26/6/97

A family tragedy: Half Kafka, half Kishon

    Common wisdom has it that we may be an inconsiderate people at the best of times, but at the worst, we're almost heroic in our humaneness.
    Which makes the harrowing story of Ruth T. doubly lamentable: it suggests our collective artery to the heart is hardening.
    Ruth, together with her sons Erez, 21, Dan, 16, and Ari, 29, recalls with disbelief that day in November 1996 -- the day her husband Hillel, 64, an employee of the Industry and Trade Ministry, died near Beit Shemesh, on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv bus. (The names of the family members have been changed.)
    "There was a knock on the door, and two policemen just walked in, without a word. At first I was scared, I thought they could be terrorists dressed up as policemen.
    "They asked if Hillel is my husband, and I said yes. 'He died,' they said. 'Your husband died on a bus.' They had no details. They had to call the station to find out.
    "They were young, inexperienced, untrained to deal with the situation. They're supposed to send officers with a doctor.
    "This was at 4:45 p.m. They said we have to go to Magen David Adom in Jerusalem to get a death-claim form.
    "At MDA, they demanded Hillel's ID card, but we couldn't get that from the police until we got the form -- and they wouldn't give us the form to get his possessions, including the card ... until we got the card! It was ridiculous, a classic Catch 22.
    "They were unable to sort it out. We talked to the doctor, the paramedic, the clerks, we negotiated with the Beit Shemesh police from MDA.
    "No doctor came and spoke to us, it seemed like without the ID card they weren't interested in dealing with us. We sat there for over an hour, completely ignored.
    "Then I found a friend who's an ambulance driver at MDA. Through this protektzia, somehow, MDA was now able to give us the form.
    "I asked the paramedic who treated Hillel if he was given defibrillation [to revive the heart] and she said no, because it was definitely not a heart problem. That was really strange: even a doctor could not have said, at that point, it was not his heart. [Ari is a medic.] The paramedic was kind of arrogant, unsympathetic; she talked about Hillel's death very casually.
    "Only later did we find out there were two ambulances there, and they had done defibrillation. But MDA didn't know anything; they only knew how to send us the bill.
    "And by the way, they sent the bill addressed to my father -- billing him for his own death expenses. Doesn't anyone think over there?"
    "To this day, the cause of death is still unknown. Everyone had a different version of what happened. If not for the chaos, I would have suspected they were trying to cover up something. They told us such bizarre stories, bits and pieces of contradictory information.
    "Because of all the confusion, and the fact his car and wallet couldn't be found, we began to think maybe they were wrong; that maybe someone stole the car and wallet, and maybe it was he who was dead.
    "The police never found the wallet. You know why? Because it was in Hillel's pocket! Some investigators, eh? The Hevra Kedisha [burial society] found it there.
    "Another thing was the time of death. At Beit Shemesh they told us 4, but that made no sense because he wouldn't be going to work [in Tel Aviv] at that time, which made us more certain someone else had died. The death certificate said it was 1:30; but it turns out it happened at about 12.
    "Then we had to go to Russian Compound [Jerusalem police HQ] and from there with a policeman to the Shamgar morgue to identify the body.
    "At Russian Compound, they didn't want to escort us. They argued, in front of us, who should take us. Three policemen refused. They called another and he refused. The officer in charge ordered someone to go and he also refused! They had to call a high-ranking officer at home, at night, to give specific orders. I'm surprised they didn't call the police minister. They argued like this for maybe 40, 45 minutes, while we were sitting like idiots.
    "Again, we were supposed to be given an officer, but they said they'd waive the rule in order to give us somebody. It was from this same station, remember, that two non-officers were sent to inform us.
    "Maybe it was coincidental, but the only policeman who'd go with us was not Jewish -- a Druse, or an Arab.
    "He didn't even know where the morgue was. He asked if I knew. He was very nice, though.
    "We finally get to Shamgar, at about 9:30, to identify the body. By now, we were thinking he's probably not there -- that he's sitting at home, wondering where we are.
    "At Shamgar, some monster starting shouting at us. 'Hey! Not today! We're closed, come back tomorrow!' He was unbelievably rude, a religious man in his 50s or 60s. He told us all kinds of lies, that he's not really working there, he has no keys, the place is closed, there aren't any bodies there.
    "He said, 'You want to see some dead bodies?' He turned his back on us and turned out the lights, leaving us in the dark. He was a vicious monster.
    ג€œAnguished, we were about to give up when someone else came in, and this first guy insisted there were no bodies there. He 'proved' it by showing us an empty card file. But I opened a second file, despite his objections, and the first card I pulled out had Hillel's name on it.
    "So suddenly he does work there, and he does have the keys.
    "He opened the refrigerator room, and we all went in. I can't describe our feelings in that place, it was like a scene from a horror movie. 'Quick, quick' he said, and pulled back the sheet for a second and put it back. This was the moment of truth, and he wouldn't even let us look. Then he turned off the lights again, while we're in this refrigerator room!
    "He shouted at us to go away, get out. Such inhumanity!
    "Back to Russian Compound, at about 10:30. Hurry, they said, go to Beit Shemesh, they're waiting for us until 11. Luckily we decided to call before going. Of course, there was nobody there. They had closed early.
    "Apparently when someone dies in a public place, automatically there's a police investigation;  until they close the file, you can't bury the body.
    "The next day, Ari and Erez went to Beit Shemesh. More confusion. More waiting. More callous shouting.
    "Then another delay: they had to track down the bus driver: they'd forgotten to question him! Finally, because I happen to know one of the guys in the police station there -- again through lucky protektzia -- the 'impossible' became possible: they closed the file without even contacting the driver.
    "The driver, by the way, had no way to contact anybody. Amazingly, no one on the bus had a cell phone -- except for one man who, by a strange coincidence, got on this bus by accident. It was the wrong bus. 
    "Then there was the Health Ministry. They needed a copy of the death certificate -- and said we should go out into the street to find a photocopier. Really! It's a government office, and they wouldn't let us make one copy, even in the case of a death! Like it was costing the workers personally. In the end, Dan saw his friend's mother working there, and she made us a photocopy.
    "If not for protektzia, we might still be waiting in MDA to this day.
    "After all this, of course, we had to arrange a funeral -- which was already delayed by a day because of the bureaucratic runaround.
    "Hevra Kedisha, despite their bad reputation, was actually the most sensitive.
    "We know what really happened only because two passengers later called us: Dan's friend's father works with somebody who mentioned he was delayed because someone on his bus had died; his version was corroborated by a woman soldier who contacted us. These two strangers were the only ones who told us a matching version. Everyone else had a different story.
    "Another strange irony: a soldier who gave Hillel artificial respiration turned out to be the daughter of a doctor I [Ruth] work with. She told the story to her father, who later realized it was Hillel she had tried to save.
    "To make the story even stranger, three months after the death, we got a call that Hillel's car, which we'd reported stolen, had been found. A routine police patrol found a very dirty car, which makes it suspicious.
    "And where was this suspicious car all this time? The parking lot of the heavily guarded Foreign Ministry! You can't even get an envelope past the front gate, but no one there notices an abandoned car for three months!
    "All along the way, we never felt anyone was taking care of us. We were in a vacuum. The lack of sensitivity, of organization, the failure of people to do their jobs properly, the torment rubbed into our grief -- it was shocking.
    "It was like the first time anyone in this country died, and no one knew what to do."