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.

                                                                                                                                  

thoughts

 I wake up at night from the sounds of an alarm somewhere far away, not here, but I hear it, the app on the phone knows where exactly it's happening. Thanks to Iron Dome that knows how to warn the exact direction of the missiles, on the screen I read the names of towns where the alarm is now sounding, if it is in a big city, Iron Dome identifies which neighborhoods it is aimed at, if it wasn't for Iron Dome we would have died here a long time ago.                                                                                                                                                       I can't fall asleep. I don't know if it will progress and reach here as well, I'm waiting. In the meantime, I'm writing beginnings for posts, later I'll forget them and they'll never be written.

I think about my grandmothers, maybe I'll write about them, when I was a child I was almost the only one who had grandmothers, my friends' parents were Holocaust survivors and they didn't have grandmothers, so I didn't notice it, I didn't think about it.

One of my grandmothers came from Germany in 1933, left her home in Berlin with her husband and my mother who was 6 years old at the time, she had no choice. The second grandmother arrived here with her husband and my father who was one year old at the time, in 1924, she was the first Jewish woman to study dentistry at the university in Warsaw, I have already written about them here before, and there is still much to tell.                                                                                                                                                                           Since the seventh of October I have been sleeping with socks because from the stories of the people who were kidnapped and returned, especially the old women, I understood that it was very difficult for them to walk in the tunnels of Gaza barefoot, yes, I have fears that may not be logical, and maybe they are.                                                                                                                                                                                 Later I start reproducing recipes in my head, maybe it will tire me, meatballs, schnitzels, the magician's rice I made yesterday, that doesn't help either. I go through a list of the families and houses on the small street where I lived in the small northern city, I count in my head my friends in Blogland and those who are no longer, and somehow in the end I fall asleep until the next sound in the "Color Red" app which is the alarm app.

Things I haven't done in a long time

Things I miss and haven't done in a long time,

Go with the girl to the hairdresser, to the shops, marvel at how well she knows exactly what she wants, go with both of them to the small cafe in the mountains where there is no place to sit because of the dozens of motorcyclists who come there on Saturdays.

I  still see them at least twice a week, they are still happy to see me and love the food I cook for them, according to their request, and that is also a great joy.

 

The garden was painted red