In late May, the second International Freedom Flotilla will try, again, to reach Gaza. Twenty boats from different countries, with 1,000 people dispersed among them, will set sail. St. Louisan Hedy Epstein, a German-born Jew who fled from the Nazis on a children’s transport back in 1939, will be on the U.S. boat.
Epstein, 86, has made multiple trips to the West Bank and tried four times already to go to Gaza. As her friend Vittorio Arrigoni once joked to her, “If you can’t get in any other way, we’ll have to catapult you.”
Arrigoni made it to Gaza in 2008, when two rickety wooden boats managed the first and only landing. He’s been there ever since, working as a human-rights activist.
Until last week, when he was kidnapped.
“He was a great big guy,” Epstein says, “36 years old, and like the Pied Piper with all the kids following him. His sign-off, whenever he wrote you or said goodbye, was ‘Stay human.’”
Arrigoni was strangled last Thursday afternoon, according to the autopsy report—24 hours before the deadline his captors had given.
“The media is saying that one of the radical groups in Gaza, not affiliated with Hamas, was responsible,” Epstein says. “There was a video: You see him blindfolded, with some kind of wound on his face, and you see an arm and hand grabbing hold of his hair, and there is a flag with writing on it. These radical people never write on the flag. I don’t think that’s who took him.
“Two weeks earlier, another wonderful man, Juliano Mer-Khamis, was killed,” she continues. “He was sitting in his car and was shot several times by a masked person. His mother is Israeli and Jewish; his father a Christian Palestinian. Years ago, Juliano’s mother started the Jenin Freedom Theater in the West Bank, so children could act out their fears and their feelings.” Mer-Khamis, who’d taken over as director, was shot on the street in front of the theater.
“I think these two deaths so close together were meant to scare anyone who is going on the flotilla,” Epstein says. “But they won’t. They will only make us more determined.”
In August 2008, Epstein tried to sail from Cyprus but it was 120 degrees, and she fainted with heat stroke. “The doctor who treated me there was a bit of an exaggerator,” she says dryly.
Before the next trip, in June 2009, she was attacked on Waterman Ave. in broad daylight the day before she was to leave for Qatar. She was caught from behind and thrown to the ground, slashing her chin open and nicking an artery, and injuring her knee.
Her third attempt was with a group that tried to walk to Gaza from Egypt in December 2009. The Egyptian government blocked their passage.
Last May, Epstein was ready to board the first International Freedom Flotilla, but the only access was by climbing a rope ladder, and she was physically unable.
That was the boat boarded by Israeli soldiers, armed naval commandos who dropped by rope from helicopters because Israel saw the flotilla as an attempt to thwart a legal blockade, and a deliberate and dangerous provocation. The flotilla was carrying 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid. Nine passengers were killed and 50 injured; one is brain-dead.
Israel has created a special commission to determine how to deal with this next flotilla. Word has spread that the Israeli Defense Forces are training attack dogs to attack people on the boats.
“I have never been scared until I heard about these attack dogs,” Epstein says. “Even if the Israeli commandos attack us, there is still the possibility of reaching their humanity. But what do you reach in a dog? So that scares me. But not to the point where I won’t go.”
The U.S. boat, originally named The Audacity of Hope, has been renamed Stay Human in Arrigoni’s honor. Epstein has received an $800 grant from the local Conscience & Military Tax Campaign office. She says, "It will help buy life preservers!"
“We will take medicine, and toys for the kids,” she continues. “And we are taking personal letters to the people of Gaza—that will be very dangerous cargo. But the real reason for going is to break the siege. For more than 40 years, no boats have been able to go to Gaza or leave from Gaza. About one and a half million people are living there—”
She corrects herself: “I shouldn’t even say ‘living.’ Existing there. It’s the largest open-air prison in the world.”
