"Why did the fire eat the mother?"

BarcelonaPhotographer Fadi En Thabet captured an image that speaks volumes: the army's eagerness to destroy a childhood, and the resilience of a little girl, Amira, who ran from her home as bombs fell, clutching only one thing: her textbooks, her future. Amira's story is recounted in A cry for the children of Gaza. Voices, images and testimonies of the genocide (Ara Llibres), coordinated and with a prologue by Txell Feixas and Cristina Mas, was read yesterday at the Teatre Lliure. The book features the voices of people from Gaza itself, as well as from elsewhere, who speak of childhood under the bombs and how the Israeli army has erased the future of some 20,000 children and teenagers. With this reading, directed by Alícia Gorina, the Lliure joined a solidarity action that is part of the Actúa x Palestina (Act for Palestine) campaign.

On a dark stage, with many empty children's chairs, which could have been in any school, authors and actors, such as Marwa Ajandouz, Moha Amazian, Jordi Armadans, Pedro Arquillué, Juan Carreras, David Fernández, Cristina Genebat, Julio Manrique, and Marta Marco, who suffered in complete silence something as inhuman as the destruction of a childhood. It was impossible not to travel to Gaza listening to the survivors explain how they are losing everything. If there was outrage among some of the audience before entering the theater about a crime broadcast live without any international condemnation strong enough to stop it, afterward there was a certain sadness, but also a clear message: the need, as was read in the play, for active solidarity and concern—where are they now, what happened to Najwa, to Sonia Elemare and so many others?

The anguish of Ahmad al Farra, head of pediatrics and maternity at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, was conveyed to the audience yesterday at the Lliure Theater. The memories of all those children will stay with this pediatrician for life. In his words, there is a great deal of frustration at having seen so many children die for lack of basic necessities like powdered milk, or at not being able to save a child whose head was riddled with shrapnel despite the pleas of a mother who had lost her entire family. "I wish I had never seen the screams of a four-year-old boy saying, 'Mother burned. Why did the fire eat Mommy?'" the pediatrician writes.

"The soldiers shattered all my dreams"

Najwa and Sonia Elemare, a mother and daughter, wrote down everything they saw during the Gaza offensive in a notebook. With very few resources, they took photographs of everything they had written so they could feel like they were outside of Gaza. "The soldiers destroyed all my dreams and all my hopes for studying and living. They burned my clothes, my memories, my toys, and everything beautiful in my life," Sonia wrote. Her mother also wrote about her despair: "Every day I wondered when our time would come, who would die first, and who would survive."

On Tuesday, many of the children's terrible experiences were palpable: a child whispering in her ear to wake up next to her mother's body, or a child wandering aimlessly searching for his dead father. Elisabeth and Dominique Salomon lost their grandparents and an aunt in Auschwitz. Yesterday, Dominique drew applause when she spoke about her story and expressed her outrage that Israel's far-right government does not represent all Jews: "Not in our name!" she exclaimed.