Ben Danzig’s Heartfelt Plea After His Father and Uncle Were Abducted by Hamas
Musician Ben Danzig speaks with The Media Line about his father, international Holocaust expert and educator Alexander Danzig, 75, and uncle, Itzik Elgarat, 69, who were taken hostage by Hamas terrorists from Kibbutz Nir Oz on the morning of Oct. 7. Danzig’s mother, daughter, brother, and many other family members narrowly survived the atrocities.
The Media Line: So first of all, for the camera, I need your full name and your connection with the people who have gone missing or the hostages.
Ben Danzig: My name is Ben Danzig. I am the son, the first son, of Alexander, 75, who has been kidnapped by the monsters of Hamas to Gaza. My uncle Itzik Elgarat, 69, sweet man, is in Gaza. He’s injured badly. He lost a lot of blood. My mother, my hero, she saved my daughter and she saved my sister’s daughter. My sister, another hero, saved her three little daughters. Their husbands fought terrorists, killed a bunch of them. Monsters. And my brother also survived, Matti, with his three daughters and his wife. So our tribe had a miracle because they didn’t touch our lovely daughters and the grandson, the granddaughters of my mother. We had a big miracle here and I thank God for that every day.
I’m a Jewish man living in Israel, the land of the Jewish people. And once again, Jewish people, my father, I will talk about first of all. I will talk about my father, who has been kidnapped. My father gave everything he had to this land, you know.
So, my father is Alexander Danzig. His name is Alex. I call him Olesho. He is a big important political influencer in Poland for the last maybe four, five decades. Maybe 50 years now. He’s the one who started educational groups, youth groups that go from Israel to Poland and exchange and change ideas, learning about the Holocaust. After that, he founded an organization that teaches teachers how to do that, you know, in Poland. He wrote books about Poland that you can travel with, about Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, I can’t remember.
Alex Danzig teaches a class. (Courtesy Ben Danzig)
I think my brother put it in one sentence that if there is anybody with knowledge that never ends, you can talk to him about Greek mythology, Polish mythology, Polish literature, English literature, history of the world, history of the United States, history of all over the world, you know. So in a way, in Hebrew, you say the imagination is like grapes, so you say the man is like, right, he’s like the grapes, like, you know, when you take grapes to your hand and have a lot of them, right if you don’t pick them. So the grapes are equivalent to knowledge that comes from a lot of words.
So my father was a conversation man. And sports, you know. Sports. Really liked sports. My uncle Itzik, he’s just a good man who likes to work with his hands. He used to do all this in the kibbutz, like gas and electricity and installation, these types of works. Live a good life, happy, you know. Traveling. He has two kids in Denmark, he has a Denmark citizenship. He’s a citizen of Denmark.
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Itzik Elgarat. (Courtesy Ben Danzig)
Anyhow, the tragedy, I think, in this story, is failing to realize how, how long this humanity, how long people with force, people with, how do you call it, like, positions, whether it’s prime minister or bank manager or lawyer or pilot or whatever, you know. I am an artist so I am not in, I am not in the game, you know. The least I can do is write a song that will make somebody be annoyed or make somebody cry, but OK. I can’t buy no island and I can’t buy no submarine, you know, with the money I have. I can buy strings and mango to eat.
So, and I think the most painful thing for someone like me after 20 days of this sh*t is to realize how low the human life really means now in the world, how, how much money is powerful, you know, like looking at, like, equivalent to other things, you know, like living in a place that has a good environment for kids, for example, you know. Raising your family in a place that has no bomb and no hate, you know.
So wait, wait, you can tell me, why, you can go to Thailand. But sooner or later, you know, if all [of us] don’t wake up to realize where are we now, situation, where are we, so I can tell you from my point of view as a musician, we are in a war that a singer can put on panties, you know, and go on a stage and sing. If you look at a stage 100 years ago, no singer wearing panties is going on a stage, man. She wears panties in the toilet. And on the stage she wears a dress that respect the music that she sings, you know. And same thing with men. Same thing with everything. Everything is cheap. So human life, imagine, babies’ life, children’s life, my father’s life, my uncle’s life, my mother’s life, my daughter’s life, is cheap. You have a question?
TML: So all of you live in Nir Oz?
