangladeshi lepers' house; five-year-old Leena Lander living in the Finnish prison for delinquent boys where her father worked as a supervisor, contemplating in fear and horror her sexually mangled doll found thrown in the forest; eight-year-old Palestinian Anissa Darwish torn by war from the Malkha village of her sweet childhood and the author herself - Corinna Hasofferett, born in Tecuci, Romania - all and each of the writers in this book map the way to survival and hope.
They ask us also to take a second look at our own life, and, well informed, to make sure the right decisions are taken in all that concerns this precious little world.

As a literary form, ONCE SHE WAS A CHILD is a hybrid: it owns the genes of literary fiction, with its attention to language, ambiguities and symbols, carved out by the author's mostly invisible questions, and editing; and it carries the genes of narrative nonfiction as those are real life stories of real, and most impressive persons, showing how gloriously they've survived Evil. Glimpses from The Past, of childhood recollections, set, like pearls on a string, with the author's journal as the connecting thread or background. The reader is invited to absorb. At the end of the book s/he'll discover in a separate section, as an addendum, how far they've reached in The Present.

HudnaPress. Hebrew Publication Date: Spring 2003
Rights information can be obtained at: hudnapress (at) gmail (dot) com

Excerpt:

In the Beginning

When my children were little we were standing one day at the bus stop. It was very hot, August. Suddenly, across from us, two children, suddenly one of them cried to his friend: 'You Arab!'

I looked at my children startled. The younger was then three, the same age I was when I came out of kindergarten and they threw stones at us and cried, 'Jidans, go away to Palestine!' Children I'd played with the day before.

I wanted my children to know that 'Arab' was the name of a people, not a curse.

So I made contact through friends of some friends with members of the Arab intelligentsia who lived in a village in the Galilee and we visited them, they visited us, a contact was made. Mahmud and Lutfia Diab, from Tamra, two hours from Tel Aviv. That was in 1970.

Three years later Lutfia's younger sister, Amal, married her teacher, Munir Diab. And Munir began in those years to manage there the first Arabic community center. So in 1975 the idea occurred to me to arrange a meeting between educated youths from Tamra and from a neighboring Jewish settlement with Jewish and Arabic artists. Munir loved the idea and thanks to him it really happened. We had meetings and conversations with Aharon Meged, Anton Shamas, A. B. Yehoshua. Once every two weeks. One time in Tamra and one time in Shlomi. Finally we had an evening of theater improvisation with the late Peter Fry. He came several times and prepared them.

From the start I'd limited my involvement in that for only half a year. I would come there every two weeks. Shlomi is located eight hundred meters, half a mile, from the Lebanese border. At that time terrorists murdered at night a mother and her two year old daughter, in Dovev. And still people came to the meetings and participated. Very willingly. But in one of the meetings, in Shlomi, someone said, 'Fine. Only you are returning to Tel Aviv and we are staying here not knowing what terrorist will roll upon us at night from the mountain.'

In my apartment in Tel Aviv we lived at the time five people in a space of four hundred and twenty square feet. No room of my own, there wasn't even a bedroom.

Then I thought, if there was a place to which artists would come for a stay of some weeks or months so they can be free to create, then both the artists and the community would benefit. It would answer to the needs.

I returned to Tel Aviv and began telling all kinds of people and organizations, that that was what they had to do. Some said, How come, and some would say, 'Why not, do it.' In those days the world was divided for me into dreamers, and doers. Two separate groups. Me, do? I come up with ideas, and they should do. But all the time it still bothered, burned in my bones. In 1984 I suddenly got up and said, 'I am acting to found such a place.' Now I understand that in that moment I turned from a child citizen into an adult citizen. Very difficult. You need to go to the world, and bow down. It's impossible without money.

Within all these hardships, in Europe as well as in the United States, I would go into bookstores, to find solace. And I would think, So many books, So many woman writers! Who are they?

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Introduction To Niam el Baz, part One

It turns out that the British knew about the death camps already in 1941. They knew from the German army transmissions that they were able to decipher. From these transmissions it was clear also that the German army cooperated with the SS and not as has been claimed all those years, that they had no part in the murder of the Jews.

