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Sam Benchetrit
was sitting in front of me, on the terrace of a coffe shop in
Los Angeles.
The clear skies and sunny day of the day before had been replaced
by a grey overcast.
Sam, in his sixties, a baseball cap over the head, and hands deep
into the pockets of his jacket, was staring at his "caffe
latte" deep in thoughts.
- "Miracles"
there were many in the history of the jews. Did you know that
we had been targeted for slaughter?"The Boches" (germans)
landed in Morocco. We didn't really see them. They all wore plain
clothes and I think they were still checking out the field. They
had settled in the Anfa Hotel. Do you know the Anfa Hotel?"
- "No"
I answered.
- "Luxuous
for those days. It was perched on a hill right in front of the
Ain Diab Beach. There were no cabins on that beach,just tents
for rent. My friend Samy, went to the hotel to meet some frinds.
He was on his bicycle and rode three times around the hotel looking
for them. When he didn't find his friends he went to the beach
to rent a tent. He was inside the tent undressing whe nall of
a sudden two germans came in and forced him back to the hotel.
Once there they interrogated him under a rain of punches,they
wanted to know why he had circled the hotel. When they heard his
answer they told him that "Whomever turns around us will
have to deal with us".The germans demanded that he come back
the day after, and Sammy suffered the same treatment again. He
was let go only when they found out that he was the tailor of
the general. "
With a distant
look , Sam scans his memory. He starts again:
"You
know the walls were all white in Casablanca.One morning we discovered
that someone had written on all of them "Watch out for November
11th"with a piece of coal. Everybody was going crazy trying
to guess what did that mean. On November 8th,the americans landed
in Casablanca. I became friends with an american later. His task
was to seize all the paperwork from a german ship that had been
captured. In those files,they found a list of all the moroccan
citizens of jewish descent that were to be killed,starting from
the richest of them. The first day of the massacre was to be November
11th. The extermination was supposed to last several days.
We were saved three days earlier."
- "Do
you remember what year it was?"
- "The
year the french surrendered, between 1940-42."
- "Have
you suffered from the germans?"
- "No,
but Tunisia yes."
- "And
the arabs, they were against the germans?"
- "No,they
were with them. On New Year's eve, five german planes attacked
the city.Two of them were shot down.The next morning we went to
check the damages.An entire school had bee leveled,the only thing
left of it was a huge hole in the ground."
- "Were
there any injured during the attacks?"
- They found
plenty of dead arabs the day after. Seeing the germans,they had
lit candles and had gone out into the streets trying to guide
the germans to the jews. They all died."
- "How
can you be sure that this story is for real?"
- "That's
what I was told".
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