THE GRANDDAUGHTER : FAREWELL TO A PEACEMAKER : The Keeper of Rabin’s Flame

She was the apple of her grandfather’s eye.

Noa Ben Artzi, the freckled 18-year-old who moved the nation and much of the world to tears Monday with her eulogy of slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, exhibited the same strength for which her grandfather was admired.

Speaking to the royalty and international leaders who preceded her at the podium, the teen-ager said: “You will forgive me, for I do not want to talk about peace. I want to talk about my grandfather.”

She raised her blue eyes--Rabin’s blue eyes--to the audience of millions at the cemetery and watching from home, and spoke directly to her beloved grandfather. The words of love, the fleeting smiles between tears, were for him.

“One always wakes up from a nightmare. But since yesterday, I have only awakened to a nightmare--the nightmare of life without you--and this I cannot bear,” Ben Artzi said. “You were the pillar of fire before the camp, and now we are left as only the camp, alone in the dark, and it is so cold and sad for us.”

Lifelong friends of Rabin say that Ben Artzi--whose mother is Rabin’s daughter, Dalia--was his pride and joy, the grandchild he took with him on a painful trip to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in Poland, the one he met every weekend he could, to talk to her and hear her concerns.

And she adored Rabin. To the world he often seemed aloof, stubborn, combative. But to Ben Artzi, he was warmth.

“Few truly knew you. They can still talk a lot about you, but I feel that they know nothing about the depth of the pain, the disaster and, yes, the holocaust, at least for us, the family.

“Grandfather, you were and still are our hero. I want you to know that in all I have ever done, I have seen you before my eyes. Your esteem and love accompanied us in every step. . . . You, my eternal hero, cold and lonely, and I can do nothing to save you, you who are so wonderful,” she said.

Her love drew a million tears from mourners realizing their grief was small compared to hers. A soldier, member of a color guard standing behind her, wiped away a tear. Ben Artzi’s voice began to break.

“People greater than I have already eulogized you, but none of them was fortunate like I was [to have] the caress of your warm, soft hands and the warm embrace that was just for us. Or your half-smiles, which will always say so much, the same smile that is no more,” she said.

But to the prime minister’s friends, Rabin lives on in Noa Ben Artzi. The redhead who recently joined the army, looks remarkably like Rabin as a young soldier. She is not a paratrooper like Rabin but edits part of an army newspaper.

She inherited his wisdom and intelligence, says Yaakov Chefetz, an old friend of Rabin’s. During their Saturday talks, she “listened and listened” to Rabin. “She’s a ‘Rabinette,’ ” he said.

But where Rabin was shy and awkward in public, his granddaughter has the grace of kings.

“He loved her with all his soul and she him,” Chefetz said.