Far from here

Facebook sends me videos of people filming in Ukraine. I don't know why, but I click follow on every one of them because it interests me a lot. The videos are very up-to-date, it's happening right now.

Most of them are filmed by men who are going through villages and towns and rescuing people from their homes. Most of the people being rescued are adults and elderly, they leave the house with one or two bags, bags they packed before leaving the house that they won't be returning to. Most of them leave with one or two dogs and sometimes one or more cats, Ukrainians don't leave their animals behind, as much as they can.

Around them you see ruined houses, neighbors' houses that were burned down in shelling, and those who somehow survived are leaving now.                                                                                                                   Maybe I'm drawn to it because I know this place of fear. That feeling of having to act here and now and not having much room for other emotions besides the intense need to be focused on what's right to do here and now. I look at the faces of the old people leaving their homes with their bags and I think I recognize the same feeling.

It's quiet here now.

In the pictures you can see the beautiful and fragrant soaps that my granddaughter makes. It's not the subject of the post, but there's something wonderful about other good things we have here.

 

New Year

 In a strange twist of life, I received German citizenship this week, me and my children, who are no longer children of course, but will always be children to me.

This happened because of the previous time when everyone hated us and would have preferred to see us dead.

My mother and grandmother were born in Germany, they were never granted German citizenship, they were Jewish.

A few years ago the law in Germany changed and Jews who left Germany from 1933 or until, whatever year, due to persecution, can receive citizenship, including their descendants.

I set out on a journey that lasted three years, I collected documents, I collected materials, and this week it happened.                                                                                                                                                                       Although this is not such a good time, because we are once again hated in so many places in the world, and the thought that it is good for us to have European citizenship because we will have somewhere to run away to is no longer so encouraging.                                                                                                                   We are trapped. Captives of such a bad government that is leading us to the brink of an abyss, and accumulating so much hatred in the world.

We, the ordinary people, and we the majority, are doing everything we can to stop the government's very bad moves, but the power is not with us, and we continue to pay such heavy prices.                                                                   On a personal level, I still sleep with my iPhone under my pillow so I can hear the missile warnings at night, I still shower quickly so I don't get caught in the shower when the alarm goes off, I'm still scared on the road, and I still run to the shelter at least twice a week.                                                                   Today is a holiday for us, a new year, but there is no holiday feeling, a lot of sadness and pain in the air and a feeling that the world has turned upside down on us, and against us.

But I decided that in honor of the new year I will not be afraid anymore, I will do what I think is right to do, including writing this post.

                                                                  

Normal life

 Everything is so relative. Missiles from Yemen are already less scary, after the missiles from Iran that killed and destroyed thousands of homes just by bouncing off hundreds of meters.

On Friday evening I returned from a family dinner about an hour's drive from here, I'm always happy when there are no alarms on the way. I got home and sat down on the couch, it was ten thirty at night and then that scary sound that announces an alarm in a few minutes. Of course I ran to the shelter and there I met everyone else again, including the little children who woke up from their sleep scared and the dog Bella who is still very scared by every alarm.                                                                                                                    This morning at 6 a.m., the same sound announcing an upcoming alarm, and the neighborhood meeting at the shelter. Fewer people are coming, maybe because they've gotten used to it, maybe because these are missiles from Yemen, not missiles from Iran.                                                                                                           It's strange to me how adaptable we are. We sit in a shelter for ten minutes, with alarms and explosions above us, and ten minutes later we go out, each to our daily routine, as if this were normal life.                                   

The picture is of Edmund the cat, who is no longer with us, who also knew how to turn any crisis into a normal event.

There is still hope.

There is still hope, perhaps. I hope.

 

Another day

 In recent days, we have been 30 adults in the neighborhood shelter and 15 children, the oldest of whom is 8 years old and the youngest is a one-month-old baby. She has been to the shelter more than ten times. Sometimes at three in the morning and sometimes at more reasonable times. She is still quiet and sleeping even during the alarms. More and more people are coming to the shelter because of the difficult images on TV of families who entered the protected room and after the alarm, found themselves in rubble and collapsed buildings.                                                                                                                                                    There is supposedly a ceasefire now, but no one believes anyone.

