About a Girl: To Liesel in Gaza

ISLAMiCommentary, July 30, 2014

http://islamicommentary.org/2014/07/about-a-girl-to-liesel-in-gaza/

by Robin Kirk

Of all of the images of the destruction being visited upon Gaza and Israel, why did the
picture of a girl retrieving her books from the rubble stop me cold?

The image was originally posted, as far as I can tell, by the Palestinian Information
Center soon after Israels bombing began. As the world knows, Hamas has also been
sending rockets into Israel, allegedly using civilian buildings as cover.

So much for the obligatory provisos. Thats not really what I
want to write about.

A friend posted the girls image on Facebook. It might be
propaganda. I dont care. There is nothing staged or fake
about her expression as she locates her belongings.

As she rescues her books.

To find the photos origin, I went through hundreds of
ghastly images. Fathers screaming at the cameras. Mothers collapsed. On the Internet,
people shout and shout and shout some more. The grief is unbearable I mean I cannot
bear it and so I continue my search for that simple photograph of that bookish girl.

The image seems quiet for such a raging fight. Hushed. A teen, caught unawares, shakes
the dust off what could be school textbooks or even a picture book or two. If my mothers
eyes dont deceive, she also manages to rescue her pencil case.

In her influential book on war imagery, Susan Sontag demolishes the assumption that
gory images prompt action. The quintessential modern experience of viewing savagery,
she wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others, does many things, but rarely does it lead to
coherent and effective action to halt atrocities.

Images objectify. They inadvertently beautify. Too often, they are so horrible and heart-
wrenching the images of the broken bodies of the little boys on the beach, a parent
cradling a limp infant that we metaphorically turn the page or (to use more
contemporary parlance) click away.

But Sontag doesnt allow us to elude that pain with easy cynicism. Let the atrocious
images haunt us, she writes. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly
encompass most of the reality to which they refer; they still perform a vital function. The
images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing may volunteer to do,
enthusiastically, self-righteously. Dont forget.

What struck me about this particular image of the girl was not gore. There is none. Gore
alone does not arouse compassion or even understanding. To the contrary, graphic
violence usually pushes people away. People dont take an interest in human rights
abuses because of gore, but rather through an emotional connection with the human
beings who suffer.

As I stared at the photo, I heard a familiar voice from one of my favorite books.

First the colors, the voice says (the girls green top, the white of the rubble). Then the
humans. (Her beautiful eyes, doing something so unremarkable that it is completely
remarkable).

Thats usually how I see things, Death explains on the first page of Marcus Zusaks
The Book Thief. Or at least, how I try.

The Gazan girl is unmistakably Liesel, Zusaks heroine, orphaned in World War II
Germany. An illiterate, she steals her first book, The Gravediggers Handbook, from the
boy who dropped it after burying her little brother. Under the tutelage of her beloved
adoptive parents, Liesel learns to read as Germany crumbles under sustained Allied
bombing. For a time, their little family shelters a Jewish man and he survives the
Holocaust.

Liesel saves a life she didnt mean to. She acted honorably, though that was never
planned. Others made the war and fought it. All she wanted to do was grow up.

What connection could a work of literature set in 1940s Germany possibly have with an
unrelated photo about a contemporary tragedy set in the Middle East?

Everything, as it turns out.

At its core, The Book Thief is not about World War II. The setting could be Syria. It could
be the Congo. It could be Chicagos South Side, where children are killed because they
step into the paths of bullets that are only sometimes meant for them. The picture of the
Gazan girl tells a story that lifts beyond accusations of Hamas deliberate sacrifice of
civilians and denunciations of Israels terrifying brutality.

Because of The Book Thief, this girl in Gaza is as real to me as any of my child
neighbors. Fiction may seem like an escape from such terrible times, but its what
brought me to the edge of that rubble, so close I can feel the grit on my fingertips.

I want to know the girls name. I want to know shes OK. I want to know what was so
important about those books, those specific books, and why she searched the rubble for
them.

I want to sit next to her and watch her turn the pages, and tell me that whats on them is
funny or interesting or completely boring or silly.

I want to know that shes OK, but I already said that. I am the kind of reader that skips to
the end, to know that my time is worth it. I want to know shell survive, like Liesel. I
want her to survive, like Liesel.

And if he needs to, I want Zusak to lift her from that rubble and tuck her safely between
the pages of his book, so that shell be safe.

Above all, I want her to be safe. I want all of the Liesels, the thousands of them in Gaza
and Israel, to be safe.

I would say we are in a dialogue of the deaf, but thats not true. The deaf speak with
elegant movements, a dance of words. Tragically, this place is familiar. Writing after the
end of World War II, the author of Charlottes Web despaired over the fate of the world.
According to one biographer, he worried that his tales were trivial and even futile.

But what is a tale after all but a shard of humanity in the rubble? The author and the
reader conspire to make a story about what it is to be human, any human, not just
yourself but always, of course, everyone. Whether this photographer meant to or not, he
or she did the same.

I cant recommend that you retreat to fiction to escape this nightmare. It just may be that
Liesel waits for you in the words, her hand on a book.

Countries are ransacked, valleys drenched with blood, White wrote. Though it seems
untimely I still publish my belief in the egg, the warm coal, and the necessity for pursuing
whatever fire delights and sustains you.

Every one of the dead is Liesel.