28/9/99

Elie Swed: To pray to die

    Indescribable horrors are too familiar to our people. It did not begin or end with the Holocaust; though the world promised "Never Again," it happened again, less than 10 years ago, to young Elie Swed.
    Not yet 30 when he was thrown deep into a tiny dungeon, Elie's best years were spent praying for a merciful death. His tormentors, so cruel they might have shocked the Nazis, would not grant him such satisfaction.
    (That is the Syrians, with whom we yearn to normalize relations.)
    Elie cannot speak of what happened to him, and from what is known, no one can imagine what he endured.
    What is known comes from a Canadian, Judy Feld Carr, whose unbelievable feats in almost singlehandedly rescuing Syrian Jewry are detailed in a new book (she was profiled in this column in May).
    The woman they call "Mrs. Judy" is a vivacious, youthful grandmother. Interviewed last week in Jerusalem, she recalled the desperate efforts to rescue Elie and his brother Selim, who suffered alongside him.
    Incredibly, this story has a happy ending, and not because the Swed brothers got their wish and died. Truly miraculously, they are living among us.

CARCERATED 50 feet below ground, in a hole measuring 1 by 1.5 meters, Elie was required to confess to having spied for Israel. He had been here to visit his sisters, and was photographed by a Syrian Jew working for the Muhabarat, the Syrian secret police.
    What he said, or didn't say, didn't matter. For almost five years he was tortured, tormented and maimed.
    "Even the fillings in his teeth were removed, lest he might be concealing something in his mouth," writes Harold Troper in his book about Judy Carr's rescue of Syrian Jewry (ג€œThe Ransomed of God,ג€ Malcolm Lester Books, Toronto). "He was fed once a day -- a cup of water, a single pita bread, and some bean mash...
    "The cell had no toilet facilities and Elie was only permitted to relieve himself once a day... He was often beaten for asking [to go more often]. If he was denied permission and soiled his cell, he was beaten again."
    "These beatings were minor compared with the horrors of interrogation and systematic torture... No atrocity seemed out of bounds..."
    Judy had been working to extract Syrian Jews since 1972, and manipulated the corrupt regime by building up an extensive secret underground, but the Sweds were beyond its reach.
    "Elie Swed disappeared for two years," she relates. "His family heard nothing. During that time his older brother Selim goes to buy Hanukka candles and he's taken too. They're kept in adjoining cells -- unaware of each other -- for two years."
    After a year and a half, in 1991, Judy got a message: Two men had been arrested, maybe you can find out where they are. "It doesn't take me very long; I find out. The Syrians finally admit to having them, and they will be charged with treason. OK, now I know they're alive. What do I do next? I've got to show the Syrians I know they're in prison, so I do something I've never done before: I write a letter to the family, to Selim's wife Sara. I tell her I've heard about what happened, do they need anything, do they have food for their seven children.
    "Now, I know very well that letter's going to be opened. and I want it to be opened. A correspondence starts the likes of which you can't imagine. It's all coded: she picks up my codes, I pick up hers. It is so brilliant."
    The Swed brothers had no idea what was going on. Global changes were in effect that would ultimately save them: the fall of the Soviet Union, the loss to Syria of its sponsor, the Gulf War, the Madrid Conference -- and Judy Carr. She got the brothers on the worldwide diplomatic agenda, involving the White House, the Kremlin, the Europeans, everyone.
    The initial breakthrough was astounding in its monumental insignificance: the Swed brothers were permitted medicine, and a weekly allotment of fresh air and sunshine -- "privileges" that each cost Judy dearly in ransom payments.
    And Sara was allowed to visit. "She goes with her daughter, sees the brothers, and she doesn't even recognize them. They have not shaved for two years. They are emaciated, they're not even people any more. All they do is cry. Elie and Selim have now found each other; they've been put together in the same torture chamber."
    By then, the airless, lightless, brutal conditions took a toll: "They were sick, really, really sick. Elie had tuberculosis; Selim had extremely high blood pressure and an erratic heart rate, he couldn't walk, couldn't move his hands."
    In time, they were moved to other prisons, where the interrogations, beatings and torture started anew. Troper writes about one such place: "Folk wisdom among prisoners was that nobody ever left this prison alive."
    After nearly five years, the Sweds were tried and sentenced to another six and a half years.
    Judy then put her contacts and experience to work, bribed the judges, and struck a deal to have the Sweds released -- fittingly -- for the first night of Passover.
    "I'm in Toronto. The first seder, no call. Second seder, no call. They didn't let them out! On the last day of Pessah, we're ready to go to shul for Yizkor, and a Canadian government official calls: 'There's a message for you: Your friends have left the hotel and will be having breakfast shortly.' I'm beside myself. That's the code! Then the French ambassador from Damascus calls, but the line is cut off.  
    "By now," she laughs, "I ain't going to shul. Then I get another call: 'I have a message for someone named Judy, just to say that your friends are eating breakfast at home.'
    "I'm crying, I'm laughing, I don't believe it! I've got them, they're out!"
    The next step was to get them out of Syria, and the Sweds -- all of them -- suddenly find themselves in Brooklyn, where they meet their savior.
    "So help me God, I look at these two men: they're zombies. There's no life in them, no emotion, nothing. Elie doesn't speak. Then when I'm saying goodbye to him, he puts his head on my shoulder and he starts to cry. He cries like I've never heard crying, his whole body is shaking, he's holding onto me and crying.
    "Then I decide, he has cried, now he has to talk. He told me. I thought I was going to be sick. I'd heard so much from Jews in Syrian prisons, but never anything like this."
    Judy still was not done with Elie, who by now had settled in Tel Aviv. "This was the most difficult rehabilitation you can imagine. A Mossad man takes Elie under his wing, and decides he's going to make Elie whole. This agent -- he's tough-as-nails, but so compassionate, the most wonderful man you can imagine -- he hires someone to teach Elie, to get his Israeli license as a pharmacist."
    And he did.
    "Now we decide, he's going to get married. The Mossad agent finds women for him, but nothing happens, he's still dead. There's nothing there."
    To look at him, Elie was not a catch. "There are huge black circles under his eyes, pitch black. It's a face of torture: it's psychological, his eyes are sunken, lifeless fish-eyes, a dead face, no color."
    Now, Judy had a new role: arch-mother. "He was fixed up with a girl, and he calls me, and I say no, no, no! This girl is not for you. I know, because I took the family out of Syria. I said you can't go with her, because her mother will eat you for breakfast. Not for you!
    "The Mossad agent fixes him up with some more girls, and I'd say no, no, no, this girl's not for him, that one's not right."
    It seemed no one was good enough -- for Judy. Then, the agent discovered Golda.
    "Elie brings me this wonderful, I mean WONDERFUL girl, Golda. I fall in love with her, I hug her to pieces, he is smiling from ear to ear -- I have never seen Elie Swed smile."
    Golda, a librarian, is from the last Jewish family in Sidon, Lebanon.
    Golda married Elie. A few months ago, they had a baby boy, Victor.
    Some day Victor will wonder, like any child, how he came to be. His parents will tell him, and he will understand the miracle of life.