I am still on alert all the time with my iPhone with me everywhere, not to miss a single alert.                                                     I have a headache, I haven't had one in years, I think it's mostly because of the debates on blogs with people who have something to say. I need to learn to ignore it.

                            

Lies I read in Blogland

 Blogland is a kind of parallel universe. People write about their lives, and that's what I love about it, the little details of everyday life, the flowers blooming in the garden, the food, the joys and worries, and sometimes also real troubles, illnesses and heartaches. A human encounter with people we will never meet in real life.

But sometimes it's a hard and cruel place where I encounter evil. For a few days now I've been trying to ignore it because I really have much bigger and more important things to worry about, like the moments when I could die at any moment from the ruins of my house or from the impact of a ballistic missile carrying a lot of small bombs that explode far away.                                                                                                    But I will write about it anyway.

Most people here in Blogland are wonderful and good, I think there are only two ladies who irritate me right now. One of them suffers from hatred of Israel and latent anti-Semitism, I noticed this a long time ago, when she was unable to feel compassion for us after October 7th and gave it an open expression. This week she wrote that a hospital here was not blown up, she heard about it on the BBC or some other station.                                                                                                                                                                              The truth is that the hospital was shelled and its wards were destroyed, there were no casualties because they were prepared for this in advance. The disdain and distortion of the truth are part of the same syndrome of anti-Semitism. Our lives are worth less in her eyes because we are Jews and Israelis. I have no other explanation.                                                                                                                                                                   The second woman is simply a blogger with no real knowledge. She has to express an opinion on a subject she understands nothing about, and I didn't find any humanistic side in her either, even though she declares herself as such.                                                                                                      All in all, two women who irritate me greatly and I wonder why I dedicated a post to them. I answer to myself that I did it because they represent a much broader and more dangerous phenomenon.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  In the picture - our sky after the interceptors head out towards the missiles.                                   It's above my house.

Saturday morning

 Some of the children stayed to sleep in the shelter with their mothers. The missiles started arriving every four hours, volleys of dozens, and there are already homes destroyed and several dead in the center of the country.                                                                                                                                                                            More neighbors who have not come to the shelter until now but realized that this time it is more serious than we thought it would be, some of them come with their dogs, but the dogs who are very anxious about the alarms are not always ready to make friends with the other dogs. The children are happy for the social event, they brought tablets and snacks and are playing games.

We are a little tired, when the Iranians take a break the Houthis from Yemen send their lone missile and that also requires his attention.                                                                                                                                                                                             In the few quiet hours I had, I managed to cook lunch for a family member.                                                                                                                                                                                       Our world now looks like a strange puzzle. There are parts that are sane, normal like anywhere else in the world, and there are parts that look like they were taken from a movie from another era.

The other day I traveled with my daughter and grandchildren to a small town in the north where a ceremony was held at a library named after my father, who wrote twenty children's and youth books and was greatly admired in this small town. We made an appointment with a Facebook friend of mine who is a resident of the city and a big fan of my father. She wanted to give us a tour of the small town where I was also born and has an interesting history. We arranged to meet at a restaurant in the city. When we got there, I saw an elderly woman sitting at the entrance to the restaurant. My intuition that it was a famous thing here in the family worked again. I asked her, "Are you Yehudit?" And she did answer yes. This was my kindergarten teacher, whom I had seen more than seventy years ago. She was very excited when I told her who I was, she remembered me and my family, which was well-known in the small town that was then a neighborhood of shacks. My grandmother was the dentist of the neighborhood at the time and everyone knew her.                                                                                                                                              The kindergarten teacher, now almost ninety, was waiting for her husband who had gone to the bathroom at the shopping center. It was a complete coincidence that we met, but I believe it was not. There is some guiding hand in the world. We said goodbye excitedly. She asked me to come visit her and that we keep in touch. I will do that.