2023-12-19 16:46:00
The woman was released and told the details of her captivity
“I found an old calendar where I wrote every day how I felt, letters to my family, my grandchildren, my children, my husband… Otherwise, I would have gone crazy,” Argentine-Israeli Ofelia says in an interview with EFE. Feler de Roitman, a Hamas hostage for 53 days, of which 46 she spent alone, in the dark and with almost no food.
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“Everything I experienced is very deep, very strong. “I have never been so alone in my life,” she confesses in a conversation in Jerusalem, accompanied by her nephew Hernán Feler, a popular sports commentator in Argentina, who has become one of the most powerful voices in Spanish crying out for the kidnapped.
Ofelia, 77 years old, regrets that her captors did not let her take with her that old almanac where she poured out her feelings and thoughts for weeks. “They threw it to the ground and set it on fire,” she says about the whereabouts of those letters on day 47 of her captivity, when they told her that she would be transferred to another place six days after her release, although she did not know the reason at the time.
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Ofelia was kidnapped from her home in the Nir Oz kibbutz, close to the Strip and where many families of Argentine origin live, that black October 7, when some eight Hamas men shot open the door of the bunker of her house where they were She took refuge when the alarms went off and, with a serious injury to her arm, they took her to Gaza on a tractor, where they threw her “like a sack of potatoes.”
At the enclave, a doctor put a bandage on him as soon as he arrived, but he has already needed two surgeries since he left on November 28, and next week he will undergo a third to finish closing the wound.
Ofelia Feler de Roitman, who was held hostage by Hamas for 53 days, of which 46 were spent alone, in the dark and with almost no food. EFE
The wound that will take the longest to heal is the mental one and next week she will also begin therapy, although Ofelia – who arrived in Israel in 1985, where her three children and nine grandchildren were born – faces that episode of her life with strength. and fortitude that surprises his family.
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“Seeing myself strong is very nice and I am very optimistic. But I start treatment next week because I need to get everything out of me, which is a lot. There are things that I bring out with my family, but there is a lot that I carry inside,” she says while placing her hand over her heart.
She spent her captivity alone, in the house of a Gazan couple, in a bustling urban area, near a market, where “they celebrated when the shells hit Tel Aviv or Beersheva.” But she doesn’t know exactly where.
“They left me alone all day, locked up and almost without light. I spoke very little with them because they barely spoke English. From her I learned that her name was Aileen, from him almost nothing, only that they called him ‘the technician’ and that she had a gun, but not long weapons,” says Ofelia.
One day when he felt the ground shake he asked if it had been an earthquake. She explained that no, that a rocket launcher was installed under the house, that it had broken down, and that ‘the technician’ was trying to fix it.
“I could only think that if I failed, the rocket would fall on me. I spent a week of continuous crying with a lot of fear,” she remembers.
And with that fear she spent the first two weeks, “in a situation that was not crazy, but more or less,” until she found the almanac where she poured out her thoughts and decided to take advantage of the long hours alone at home to walk around the living room.
Argentine-Israeli Ofelia Feler de Roitman. EFE
In addition to being afraid, he was also hungry: “In the morning they gave me a small piece of pita bread, with zataar, very hard and old. I put it in the tea glass so I could swallow it. At night they gave me a plate of dry rice.”
But he endured all of that, the only thing he couldn’t bear was the longing for his family. “Meeting them again was like touching heaven,” he recalls of his release, on the fifth day of the week-long truce at the end of November between Israel and Hamas, which allowed the exchange of 105 hostages for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
Six days before her release, she was transferred to a hospital and there she met again for the first time with other abductees, some of her neighbors from Nir Oz. Until that November 28, without knowing where she was going, they dressed her “like Arabs”, they put her with seven other women in a van and she left the enclave forever.
“Every day I ask for the release of all the hostages,” he comments about the 129 captives left inside, although it is estimated that around twenty are dead.
“It makes me very sad to think about everything he experienced. My soul hurts. But I feel great pride in his mental and emotional strength,” acknowledges his nephew Hernán Feler, who after 26 years without setting foot in Israel has returned to reunite with Ofelia.
“We are relieved after so much pain, uncertainty and sadness that we experienced for 52 days. But we have to keep fighting until everyone returns,” says Feler, who created the Together for Isreal foundation to help the victims of the brutal Hamas attack.
(With information from EFE)
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