Arnon Grunberg

Mom

Europe

On disappearing mothers and daughters – Hilo Glazer in Haaretz:

‘“We crossed the Champs-Élysées and started to walk toward the Eiffel Tower. At a pedestrian crossing, Mom didn’t want to give me her hand. Suddenly, the light turned red; I crossed and she remained on the sidewalk opposite. A woman from the group asked me to take her picture next to a Ferrari. I told her: ‘Wait a minute, I’ll just get my mother and then I’ll take your picture.’ I didn’t look at my mother for a second and suddenly she was gone. When I crossed the street back to the other side, she wasn’t there. I shouted, ‘Mom, Mom, Mom,’ and she didn’t answer. I looked for her for four hours and then I passed out.” Thus recalls Yasmeen Kadan, 31, the moment when her mother, Lutfia Zabad, went missing on the world’s most famous avenue, in the very heart of the bustling French capital in October 2019 during a group tour of Europe. The Champs-Élysées was their first stop in Paris after a few days in Amsterdam. Yasmeen kept up the search for her mother for over two years.
Yasmeen was certain that her mother, who had never been abroad and didn’t know the language, got lost because she wasn’t able to ask for help. Yasmeen searched in Paris a few months, crisscrossing the city on foot. She stayed in the apartment of a local family of Moroccan origin who were moved by her story.’

(…)

‘She also met along the way a few good people who did what they could to help. However, as weeks and months passed, the assumption that Lutfia, now 54, got lost began to give way to very different hypotheses. Perhaps someone wanted her to disappear; maybe she was dead, or missing by choice. The staff of the Israeli consulate in Paris, the city police and their missing persons unit held the latter view, with varying degrees of conviction. So, too, did an Israeli rescue squad that joined the search, paid for by Lutfia’s insurance company.
“At first all the options were on the table,” says Chief Superintendent David Katz, who recently concluded his term as the Israeli police attaché in southwest Europe. “Either she wanted to disappear, or someone wanted to disappear her, or she actually got lost and died, heaven forbid. The most likely scenario was that she was in a shelter or a soup kitchen that gave her a haven and did not know her identity.” If so, he speculates, either Lutfia didn’t remember who she was or “didn’t want to say who she was.”’

(…)

‘These questions were still unanswered when one night, 29 months later, Lutfia appeared on a street in the 12th arrondissement and said she wanted to return home to her family. Where had she been? Under what circumstances? Had someone helped her? Had someone hurt her? Only Lutfia knows, and so far she is showing little inclination to share that information.
“I had all kinds of wild thoughts about this story,” says Michel Harel, Israel’s former consul general in Paris, who played a key role in the search efforts. “But I prefer to keep them to myself.”’

(…)

‘One of the team’s first moves was to examine security camera footage from the area where Lutfia disappeared. “The Champs-Élysées has perhaps the most surveillance cameras anywhere in Europe,” Lopez says. “We were sure it would lead us to something.” Indeed, one camera had caught Lutfia passing by the Adidas store between the avenue and Place Clemenceau. Surprisingly, that was all that was found. “It’s very hard to evade the cameras in the Champs-Élysées area, but Lutfia somehow managed to avoid them,” Lopez notes, “but not intentionally.”’

(…)

‘A few months ago, Michel Harel, the former consul general, concluded a 44-year career in the civil service. Over the years, he had occasion to locate and rescue Israelis, especially trekkers in East Asia. But disappearing “on the Champs-Élysées, and then reappearing two-and-a-half years later” is something else, he notes. “I had never had a case like that.” It was a first for Chief Superintendent Katz, too.
Harel and Katz collaborated in their efforts and worked with French authorities. Katz began by getting Lutfia’s case transferred from the police station in the arrondissement where she disappeared to the city’s missing persons unit. “I immediately called the bureau of the Paris Police Prefecture to ensure the case’s transfer,” Katz recalls. “Cooperation with them was superb throughout.” A simultaneous investigation was launched in Baka al-Garbiyeh.
Harel made sure the missing persons bureau stayed on the case, even when intelligence was lacking and there were no good leads. “We didn’t let up,” he recalls. “We cultivated ties with them. We bought the police officers presents.” Yasmeen returned to Israel after a few frustrating months. “I was afraid my visa would expire, and I wanted to keep open the option of returning for another month,” she says. “I cried in my heart to my mother, ‘I am sorry to be leaving you, but I have no choice.’” Back in Israel, she continued devoting her life to solving the mystery. She focused on recruiting people and overcoming public indifference regarding her odd story. She despaired quickly of the media. Reporters whom she contacted told her it wasn’t an “item.” She posted clips on social media, lamenting her mother’s disappearance, but they had little if any effect. She even organized a demonstration outside the Baka al-Garbiyeh municipal building – in which she was the only participant. In desperation, she published a post about her distress in Hebrew on the page of a group of Israelis living in Paris. And then Smadar came on the scene.
Dr. Smadar Bustan, a researcher and lecturer in the fields of medicine and philosophy, lives in Paris with her two adolescent children. “Yasmeen’s post was very confusing. I could see it was written by a woman who felt helpless, but the description of the story itself was simply unbelievable,” Bustan says via Zoom. “I thought it could be solved easily using connections here. I didn’t know what I was getting into.” Bustan contacted Yasmeen after her return home, and then posted a message on the Wanted Community Paris Facebook page, a private group. “Half an hour later, around midnight, someone writes me that she knows exactly where Lutfia is and that she had even spoken with her,” Bustan says. “She gave me an address in the 16th arrondissement and said Lutfia was a homeless person living in a building basement there. But she described Lutfia as not the average homeless person. She said, for example, that she had brought down tea and cookies, and that Lutfia folded up everything and left the place neat and tidy after finishing the tea.”’

