‘A tireless advocate for many causes’ has passed away

On May 26, holocaust survivor and defender of Palestinian rights Hedy Epstein died of cancer at 91 in her home in St Louis. 

A tiny, feisty woman, she was a tireless advocate for many causes.

Hedy was born in 1924 in Germany shortly before Hitler came to power. Her parents soon realised they had to leave the country but found all doors closed to them except the door of Palestine.

Her parents were, however, anti-Zionists, prepared to go anywhere but Palestine. Following the attacks by Hitler’s brown shirts on Jewish shops and persons on November 10, 1938, an event known as “Kristallnacht” or Crystal Night, Hedy’s father was detained and sent to the Dachau concentration camp.

When he was released, her parents decided to send Hedy to Britain on a special train called Kintertransport. She never saw them again: they died in Auschwitz.

Hedy, 14, was among 500 children, aged from six months through 17 years, taken in by Britain, which accepted more than 10,000 between 1938 and 1940.

They were placed with foster families, in institutions, and given schooling and employment. Boys who reached military age served in the armed forces.

Hedy was billeted with two unsuitable families and finally found a place in a women’s hostel.

At 16 she quit school, went to work, and joined a leftist German youth movement where she received her political education.

After the war, she took a job in Germany as a censor and researcher assembling evidence for trials of doctors charged with experimenting on prisoners.

She emigrated to the US in 1948, the year Israel was established.

She worked with refugees for a time, but went west to Minneapolis to study at university where she met her husband. They eventually settled in St Louis and raised their son.

In the 1970s, Hedy returned to university to take BA and MA degrees in urban studies.

She first went to Israel in 1981 and was revolted by the racism exhibited by Israelis towards Palestinians.

During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Hedy had what she called a “wake up call”. She told this writer: “I learned about the massacres in the Sabra and Chatila camps [south of Beirut]. The more I found out, the more horrified… I became.”

She criticised Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians. In 2001, she established a St Louis chapter of the anti-occupation Women in Black movement and in late 2003 began paying annual visits to East Jerusalem and the West Bank where she joined protests against the Israeli occupation, braving water cannon, gas and rubber coated steel balls the Israelis call “plastic bullets”.

Israeli security detained her for hours at Ben Gurion Airport and conducted a humiliating body search. This treatment did not deter her commitment to the Palestinian cause.

In 2004, she was heckled and taunted during a speech she gave at Stanford University in California, where she compared the situations in Palestinian territories and in Germany soon after Hitler’s rise, a comparison made on May 4 this year ahead of the holocaust remembrance day by Israeli deputy chief of army staff General Yair Golan.

He stated: “It’s scary to see horrifying developments that took place in Europe begin to unfold here... [The holocaust] must lead us to fundamentally rethink who we, here and now, behave towards the other [Palestinians].”

He was roundly condemned and the defence minister, who defended Golan’s right to speak, resigned.

Hedy would have applauded Golan’s words, but by that time she was too ill to follow the news.

I met Hedy, then 81, in the small West Bank village of Bil’in during the summer of 2005.

While most protesters were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, Hedy was attired as if she was about to attend a garden party.

We waited in the shade across from the village mosque for the start of the weekly demonstration against Israel’s construction of its West Bank wall that would cut the village off from its olive and fruit trees.

At the head of the ragged line of protesters descending into the valley came Israeli activists to act as a buffer between the Palestinians and the clutch of armed Israeli soldiers in helmets and flak jackets.

Next were the “internationals”, volunteers connected with the International Solidarity Movement and finally the Palestinians.

After a few hot words, the soldiers fired tear gas and percussion grenades, and chased the demonstrators up the hill.

Hedy came to Cyprus at the end of July 2008 to take part in the Free Gaza movement’s attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza by sailing two elderly vessels into Gaza’s small fishing port.

I found her at the hostel of the Cyprus University where Free Gaza had taken rooms for its volunteers.

Hedy, who had learnt swimming to take part in the voyage, joined training in non-violent resistance to arrest by Israeli troops or police.

But the fragile boats bought in Greece for the voyage took weeks rather than days to limp into Larnaca port in Cyprus.

The Free Gaza activists suffered in 40°C temperatures without air conditioning. They grew restive and depressed.

When the 40 boat people from 17 countries finally set off for Gaza, Hedy, who had celebrated her 84th birthday, was not among them. She had been taken into emergency with heat stroke and did not take part in that historic visit.

She tried and failed to reach Gaza again in 2011 by taking part in a march from Cairo blocked by the Egyptian authorities and by boarding a ship called the “Audacity of Hope”, which remained in a Greek port due to sabotage blamed on Israel.

On August 18, 2014, three days after her 90th birthday, Hedy made global headlines by getting arrested in St Louis for refusing to disperse during a rally protesting the shooting death of a black teenager by a white cop in the suburb of Ferguson.