the fifth day

I am debating whether to tell only my personal story here or to give a broader picture of the terrible thing that happened here. The truth is that nothing happened to me that had not happened before in previous rounds of war. Right, I'm scared. I have many minutes of fear with alarms in my unprotected hallway, I don't go to my grandchildren and I hardly leave the house. My grandchildren have not been going to school for five days and they are all sleeping together with the two dogs, the cats and their mother in the protected room. They are used to such situations and not anxious.   -

The TV stations here take pity on us and do not broadcast difficult images or details. There are difficult details that I see precisely on foreign TV stations. But after five days the real story starts to come out.

There is an organization called Zaka that has been operating for more than twenty years in places where there have been serious accidents or attacks. They collect corpses and what remains after an attack. They have seen terrible things in these twenty years and now they are being interviewed and crying. They say that they have never been exposed to such severe cases of abuse of babies, children, and deaths. Entire settlements are completely burned and the bodies have not yet been collected. There are also dead bodies of dogs and cats in the streets.              Everyone talks about it in terms of a holocaust after the sights are revealed.

I think this is the last time I will write here about the general picture because I don't want to flood the post with descriptions of horror and also with the understanding that as much as I want the understanding and support from those who read it won't always happen 100 percent.

With all the difficulty we experience here there is also a beautiful side of the thousands of people here who help everyone who is in need. The feeling is that the disputes that have been here in the past months are over and the people are very united.

And a big thank you to all the blogland members for the supportive comments. For me it means a lot.                                             

what is happening now

 My house is about forty kilometers north of Gaza and thirty kilometers south of Jerusalem. In the terms of our small country, it is far from Gaza and close to Jerusalem. I can't sleep at night and already know how to distinguish between the echoes of the shelling in Gaza and the explosions of the rockets from Gaza that are sent here and stop near the Iron Dome. The house shakes anyway.All the TV stations here talk in terms of the Holocaust when they try to describe the scale of the horror that took place on Saturday in the border and at the nature party where 260 young people were murdered. In the settlements,  in the families with their small children were murdered. There are parents, children and grandchildren who are still looking for their family member.The feeling is that something more difficult and longer awaits us in the coming days. People were asked to stock up on water and food as scary as it sounds and belongs to other times. I will update more later and sorry that I don't personally answer comments.

what is happening here

 I don't know if I will go into all the details about what is happening here. I don't know what the news stations in your places are reporting, but without a doubt what you see from here you don't see there.

On Saturday morning at six thirty I woke up to an alarm. I don't have a protected place and I'm just standing in the small hallway of my small house that won't withstand even a rocket fragment. This happened several more times during the day. All day and night I heard loud explosions and saw the fireballs of the Iron Dome. The TV is on and tells me where there is an alarm at any given time.

TThey entered houses and shot at families there. They took captive small children and demented old women with their Nepali caregivers. People are still besieged in their homes and waiting for rescue.

I still haven't heard the alarms here this morning. I calm myself by cooking vegetable soup. I watch on TV unhappy and painful parents whose child who was at a nature party was kidnapped to Gaza with several dozen other boys and girls who were at the party. Those who were not kidnapped or managed to escape were shot.

If I succeed I will upload a picture from the night before from spending time at a restaurant with my granddaughter and the rest of the family in honor of my birthday which was the night before. 

Untitled

I'm afraid that when I really want to write here again, I won't  remember the technique of uploading the posts, so this is an attempt.

Life around here is so complex and charged with difficult energies, but everyday life is really fine. I guess when there is some sort of existential threat again I will come back and write because there is nothing like blogland as a comforting environment on hard days.
 

kitten

 She didn't go to school today because the puppy she found has to be fed every three hours. And yes, she has grown a lot and like all thirteen  year old  girls, the gel polish on her nails is very expertly done.

things i learn

Every now and then we go on a short shopping trip. She is already older and very focused on what she wants. Many times it is still the same store where she buys materials for her artwork that she loves so much. In the store we were in earlier, she had a hair mask and a make-up pencil. Her world is so different from mine when I was her age.

When I asked her how she knows what's going on in the world if there are no newspapers at home and no news on TV, she replied that everything is on Tik Tok. A short test showed me that she was indeed right. She also convinced me to follow the royal family's Instagram, which I did.

 

Ukraine

My grandfather was born in Odessa. I do not know when he came to Germany, I found his father's death certificate in Berlin so I guess the whole family moved from Odessa to Berlin at some point.

In 1933 he was forced to leave his life in Berlin and came here with my grandmother and my mother who was six then.

Four years later he was murdered by Arabs in the orchard where he worked. I did not know him and I do not feel a special connection to Ukraine.

But I feel a lot of compassion and sorrow for the fate of the Ukrainians.

I understand that I belong to a large tribe whose post-trauma is already part of its DNA.

When a great national trouble occurs in the world it is hard for me to ignore and I find myself experiencing it through all means of communication and introspection and I need to learn the smallest details.

I'm sure I'm no better than others who say that as long as they can not do anything about it they prefer to turn off the news and clean the shelves of the fridge or watch nature movies.

But I also remember how in times of existential anxiety here a few kind words from people I have never met and probably never will have helped me. You know who you are. There is something so empowering in a few words in such difficult hours.

So do not ignore, try to do something small, in a word, in thought in whatever way you choose.