The agony of survivors: everlasting depression and relentless guilt.
The terrorist attack in Italy, like all the others: a real war
Il Giornale, may 21, 2012
It is hard to gain an insight on terrorism: it takes years of internship, living in the midst of attacks, casualties, and terrorists themselves. As a journalist you do, and you realize that when you don't have a direct experience of the event, a sort of collective repression inevitably tends to sort it there where the cause-effect principle applies, where logic and civilization rule. It is not how the matter stands though.
Rightly, Eli Wiesel asserts that definitive, international laws, the ones on Crimes against Humanity are needed to fight terrorism. It is indeed the worst kind of war. You are thrown into a world where nothing you teach your kids applies. There is no prize, no punishment: you can be a wonderful, an innocent soul like Melissa - the 16-year-old girl killed by a terror attack upon a school in Brindisi on May 19 th - yet terror hits you like a plague. Terror kills, it permanently maims, it confines you in a depression condition or in a post traumatic stress disorder forever. The biblical Job's paradox comes true: your shoah can assume different characteristics. Whoever gets hit even though they were lucky, they still are hardly hit. Anyone who escaped it, in the end of the day gets stuck forever, their lives being doomed. Who was not there, because by pure chance they had stayed at home that day (papers published the story of Anna Ancona's niece who could not go to school) risk to fill the physical void with a nonexistent fault that will eventually destroy them. If you happen to be a friend, a parent, a school mate or a colleague of a victim's the torment inflicted by the terrorist will drag yourself too into the tunnel. Terrorism is a big war, just think of Ireland, Israel, Iraq, just imagine the huge ambition it displays when it lays its hands on the most important of world's capital cities with the attacks to Twin Towers', London, and Madrid. No matter it was a madman in this case: the Islamic terrorist or else the guy firing a gun in Columbine and shooting his college mates, or else the suicide bomber at Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem who killed a father and a daughter who were there celebrating that the girl, Nava Applebaum, was to get married the next day, or else the one who killed Melissa: they all make up one single army.
A terror attack does not end as soon as the bang of the blast ceases, it does not die at the same time as its victims neither does it heal with the cares provided to the injured. You have to hang on to the dialogue with an unjust death. Victims tell that when you are deafened by a bomb, you are plunged in a total silence, you get to see with the sound turned off a flood of blood drowning you, fire burning you, you are not really aware whether you are dead or alive. Then life resumes the volume again; your own pain hits you as well as the one of the ones around you. It is your life resuming after silence, the silence of death as I was once told by a victim. From the rescue onwards you face an ordeal feeling not only physical pain but also the remorse to be still alive as well as pity for the humanity committing such atrocities. Our thoughts go not only to Veronica Capodieci 15, still on the danger list, hanging like a lioness onto her life, but also to Vanessa, her sister, 19. She was allegedly saved by her sister who shielded her with her own body. And we think of Selena Greco, also in critical conditions as well as the other girls Sabrina, Vittoria, who fought their own way the battle against terrorism buoying each other while burning alive; they still are to fight that stage of the battle terrorists rely on: the destruction of their personality. This is indeed the reason why - during Intifada's years - terrorists were certain to succeed in chasing Israelis away from Jerusalem through ongoing explosions in buses and cafes, or the Irish meant to bend the English by killing people in pubs; or else white American supremacists aim to undermine society at its foundations trying to corrode its cohesion with blood; or talibans terrorize people who nurture hopes for a slightly better society.
A terror attack fails any rationale, the fate's whim may kill you and not someone sitting few inches away, or else it may kill the other and leave you alive always wondering why this happened to him and not to you. In Jerusalem's pedestrian area Eran Mizrachi, an approximately 15 year old boy was lined up with other eleven boys, who all got killed by a suicide bomber while they were in a pub. He was dead, his twin brother Avi however provided him artificial respiration 25 minute long until he managed to resuscitate him. He then ran up the stairs to the roof, resolute to jump off despite his success: he could not bear what his brother had been subjected to. He was stopped, his brother Eran was later injured in another attack. That's what terrorism is.
When you see the body of a killed terrorist, as the reporter experienced, rather than having pity, it is curiosity that you get from the sight of his dead trunk. You wish you could ask him several questions: Why? What kind of world did you envisage to build on the bodies of kids, youth, innocent souls? Our curiosity would not be appeased, as we would get an array of plain stereotyped, empty replies. Terrorism, regardless its make up, has got a leitmotif: the hatred of life, the hatred of civilization, some of them claim that is actually their greatest tactical asset over the ones who, instead, love life. We absolutely have to win this challenge because if we won't, they will kill even our soul.