Mr Weissmann, born in France in 1940, said the attack had revived childhood memories.
Modiin, Israel:
Yaakov Weissmann survived the horrors of the Holocaust by going into hiding with a non-Jewish family in France during World War II, when he was just four years old.
Now 83, he survived the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, which has drawn comparisons to Nazi atrocities because of its brutality.
Yaakov Weissmann’s village of Netiv Haassara is just 500 meters from the border with the Gaza Strip, from where Hamas Islamists marched into Israel under cover of a hail of rockets, killing 1,400 people, mostly civilians.
Israel declared war on Hamas and has since relentlessly bombarded Gaza with airstrikes that authorities in the densely populated enclave say have killed 2,750 people, most of them ordinary Palestinians.
Yaakov Weissmann heard rockets going off around 6 a.m. that Saturday, which was also the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest.
“Rockets, rockets and bangs. Well, it’s not the first time,” said Yaakov Weissmann, whose village of 800 residents is used to projectiles aimed at Israel by armed Palestinian groups.
With a gun in hand, he and his wife followed the drill to enter his fortified shelter – something every house in the area is equipped with, which locks the door and window in 15 seconds.
“Then I, together with my wife, heard machine gun fire. When we heard this, we know that an infiltration of enemy forces has taken place,” he said.
A deep sadness came over him, he said, “because as soon as there’s gunfire, I know there’s going to be a death.”
When he emerged from the shelter, he was relieved to discover that all 23 of his descendants – children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren – living in the village were still alive.
Fury
Twenty people in Netiv Haassara were killed, including many whom Mr Weissmann knew personally.
Five of them died with weapons in their hands. They were security volunteers, said Weissmann, who believes they helped prevent further bloodshed.
As the day passed, the scale and horror of the attack became clear.
In the worst-hit villages, entire families, including babies, were murdered in their homes, some also set on fire.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the attacks were “an atrocity never seen since the Holocaust.”
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Hamas fighters have taken “evil to another level” among Islamic State jihadists.
Ten days later, Mr. Weissmann said that the overwhelming emotion for him besides sadness is “anger, because how has our famous army been overwhelmed?”
Mr Weissmann, born in France in 1940, said the attack had revived memories of his youth hiding from the Nazis.
His Polish parents fled the pogroms to move to France in 1933, but his father was arrested by the Nazi-allied French militia in 1944.
He was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered.
A non-Jewish family took him and his sister to a village near the southeastern city of Lyon, as if they were visiting their cousins.
After the war, Mr. Weissmann moved to Israel, first living close to the Jordanian border before settling in Netiv Haassara, a farming village on the Sinai Peninsula after it was captured by Israel from Egypt during the 1967 Six-Day War.
But the village was evacuated in 1982 as part of a peace deal that returned control of the peninsula to Egypt.
It was then moved to its current location close to the Gaza Strip, keeping the name.
‘Exterminate them’
At the age of 83, Yaakov Weissmann has been displaced again – this time to a retirement home in central Modiin, Israel.
Residents of villages near Gaza have largely abandoned their homes in recent days as Israeli forces gathered in preparation for a ground invasion.
“I don’t want revenge, but I want those responsible to pay,” said Yaakov Weissmann, adding that “not only Hamas is to blame, but also Gaza” who “jumped for joy and distributed sweets” when the gunmen carried out their attack.
His greatest revenge against the Nazis was simply to survive and start a family.
“You wanted to exterminate us, well, I had children and grandchildren and we live,” he said, adding that he uses the compensation Germany pays him as a Holocaust survivor to take the family on holiday.
What he wants for Hamas is to “remove them from the map.”
Israel’s promise to “destroy” Hamas must be kept, he said, adding: “Then I will calm down.”
Then he says without hesitation that he plans to return to Netiv Haassara.
“But I can understand that my daughters might not want that,” he admitted.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
