"In my childhood I have suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I passed from the Warsaw Ghetto, through the labour camps, to Buchenwald. Today, as a citizen of Israel, I cannot accept the technocratic cruelty of the bombing, destroying of human beings. I hear too many familiar sounds today, sounds which are being amplified by the war. I hear 'dirty Arabs' and I remember 'dirty Jews.' I hear about closed areas and I remember ghettos and camps. I hear two legged beasts and I remember"Untermenschen" (subhumans). I remember suffering, destruction, death, blood and murder... too many things in Israel remind me of too many things from my childhood." Letter written by Dr Shlomo Shmelzman, a survivor of the Holocaust, to the press in Israel announcing his hunger strike at the height of the bombing of West Beirut in Lebanon in August 1982