Churchill knew.

Before and after 1941, the British Empire knew, and did not let my parents immigrate to Eretz Israel. With the knowledge that by doing so they were abandoning us to the hands of the murderers.

So I was born in Romania, Niam.
A small house, that my maternal grandfather and grandmother collected penny to penny to build. That we left behind, in December 1947, since the exit from Romania had to be done in secret.

Tile-roofs, spotted hens in the courtyard. A pleasure to discover an egg among the flowers, to punch a tiny hole and drink it on the spot, warm and fresh, and the egg-yolk soft.
A neighbor who had returned from a visit to see relatives in Eretz Israel said that there in the kibbutzim they had this piece of furniture, a play-pen, for infants, and they should build one just like it for the twins.

A year ago my aunt told me, "Even when you were babies, we used to take you out of the play-pen first. You were like that, quite a number."
They say it was a large piece of furniture, of heavy wood.

One evening, when I was four, four and a half, I collected the letters from a piece of newspaper and read a whole word, out loud. The room filled with silence like during the revelation of the Messiah.

Our uncles, twenty, twenty-five years old, would come in the evenings and dance ballroom dances with us, when we were three, four, five. Then they took them, and our father, all the Jewish men, to forced hard labor.

They put them to work by the railway tracks. The German soldiers would pass by on the trains and shoot for fun, at them and at the Romanian guards. My uncle says that one of the prisoners would always lie with his ear on the tracks to hear if a
train was approaching, so they could hide from the Germans in time, they and their guards.

One in the afternoon.
A call from Idit, who works at Yad va-Shem. She is sending me a list of the books they have in Arabic about the Holocaust.
There is only the one problem, how to send them to Niam.

Now, after having completed the deciphering of the conversation with her, again and again I see Niam's bold face as she says authoritatively what she'd been fed by Neo-Nazis in Germany, "It's not true!".

The Jews weren't allowed to ride the trains, (except for those in which they were taken to the death camps) and father did, in order to send, each time from a different town, anonymous letters to the editor of the newspaper PORUNCA VREMEI -- The Order of the Day: "If you do not want us, why don't you let us go to Palestine, where Jesus bade almost two thousand years ago Love thy neighbor like yourself."

The Order of the Day answered:
'The leprous jidani, awaiting their Talmudic rule, are sending their leprous fingers across all the nations and taking dominance over them. This is the reason that rivers of blood have been shed, and not only Romanian blood.'

The neighbors to our right were Christians. Father, mother, daughter and a son a few years older than us. We would go over to them through a hole in the fence.
I saw them also on the sidewalk among the children, when they were throwing stones at us and shouting, "Jidani, go away to Palestine!"

Afterwards, but after what? What should have come later, maturity, came too early. In my life, like in the life of that whole generation, times got mixed up. One day they confiscated our house, and we lived in the servants' room in the yard. And another day we came out of a shelter, and on the street we found a parade
of Russian tanks, people were applauding, and the town was full of loudspeakers, Red Army songs, announcements of daily victories, while children, skin and bones from hell, were arriving to town, forbidden for us to touch lest we catch what they had been struck with. They put them up in the Jewish school until they were adopted or driven to orphanages.

But it was impossible to disinfect the entire world in order to protect us because right after that, or before that, someone brought a bar of soap from the death camps and the whole town marched at the funeral.

Yesterday, over the phone, I said to a Israeli friend, "My childhood stories were the Nuremberg trials" and she said, "What a terrible thing to say."

I would sit on my uncles' knees and give them the daily reports from the trials of the Nazis in Nuremberg after the war. I read from the newspaper and they were so pleased and proud of me, that yes, there was nothing to worry about, the memory-safe was in good hands.

So the world, which during the first years had behaved like a womb, was cut apart and healed again, cut apart and healed.
Outwardly there was still the appearance of paradise. In the spring, in the summer, and in the autumn, ornamental flowers blossomed. Large and warm raindrops fertilized the leaves of the trees and the bushes. In the winter the snow piled up as high as
the fence, and the frost painted Christmas tree decorations on the windowpanes.

There, amidst all this, for twelve winters and summers I was Corinna.