Israel Matzav: Swimming through the pain: A terror victim trains for the 2016 Olympics

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Swimming through the pain: A terror victim trains for the 2016 Olympics

Giulio Meotti's A New Shoah, a book all about Israel's terror victims and their families, includes this description of Asael Shabo:

In June 2002, a terrorist entered the home of the Shabo family in the settlement of Itamar and ﬁred a hail of bullets, killing Rachel Shabo and three of her children. Asael, nine years old, was hit by a series of bullets that took off his leg. Today he walks thanks to a sophisticated prosthesis designed in the United States.

At ﬁrst he was depressed and didn’t want to hear about wearing an artiﬁcial limb. Then he met Shlomo Nimrod, a disabled veteran who wears a prosthesis designed to allow him to run and play sports (similar to the one used by the South African Olympic champion Oscar Pistorius). Nimrod convinced Asael to have a prosthesis like his own made. “Dad, I can run on two legs,” Asael told his father before returning to
Israel.

...

Everyone here remembers what happened to the Shabo family of Itamar, near Nablus. Rachel was killed along with three of her children, Avishai, Zvika, and Neria. Their father, Boaz, was in another house in Itamar, and in the distance saw his own home burning until it was completely devastated. “When we arrived, they were taking away the bodies. Boaz and I started to count them,” said one of the boys, Meir. “Nothing in the house remained intact. The only thing that wasn’t devoured by the ﬂames was the cabinet where the Jewish sacred texts were kept.”

The children here grow up reading the story of the ten martyrs of the Talmud: The Romans found Rabbi Haninah ben Tardion with a copy of the Torah in his arms. They wrapped him in it and burned him. His students asked him, “Master, what do you see?” He answered, “The parchment burning, the letters ﬂying in the air.”

Thousands attended the funeral for the Shabos. Five years later, Boaz would go to Sderot to help the citizens of the community hardest hit by the rockets of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. “Helping others gives me strength,” he says. “I tell my children that their father goes wherever he is needed, and they are happy for me.”

Asael Shabo, who survived that terror attack, is training for the 2016 Para-Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. And he has a pretty good chance of making them (Hat Tip: Mrs. Carl).

It is hardly the type of beginning that leads to championship sports competition, but 10 years after the attack, Asael is a standout athlete at the Israel Sports Center for the Disabled in Ramat Gan and is training for the 2016 ParaOlympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is Israel’s national champion for the 50-meter freestyle and a member of the national wheelchair basketball team – and coaches younger kids in both sports.

With his body and family in tatters, sports provided Shabo with a framework for a long, grueling rehabilitation program. Aside from learning to function with just one leg, the process included exercising muscles that had atrophied during his long hospitalization and learning to maneuver first with crutches, later with a prosthetic leg crafted for him by a New York firm and paid for by private donors. But he says the physical aspects of his training were nothing compared to the emotional ones.

“I first came to the Center about a year after the attack, mainly for hydrotherapy,” Asael says. “Learning to swim was tough, but after I learned how to swim properly, being alone in the water gave me two important things: It gave me the quiet and the solitude to digest and internalize what had happened, and it gave me a physical outlet to work through the emotional pain of watching my mom and brothers murdered. I literally swam my way through the emotional turmoil I was going through, and the mental anguish I went through for years afterwards.”

A decade after the attack, years that have included an intense course of psychological care, the effects of both the attack and his physical rehabilitation are readily visible on Asael’s face and body. His chiseled, unshaven face sits atop the muscular body of a young man in the prime of his life, a dedicated athlete who has spent years developing his upper body strength. His physical presence in the pool is strong enough that one does not immediately notice that the swimmer is missing a leg.

But a deeper look into Asael’s eyes shows the face of a traumatized 9-year-old, bearing the emotional scars of that horrific night. He speaks openly about his mother and brothers, as well as about his family life since the tragedy, and the conversation emanates from a scarred place deep inside.

“I met Asael a year or so after the attack,” said Slava Longo, a swim coach at the Center. “He wasn’t really shy, but he was frightened and withdrawn. I can’t say that he took to the water as soon as he jumped in – at first it was just another one of the sport activities that the center offers, and he enjoyed it. I didn’t think anything of it, and it certainly didn’t occur to me that he was going to be a competitive swimmer."

The switch came a few years after Asael started swimming. Coach Longo had taken an 18-month break from coaching, leaving Asael to try other sports. “When I got back from my sabbatical, he’d obviously done a lot of hard work and began spending long hours in the pool. That’s about the time we started seeing a marked difference in his demeanor and outlook on life. His remarkable inner strength took over, and he began to digest the tragedy he’d been through and he began to visualize a real future for himself. It was a phenomenal process to watch and to be a part of,” said Slavo.