My grandmother escaped the Warsaw ghetto after her first of four sisters died from hunger. She slipped through a few missing bricks in the wall that sealed the Jewish population away from their Aryan neighbors, where they were trapped in poverty and malnourishment and subject to Nazi plans for extermination. Scholars report that 92,000 Jews died of starvation in the ghetto before 300,000 were deported to camps. After escaping, my grandmother — just a teenager — snuck food to her family several times before the rest of her family died, and my grandmother stayed hungry for many years, as she survived the Holocaust on her own.
“When you hungry, you soul flies out,” Bubbe, as I called her, said in her testimony of survival. Bubbe is most tragically poetic in her descriptions of hunger, and she never forgot the way her sister died asking for a piece of bread, just a shtickle fun broyt. Bulging eyes and blue lips. My grandmother’s relationship to food was forever marked by the ghost of hunger. Once she was living safely in the American suburbs, she was never without a loaf of rye bread in the freezer.
My grandmother knew about the essential dignity of every human being. At the end of the war, when she was liberated by the Russians in the Polish city of Lukov, she noticed the German soldiers walking around without boots, and she felt sad for them. “You see a person is hurt,” she said, “you want to help.” How we respond to the needs of those around us — this is what forms the basis of our character.
In drawing a book about my grandmother’s story, I thought often about the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” At the bottom of the pyramid is our basic physiology, our need for food and water, and above that our need for security and safety. Only when these needs are met, can we focus on higher planes, seeking belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization. It is only because my grandparents fought so hard, endured so much, for their bread that I am in a position to reflect on what my grandmother’s struggle for survival means for my identity, my sense of meaning and my politics.
Her legacy taught me that every group of people deserves to live free from hunger and fear of violence in their homes, that we all need bread and boots. She taught me that we should tell the stories, all stories, of exile and loss and persecution. She taught me to love and believe in America, and that the Jews of the world are safest in liberal democracies, with governments that grant equal opportunity for all in their jurisdiction.
As I learned more about Jewish history, I came to believe that the long story of Jewish suffering resulted in an attempt to solve “the Jewish Problem” by creating a Palestinian Problem, that the Israeli government has never sufficiently reckoned with its role in Palestinian persecution, and that the fate of Palestinians and Israelis is, consequently, forever linked, and therefore the only viable future for either peoples lies in the two learning to break bread together.
I can more easily imagine this future because I — unlike my grandmother, unlike my Jewish cousins in Israel, and unlike all Palestinians living under occupation — have not feared for basic survival. But those who’ve lost more than I have share this vision. And I believe it’s my duty, at the very least, to hold on to my imagination.
But in the face of hunger, words and ideas begin to melt, then evaporate. Hunger is stupifying.
The mounting starvation statistics in Gaza change daily, and they are all bad. In May, 5,000 children diagnosed with malnutrition. A 24-hour period with 19 deaths from starvation. At least 1,400 people have been killed in Gaza while trying to access food since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an opaquely funded American and Israeli organization that 25 experts have called an “insult to the humanitarian enterprise and standards,” began dominating distribution of aid in the Gaza Strip, in the name of diverting food from Hamas. The blockade, the system of severe restrictions on the movement of goods and people into and out of Gaza, has halted the flow of food and medical supplies, and frequent breakdowns in telecommunications have severely challenged the efforts to distribute what aid does get in.
Outside of Gaza, we are in a position to quibble about statistics and argue about what words we use to describe other people’s suffering. Many scholars have called the constant killings, the reduction of Palestinian infrastructure to rubble and the systematic blockade of humanitarian aid a genocide. For many Jewish people with direct connections to the Holocaust, the story of genocide is so total, so unimaginable, it’s hard to reconcile a word with such totemic power with something happening right now, in front of our eyes, on our phones.
Yet some Jewish Holocaust survivors identify with the images of Gaza’s destruction and feel compelled to use the strongest language available in condemnation. Others use the terms ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity, while some just want to call this a war. These distinctions matter; a designation of genocide would, theoretically, oblige the international community to act, with sanctions or criminal prosecution for those responsible. But this semantic dialogue can produce a kind of blank despair. Starving children make fine distinctions feel hollow.
The Israeli government claims there is “no starvation” in Gaza, even as officials have moved to address this starvation in response to international and internal pressure, with pauses in fighting and minimal air drops. Israel’s defenders admit there is a starvation problem in Gaza, but blame Hamas and Hamas-infiltrated international organizations for looting humanitarian aid, a claim that has been widely debunked.
The Israeli government says this is a war of defense. This is the logic that has led, for example, to the siege of Gaza’s already limited clean water supply. We can acknowledge the violence, the constant fear and the deep disappointment both peoples have experienced for decades, without equating these experiences, all the while seeing the moral imperative clearly: Food and water for all must come before security for some, all of which must come before ideology. This formulation implies that those wielding the most resources, Israeli and American institutions, must be willing to sacrifice some security in the name of ensuring hungry people are fed. There’s no future for Israelis or Palestinians in which one people’s security comes before another people’s basic physiological needs, in wartime or after.
All of us attending to the news today are squinting through intergenerational memories. I’ve looked at pictures of starving Gazans and been swept back to the Polish ghetto I never lived in, watching a family member die. I’ve seen Jewish people I love walk freely down the streets of American cities and perceive menace in symbols of Palestinian liberation they don’t understand. I’ve listened to panicked complaints from Jewish acquaintances about how loud the sirens are at protests in front of Israeli embassies. To them, perhaps the sirens feel like war planes.
The thing about those of us living at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy is that sometimes we fall through loopholes and touch the panic of basic survival, bringing our identities, and our politics, with us. We can have compassion for each other in these moments. But we must anchor ourselves with these facts: At this point, in Gaza, some people aren’t eating. This is why so many around the world are crying out and risking their safety and their status to protest. Our intergenerational grief should lead us all to cry together, in the name of those most vulnerable.
Artists and activists don’t have perfect plans for solving the most complex political crises of our lifetimes, and we don’t command armies or wield many resources. What we can do is cry. We can cry about what is deeply wrong with now, and we can use our imaginations to light the way forward. Where our imaginations fixate might guide our collective priorities. So I imagine the children of Palestine in my drawings. They are breaking bread with my grandmother’s sisters, if only in my imagination.
Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of “Artificial: A Love Story” and “Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir.”