(…)

‘The couple divorced when Yasmeen was 18; her mother reverted to her maiden name. Her mental state was unbalanced, and she relied a great deal on her daughter’s company. “She was lonely. I was the only one who watched over her and tended to her needs all these years,” Yasmeen says. Lutfia suffered from frequent mental crises and drew on her daughter’s help even for everyday tasks. She had rarely left the house in recent years.
Her first significant disappearance occurred a few years ago in the form of a burst of independence. “She wanted to go buy flip-flops; I asked her to wait until I got home from work,” Yasmeen recalls. “She insisted on going alone. She boarded a bus and disappeared for two days. In the end we found her in the Hadera central bus station.”’

(…)

‘On the night of March 6, Yasmeen says, a nurse of Lebanese extraction was walking through the 12th arrondissement on the east side of Paris. The nurse, a volunteer in SAMU Social, a humanitarian organization that assists street dwellers, saw a barefoot, homeless woman and asked if she needed help. The woman said she did, stated her name – Lutfia Zabad – and told the nurse a little of what she had gone through.
Those searching for her had conjured up many possible scenarios. They considered one in which she would lose her documents, forget who she was, survive harsh winters as a homeless person, and then suddenly regain her memory and seek to return to her family, to be wildly improbable. Yet that was precisely her account.
From that moment, over two years of frustrating searches were compressed into a few hours. The organization contacted the local police, which found Lutfia’s name in their database. They informed the Israeli consulate, the family and Bustan.
“I was in Normandy, four hours from Paris. The police told me they were not allowed to hold her after 12 noon,” Bustan recalls. “Fortunately, Monaco [from the missing persons unit] intervened and gained an extension until 4 P.M. Meanwhile, I’m in a race against time to get back to Paris. They wanted to send her to the Chabad House. Lutfia was afraid to go there but finally agreed. I got there at 8 P.M. She was still wearing her street clothes, and one of the Haredi guys had obtained a pair of shoes for her.” The next day, Lutfia was back in Israel. A few relatives greeted her at Ben-Gurion International Airport with a large floral wreath and much hugging and kissing. Yasmeen says the first thing her mother did when she got home in Baka al-Garbiyeh was to ask for molokhia (a dish made with wild mallow).’

(…)

‘Why did she use a false name for so long? Was it a rational decision or due to confusion caused by a mental crisis? Did Lutfia want to disappear? If so, why? And why, if so, did she opt to return? “I will not say anything about her testimony,” says police officer Suleiman, one of the few people who has spoken to Lutfia since her return to Israel. “In any event she didn’t say much. She did say there were people from an organization in France who helped her all along the way with food and shelter. She smiled a lot, and my impression was that she wants to return to her family. In the end, one of her sons came and gave her a kiss.” “Lutfia is a brave woman who suffered a dreadful trauma and survived the impossible here in Paris,” remarks Bustan. She says the authorities should make sure she gets proper care that is noncoercive. “For reasons of personal privacy I can’t say more,” she adds. “But I will say this: Every person has the basic right to live with a sense of security, surrounded by people who love them and are concerned about them.””

(…)
‘After the intense, two-and-a-half year search, and just a couple of weeks after the fairy-tale reunion, Yasmeen left Israel indefinitely. The circumstances appear festive: She’s marrying a man who lives in a nearby country. However, she hid the timing of the trip from her family, and as a diversionary tactic fled from her home three days before the target date. Her decision was influenced by her family’s expectation that she will continue being completely devoted to looking after her mother. She desires to finally have a life of her own, which has infuriated them.
Bustan, who became a good friend of Yasmeen, says that since she left, other members of the family are working to sever the daughter’s relations with her mother. “There is no reason for them to prevent Yasmeen and her mother from being in touch just because Yasmeen went to get married and didn’t cancel everything in order to be with her mother for the rest of her life,” she avers. “There is no reason to threaten Yasmeen’s life in order to prevent her from visiting Baka al-Garbiyeh.” Bustan doubts whether Yasmeen will return home in the foreseeable future. “Unfortunately,” she says, “Yasmeen had to escape because her life was in danger.” It’s difficult not to see the tragic connection between the stories of mother and daughter. One disappeared, and only she knows why; two-and-a-half years later, the other also appears to be in flight.’

Read the complete article here.

There is such a right to disappear, exercising this right is slightly selfish.
But apparently sometimes disappearing is the only way out, being homeless in Paris might be better than living near your family in Baka al-Garbiyeh (a Arab village east of Hadera, near the green line.)

Most interesting is that the daughter followed the example of the mother.

Often when people disappear there is a crime involved or a spy service, which is just another way to describe the crime, a state-sponsored crime.
This seems to be nothing but a family matter.

The act of disappearance as the road to liberty, the only road.

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