Never again. Again.

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This article was published 14/10/2023 (903 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“They just said, we found Emily, she’s dead and I went yes,” Thomas Hand, interviewed on CNN, Oct. 11, 2023

You don’t have to be the parent or grandparent of an eight-year-old to begin to understand the emotions of this Irish-born father, Thomas Hand.

He had just learned that his daughter was among those executed by Hamas Jew-haters, at the Be’eri Kibbutz in southern Israel. She was on a sleepover when the terror attack was launched. He was much relieved to learn of his own daughter’s demise because he knew she might have suffered a fate much worse than death.

His greatest fear was that his little girl had been taken hostage with scores of other children and adults to Gaza. How does any father express a morsel of joy when learning that his child has been murdered? Only when you learn the context of the war crime can this father’s reaction make any sense.

“I went yes, and smiled because that is the best news of the possibilities that I knew. The best possibility that I was hoping for … She was either dead or in Gaza, and if you know anything about what they do to people in Gaza, that is worse than death,” said Emily’s father.

This is the week we learned that losing a child to a terrorist with a gun, a knife and lighter fluid, is not the worst nightmare scenario for a parent. In the case of what’s going on in Israel and Gaza, life could be even worse than death for any Israeli hostage. Hamas is holding an estimated 150 hostages in Gaza. But Thomas Hand knows that one of them is not his eight-year old-daughter. Mercifully, from his perspective, Emily is dead.

“The way they treat you, they have no food, they have no water. … She’d be in a dark room with Christ knows how many people and terrified every minute, hour, day and possible years to come … So death was a blessing, an absolute blessing.”

Many stories are emerging from these darkest of days, but the story told to special correspondent Clarissa Ward, of CNN, is one that I will never forget.

Remembering the lives of human beings murdered in cold blood is something this columnist has experience with.

My late father regularly reminded me, ever since I was Emily’s age, that it was his duty and therefore my duty, to remember his mother and father and brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and neighbours whose final breaths were taken in a ditch or a gas chamber, mass murdered by Hitler’s Jew-haters.

Mike Adler believed his chief personal responsibility was holding on to the memory of those who died at the hands of those contaminated by the world’s oldest ideological poison, antisemitism.

“The way to honour their lives, is to never forget that they were real human beings — much more than the numbers the SS branded into their arms,” said Mike Adler. The two words “Never again” were his marching orders. He seared them into my eight-year-old brain. He employed “Never again” when he commanded me to go to law school. He wanted his son, the grandson of his murdered parents, to prosecute war criminals.

He said it was the most appropriate way to give meaning to “Never again” and to honour the memory of those given capital punishment for having committed every antisemite’s idea of a capital crime — living with Jewish blood.

Because of Mike Adler’s unfulfilled dream, I live with Jewish guilt. I let him down. Somewhere in the hell of his final years of Alzheimer’s, my father told one of his caregivers, that he was proud of me. He pointed to the radio as he was listening to my show, smiled at her, and said “My son. My son.”

My father would affirm Thomas Hand’s relief when learning that Emily was dead.

Mike Adler was told that his parents were incinerated shortly after deboarding the train at Auschwitz. It was final days of the war. The Nazis were weeks away from surrendering, so they chose to exterminate as many Jews as possible. Your parents and siblings were put to death, Mike Adler was told. That was much better than being worked to death.

Thomas Hand, I have a message for you from the late Mike Adler. We will never forget your daughter, Emily. Never again. Never again. Never again.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. charles@charlesadler.com