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I wouldn’t have chosen Israel because I wanted to go somewhere more neutral. I didn’t want to immerse myself totally in all that Judaism again. It’s hard to say. Perhaps if I’d gone away straight after the war I’d have wanted to go to Israel. But later it certainly wouldn’t have ended like that; we’d definitely have been in the States or somewhere. Israel is a challenging country to live in; I’ve been there twice. The first time I didn’t like it very much. I was there in the early 1960s, before all those wars [the Six Day War [23] in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War [24] in 1973]. The jingoism annoyed me, and the fact that Israelis are terribly harsh. I didn’t understand that it’s a country threatened by its neighbors. I didn’t see that then. Later on I understood that it had to be like that for political reasons.
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Interview
Hanna We