Brooklyn first responder shares story of retrieving bodies after Hamas' attack in Israel
NEW YORK - It's the same vest that's been through war. It's the same set of eyes that have seen the unimaginable.
"Look how many bullets are in the ceiling," said Yanke Landau.
These are all memories Landau now lives with. But these moments he snapped on his iPhone, only tell half the story of the brutality and barbaric nature of Hamas' rage of terror they unleashed on Oct. 7.
"We saw bodies in the cars, we saw bodies in road, executed. Literally executed," he said. "They piled up bodies, one on top of the other, and you saw that they were executed that way."
The pain of the atrocities was raw for Landau while he was in Israel. He volunteers with the organization Zaka, a group of first responders that is working alongside Israel Defense Forces to retrieve the bodies of the dead, following specific guidelines in Judaism.
"Every body went into a bag. The bag had to be marked where we found it and how we found it," said Landau.
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Landau and his team picked up bodies all over southern Israel.
"On the road, they were executed, they were burned, but the torture was in the kibbutzim," he said.
In his first interview being back in his Brooklyn home, Landau can finally reflect on the realities of what he saw.
We learned in history what the concentration camps were, what they did to them. Over here, there was no camps. They took families, they tied families together, they burned them alive together," described Landau.
Landau is the descendent of Holocaust survivors. The atrocities his eyes have seen are the same ones his parents survived, the same ones his grandparents died from.
"These people were killed only for one reason -- because they lived in a Jewish state and they were Jewish," he said. "If people think that this could only happen in Israel, they are wrong."
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