a new day

 Corresponding with my granddaughter on WhatsApp while staying in the bomb shelter yesterday evening, (outside many alarms and explosive sounds of ballistic missiles from Iran)                                         she;

"grandmother

did you have an alarm

are you ok? how are you?

"We are in a shelter" (my answer)   me-                                                                                                                     

she-

very good

how are you feeling (she asks)

I send her a picture of the little children of the neighbors who are with me in the shelter and draw pictures on pages that their parents made sure to prepare in advance in the shelter.

she-

will be fine

Stay in the shelter

I was with a friend and we entered the protected room

we are all fine

And after we got quieter we sent each other hearts and flowers on WhatsApp.                                                       

She is 14 years old, with the spirit of a devoted and caring grandmother.

be brave

When someone writes that they don't take sides, even if they are one of my favorite people in blogland, I ask myself where we failed in mediating our reality here to the world.

Please, even those of you who don't take sides, even if it's hard and scary and can create a crack in your worldview, go learn and read what really happened here on October 7th. You will learn the small details and the terrible stories that happened here, in complete surprise, the brutality is captured on the body cameras of the people from Gaza who arrived here that Saturday morning.

Watch, among other things, the video of the boy from Gaza who tells his mother that he killed several women and now father continues. Without going into the small details he describes, and his mother in response encourages him. This is one of the 7000 Gazans who committed the terrible massacre here. Learn the small details, it's important. Also for your history.

Meanwhile here

As time goes by we get used to fear, it becomes a pale shadow of itself and sometimes it turns into indifference.                                                                                                                                                                              Words like "regional war" that many talk about as a realistic option here wake it up anew, but thank God that nature invented the defense mechanisms and you can move on as if nothing happened.                                                                                                                                                                      I'm sorry I don't comment on your posts, you are my favorite people and you know who you are, I read every day and love you but something has become silent in me, it will come back.                                                                             Our lives that are made of layers are made of the same gems everywhere in the world, the joys, the troubles, the health, the sick, the meals, the birthdays, the togetherness and the loneliness, here there is simply one more layer that is very special to this place and it is called spirits of war, it is definitely a challenge to deal with it and I Hope we succeed.                                                                                                         

I'll be on my way soon

I'll be on my way soon. Like every Wednesday lately. 35 minutes to the destination. In my bag, a thinly sliced ​​chicken breast, seasoned breadcrumbs, pasta, ground meat, tomato paste, a bottle of Cola Zero and chocolate. I will prepare schnitzels and bolognese for the children.

The problem is just the way. If it catches me in the middle of the road it's really dangerous. You have to get out of the vehicle and lie on the ground with your hands covering your head. I can lie on the ground, not sure I'll be able to get up easily.

Life on a volcano

 I've always loved reading descriptions of people's lives in Europe before the Holocaust, how they lived on the edge of a volcano before it erupted, how aware they were of the impending danger, how much they lived in denial, and how they coped with their helplessness, with the fate they had no control over. .                       I have read Victor clampere diaries more than once. (I may be spelling his last name wrong here), this is an accurate and reliable description of a man facing his destiny.

I was also interested in how people who actually live near volcanoes always return to live in those places even after their homes are destroyed by volcanic eruptions.                                                                                          I have never tried to explain to myself this curiosity and attraction to the life stories of the people who walk on the edge of the abyss and still walk.                                                                                                           Now I am this woman walking on the edge of the volcano. Me and with me a few million more here.

Our history and our genes have prepared us for such situations, it's not entirely new, but every time something dramatic happens here, another new element is added that wasn't there before.                                     This time we are promised attacks from the north, from the east, from the south, we are talking about seven different fronts, all the airlines have canceled flights here, many countries are begging their citizens to flee the area and take any possible flight immediately anywhere in the world, just don't stay in this area.                                                                                                                                                                          People are urged to stockpile food, candles, water, generators, etc. and check if they have a protected space. I didn't do any of that and I don't have a protected space.                                                                                             We don't know when it will start, it could happen any minute or some other time soon. Every appointment to the doctor, to the hairdresser, anywhere ends with the words "if nothing happens", nothing is certain.                                                                                                                            

The half-full glass

 I decided to choose the half full glass. All those good people who wrote to me and cared, I will choose them.

