A very painful episode unfolded today on the Lebanese-Israeli border when Hizbollah returned the bodies of two dead Israeli soldiers in return for several live prisoners including one convicted of a particularly heinous murder, Samir Kuntar.
It raises difficult issues. On one hand, Israel is fulfilling a pledge it makes to all its soldiers never to abandon them and granting their families some closure. On the other, it is releasing hardened terrorists who may well kill again and granting Hizbollah a propaganda victory. Even now, they are celebrating their success in liberating murderers in exchange for corpses.
I was in Israel when that attack took place in 1979. I will never forget the horror.
Here are the words of one victim, Smadar Haran Kaiser, from an account published in the Washington Post (May 18, 2003)
"It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border. Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer. As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.
Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. "This is just like what happened to my mother," I thought.
As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl's skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar."
By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

My father, Eugene Elsner, celebrated his 90th birthday last week. Some readers will know of his amazing story of survival in World War II from my book, "Guarded by Angels." To give a sense of who he is, I'm posting here his speech from his birthday party.
Happy Birthday Daddy and Many More!

There are many answers you’ll get when you ask different people what they know about the older generation. Some will tell you they know all there is to know about them. On the whole they will tell you the oldies are doing alright They queue up early every month to collect their old age pensions . Then they get back home to doze off in their armchairs. They also get reduced entry charges to national parks. and to some cinemas And if they happen to live in England they don’t have to pay any bus fares after 9 o’clock in the morning. So they haven’t got much to complain about, but very often they do...
Other people will tell you, old folks live in the past They bury themselves in their memories, judge everything by the standards of yesterday and just let the real world pass them by.
Maybe all that is true to some extent of some older people in this and also in some other countries. But for most of us living in Israel that kind of thinking is not an option. Too much is going on., Here miracles occur on a regular basis. We can never doze off or relax for too long in case we miss one..
And there is nothing wrong with memories. Young or old we all have them. We may have them as pleasant dreams or as nightmares, but quite often they help us to avoid errors we have made in the past.
And sometimes memories intrude on us unexpectedly. This happened to me only a few days ago as I was thinking of our coming get- together tonight.
Without any warning I found myself trying to imagine what my late parents would think of their sons, Mark and me and their children and grandchildren if they could see us all tonight. They would be proud and happy and love them all, I was certain. But then very quickly it came to me, that when the clock stopped for our mother and father on that fatal day in 1943 they were only 47 and 49 years old .Young people really. Much, much too young to perish.. It made me as sad as always when they enter my memory.
Fortunately not all the trips into the past are so sad or depressing. Some are just unforgettable. So on this occasion I hope you will allow me to reminisce just a little You know of the events I am going to tell you from films or history books. But it’s different when one almost witnessed them. This one happened on 29th November 1947 just two years after the end of the second world war. It was two o’clock in the morning and I listened on the radio as the 58 states of the United Nations were taking a vote on partitioning Palestine into an Arab and Jewish state. The tension was unbearable. Apart from worrying about the fate of the yishuv I had many olim friends there, whose future and maybe life depended on the outcome of that vote.
My London landlady was greatly alarmed when she was woken up by my shouting and hurrahs and dancing round the room, when the result was announced What followed that vote after a bitter struggle, was the miracle of Eretz Israel whose 60th anniversary we are celebrating this month.
Many events happened or had their beginnings in the month of May , my birth included. In May 1967 the celebration of my birthday was forgotten by the enormous worry about the events in Israel. In the last two weeks of May the situation has changed from dangerous to alarming. Our enemies and many others were proclaiming that Israel’s days were numbered Each days news was more ominous than the previous one and the various experts in the English media, and many others around the world came to conclusion that the forces gathered against it were so overwhelming that Israel could not be expected to survive for longer than perhaps one, two or three weeks at most. Its fate was sealed. Obituaries were being prepared.
What happened in the Six Day War was a miracle that in my eyes beats the biblical story which tells us how God parted the Red Sea so that His Chosen People the slaves of the Egyptian Pharaoh could escape and his armies to drown.
Only this time around in June 1967, as everybody knows the modern Israelites did it all by themselves with perhaps, and only if you are a believer just a little help from above.
But let’s come back to the present. The reality of the present is that we have a marvelous little country which in spite of all the various blemishes that we hear so much about, we can all be proud of and that Helen and I, Alan and Shula Gill and Ralph have children and grandchildren any family would cherish and be proud of and no matter what the defeatists are trying to tell you. our country and our children have a future of great achievements in front of them So let’s lift our glasses and drink to it. L’Haim!

My nephew, Edan Schiller, a film student at the Sapir College in Sderot, Israel had a narrow escape today. He'd been standing in a parking lot waiting for a lift. Two minutes later, a missile fired from Gaza hit that same place and killed a man. It was one of 40 missiles fired at the town today.

Edan is not easily shaken out of his customary laid-back attitude to life but this day was quite scary even for him. Several times, classes were interrupted when the missile alert sounded and the entire student body, as well as everyone else in the town, scrambled to get to the shelters. One time he was out on the street when the alarm sounded. He had only a few seconds to take cover.

The world really has to take this situation more seriously. On one hand, Israel is condemned for keeping the Gazans "imprisoned" in their territory. When they attack those responsible for the rockets, they are criticized for that too. When they take non-violent steps, such as cutting down the electricity supply, they are criticized for that as well.

Much of the world evidently feels they should just sit there and take it.

How long would any European country or the United States just sit there when scores of rockets are fired at its civilian population day after day?

Some background:

More than 800 rockets and mortar shells have been fired from Gaza into Israel this year. That amounts to more than a third of the 2,300 fired at Israel during all of 2007. Since Aug. 2005, when Israel withdrew all of its citizens and military from the Gaza Strip in hopes of paving the way for an independent Palestinian state, terrorists in Gaza have fired more than 4,500 rockets and mortars at Israel. There has been a significant increase in the number of rocket and mortar attacks launched from Gaza since Hamas took control of the area in a bloody siege against Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction in June 2007.

I wrote an article about Romanian Jewry for the Washington Jewish Week.

You can read it here.