Ben Danzig: OK, so in Nir Oz, on the 7th of October, my mother is in one house with my daughter and my sister’s daughter, OK. If you look at the kibbutz, right, it’s like a circle. OK, so my mother, if this is the gate where they’re coming from, yes, the monsters, OK. So they shoot missiles, right, 6.30 in the morning. They shoot like thousands of missiles, you know. Why? To divert, right, and kill. They’re shooting missiles and they start to come, right?
So when my mother after the first missile she go to the balcony to smoke a cigarette because she never, my daughter’s there from Tel Aviv. And my sister’s also there, and booming, crazy booming, you know. She is afraid. She sit on the balcony and she sees a thousand monsters coming. You know, a thousand. Just from her side of the kibbutz. She is like here. So if this is the gate, right, sorry, this is the gate of the kibbutz, you enter with a car and you have a circle, a road that goes all around this place, what used to be the kibbutz, right, Nir Oz. So if you go right, you go right here, there is a neighborhood, nice neighborhood, you know. Don’t have no double building in kibbutz, you know, it’s all flat houses, you know. Each one has his own garden, his own hobby, his own life, you know. But the birds whistling all the time, you know.
OK, you go there, OK. She sits here, she sees a thousand people coming. If you go like this, a thousand come here from there, from all about, right?
And they are failing to realize how, how Arabs are not stupid concerning killing, not stupid concerning raping kids. You should be ashamed of yourself, Hamas. Of the crimes you did. And so she is running inside, closing the door, you know. And they are coming inside and starting to shoot. Nine hours, man, until the army came. So hell is right here and right now. I will repeat it again. Hell, you know, where they burn people and rape them, is right here and right now.
And if the world is still failing to realize how much we need to love, how much we need to unite, how much you need to educate, to respect each other, you know. I’m a musician. You know, Bob Marley sings that, those words, long before I born. You know, long before I born. People singing the message and nobody’s listening, you know. So there are a very few tribes of people that still believe in love, you know. If you had asked me 10 days ago, I was only hating and angry. But now, love is coming back to my heart, through music, through talking to my friends, through seeing my daughter, my daughter surviving and dealing, you know, like actually speaking and cooking again and drawing again. Getting back on our track, you know. So this is something that is very, very, making me very happy and I thank God for that.
But at the same time, when I wake up in the morning and think about the 75-year-old man who dedicates his life to Holocaust, right, education, and research, being held by Nazis that are worse than Germans 1938. Worse! I think I’m done talking. What do you say?
TML: Well, I have more questions, we’ll skip a couple because I think you answered many of them anyway. What do you think the world needs to know that they don’t know, that they’re not understanding right now about the situation?
Ben Danzig: I think that the same, the same way how we are destroying our planet, you know, imagine a sea, right. So imagine we are letting industry pollute the sea for decades, you know. If you go all about Israel, you know, you see nature being destroyed, and we have the most nature in the f*ing world. Sorry, we have the most nature in the world. We have the lowest point, you know, which is the Dead Sea, it’s amazing. Ein Gedi, all those places. You have Tiberias, you have Jerusalem, you have Tel Aviv. You have holy places. You have city places. You have everything in Israel. But you, but what you lack in this country and all about the world, priorities! Priorities in the world change. First priority today in the world: money. Second priority today in the world: power. Third priority today in the world: bribing, I don’t know. You know, so you find love in like, 35 places. In the least. Compassion is like, hundred and, like my room, 157. Compassion. In a little, compassion, you know.
So what I’m saying, look, I am a father, for me living in these days, it is now the 20th day, as a father, is very hard. I don’t have, I don’t have any answer for my daughters. I can never tell them that they will be safe, nowhere in the f*ing world. I can never tell them, that they will be safe, nowhere in the world. You know. And this is a very sh*y, sorry, this is a very “shimsy” feeling, you know. Because my heart wants to be open to the world. My heart wants to give love to the world, especially my daughters. But I’m in a kind of situation that I need to smoke weed now to relax and the government doesn’t even let me smoke it because I don’t have permission.
So you know, you are in a place, OK, another example. After 20 years that this area has been suffering from missiles, my mother’s life was saved twice, during these 20 years, from missiles, you know. And after 20 years, this massacre, this holocaust, and the plan, you know, the Israeli government, is to put my mother in a caravan somewhere. You know, 71-year-old grandmother to 13 kids, to 13 grandchildren? Madness. So for me, seriously, I just want to find one spot in this world that I can live quietly my life. And maybe someday my heart, my good heart that I had in me, will come back to me and I can even love again and not hate. Right now I’m really pissed off.
