I saw the image on the website of this newspaper ten days ago and I can’t get it out of my head. There have been others, but that persists obsessively. It highlights a body lying, white, almost gray. You can see all the vertebrae and all ribs under the skin. What attracts my gaze, what I cannot stop seeing, what has been hit in my eyes is the hip, the bones of the hip that seem about to burst the skin, that skin like paper. Around the lying child there are only shadows, a figure dressed in black (her sister? Her mother?) And nothing, like sucking what awaits the child.
It is not the first unbearable image of child suffering because of a war. The last fifty years have been prolific in this type of photographs, from those of Biafra and the iconic image of the. More recently there are the photograph of that girl from Sudan, lying down, with a vulture next to it, waiting, drowned while trying to escape with her family of the Syrian civil war. They are images that have removed us to the background, which have made rivers of indignant ink run (like this), but they have not managed to stop the infernal machinery that causes children to die drowned, burned, hungry.
The habsting body powerfully on another image. That of the prisoners of the Nazi extermination fields after their release in the spring of 1945. Bodies without meat, only skin and bones, wandering with a lost look. People who have seen hell, who have lived in it. They were saved (although, as Primo Levi taught us, that is too simple a statement), the child of photography will possibly die. Or he already died. And I burn my impotence hands before this fact. This child will die and nothing will happen. And there will be other children who will die and we will not be able to do anything to stop it. Just accumulate more and more images in our eyes, which are going to stay there, as Aylan de Bruces stayed in the sand, rocked by the sea.
I will end up writing what has been bumping on my fingers for days and I will not feel relief. I will not placate my consciousness or I will feel better person for having written this. I don’t want to raise my voice, remove consciences. What I want is to save that child’s life because I can’t bear to die without more. And if I write this it is not to go to sleep quieter, it is because my stomach is stirred, it is because it makes me want to vomit, it is because I burn my eyes the tears for a child who will die, starve and I have seen him, as we have seen so many, and I cannot do anything to avoid it.
Can we call Netanyahu Gaza’s executioner? The Gaza butcher? Or maybe it is too early, it would be an offense, an insult, a disconsideration towards the prime minister of the only democratic country in the region, an ally at last. He drew it magnificently Riki Blanco in this newspaper in a terrible (irrefutable) portrait of von der Leyen. You have to let him finish the homework to judge Gaza. We do not rush. There are interests that go beyond what we see, important reasons, weight considerations.
But what higher interest, what more supreme value can there be in the world than to save a child’s life?