I started writing this blog because I wanted to improve my English, over the years I discovered wonderful people , it was never really easy here and always in difficult times a few kind words were so much to get through these times

I've always felt like I'm living a double life, on the one hand the everyday life of the grandchildren, the garden, the food, like everywhere else in the world, and on the other hand, the everyday that there's always a danger hovering over our heads, a danger that we're aware of for part of the time and for the other part we live in denial, because it's impossible otherwise

On the seventh of October our lives changed. Something terrible happened. I felt that I was not able to mediate it to the blogland world. At first we were the victim that was easy to sympathize with, but I immediately knew that when we started fighting for our lives here it would change, and indeed it did. The media loves the pornography of disasters. People are affected by this and form opinions. It's hard to argue with opinions, no one has yet changed their mind because of an argument, and I decided to give up. The forces should be kept for survival here                                                                                                                         This country is small, the number of inhabitants here is almost the same as that of London, a little more, there is no one who does not know at least one prisoner in Gaza, people who were murdered on the seventh of October, children who were left orphans, children and women who returned from captivity, soldiers who were killed, and those who are refugees in their own country here because Rockets are still fired at their houses every day.                                                                                           

          Life here is unlike anything you know, even the dramatic things that used to be told about in the news have become routine. I think if I go back to writing, it will be to tell about these things. And maybe not. I do not know yet.                                                                             

My weird Facebook groups

 As soon as the grandparents entered Facebook en masse the young people abandoned it. I know this from my grandchildren who told me more than once that Facebook is for old people, and that is the reality.                                I don't write anything on Facebook but I am a member of several groups, some of them are strange and interesting.

At the time of Covid, when the whole world was in lockdown and with the feeling of the end of the world, I was busy connecting all the descendants of my grandmother and her ten sisters who were scattered all over the world, it was a wonderful adventure.                                                                                                                                      And so I came to a group in Poland, a group of residents of a small Polish village from where my great-grandfather came to Leipzig in Germany in 1898.         My grandmother would be born two years later in Germany. I have no idea how he arrived with his nine daughters, his son and his wife who would die nine years later, from that small village to Germany. But it happened.                                                       And so in order to know more I joined the Facebook group of this small village that still exists. Thanks to Google Translate I corresponded in Polish with some women in the village. I don't know how ridiculous Google made my Polish but they understood me and I understood them.                                                    One of the women with whom I corresponded the most told me that there were Jews in her family, but it was a secret that was kept all these years, they were afraid to reveal it, anti-Semitism existed then and still exists in many, she said. She searched in the district archives and found some documents that were discovered in the attic of one of the houses, which contained lists of Jews, residents of the village, all of whom were killed in concentration camps.                                                                                                                  There were no Jews left in the village, they were all murdered there or sent to concentration camps during the war. The Jewish cemetery was destroyed , but later someone else sent me pictures of a group of people who decided to restore what was left of the tombstones.                                                                Every time I tried to post in the group a picture of the beautiful and old synagogue that was burned in the war, someone deleted the picture. Some things still exist. I am still a member of the group.                                                           The second group is also in Poland, my father's hometown. There are seven small towns with the same name, my father was not the person of the small details, and he also left this town when he was one year old so he didn't know much. I managed to find out that the town he thought he was born in was actually a different town and so I joined her Facebook group to understand more.                            The third group is the archive group of the city of Leipzig, where I pursued documents such as the birth certificates of my grandmother and my mother, my mother's library card when she was in first grade, and more.                                                                                                                                                      About the rest of my strange groups in another post.