This is part of a series, “Uprooted.” Each column is a curated monologue from an individual among the tens of thousands of internally displaced Israelis during the war with Hamas who were evacuated from the country’s northern border and the Gaza envelope.
Saturday, October 7
On Friday, October 6, I was at a friend’s birthday party with my partner Doron next to Kibbutz Re’im. We stayed to camp with friends and there was a DJ — Dr. Hayim Katzman — who played uplifting Arabic music. A few hours later, we found out he was murdered when he went to help a neighbor who had terrorists in her house.
The sirens began at about 6 a.m. It was seemingly familiar, but this time an inner voice told me to run. We were packed within a minute. I wanted to go to my daughters, Arian, 8, and Eleanor, 4, who were with their father, Nikko, at Moshav Yated. And then we heard a series of sirens like we’d never heard before.
Doron said, “Come, let’s go to my place at Eshbol.” Doron is from the area. He grew up in Sdei Avraham and knows the area well. We left the fields and passed Ofakim and Netivot, and in retrospect, that’s probably what saved us because the road to Yated was already trapped and people had already been murdered there. The road we were on was also filled with terrorists shortly after we passed through. Was it divine intervention? A miracle? I don’t know.
We reached Eshbol, turned on the TV, and saw the horrors. Neighbors of mine from Yated wrote on WhatsApp, “There are gunshots, someone get here.” I couldn’t communicate with Nikko other than for a minute here and then when he left the bomb shelter to charge his phone in the car because he didn’t have power.
I called the neighbors who lived next door to him — who I knew had a weapon — and asked them to invite Nikko and the girls to their bomb shelter. Nikko thought I was blowing it out of proportion; he had no idea what was really happening. I couldn’t explain the severity of the situation to him because communication with him was so fragmented and I didn’t want to waste his battery. At night, after I’d screamed my soul out, they finally went to the neighbors.
On Sunday, a message was sent from the security team about a terrorist infiltration. I called the neighbor and she said that Nikko and the girls had just left. They hadn’t seen the message about terrorist infiltration. Right at that moment, other neighbors said there were gunshots right next to them.
I knew that Nikko had left, I knew that there were terrorists in the moshav, and in the background, other people who lived nearby were calling for help. For seven hours, no one answered. I paced like a tiger in a cage screaming to the skies. Terror. I was sure they were dead.
The evacuation
On Sunday, October 8, at around 4 p.m., people began an organized exodus from Yated. No one put out an official evacuation order. Doron and I opened a mini command center from afar to help. People who had weapons left together with people who didn’t.
Most of the residents evacuated to Eilat. We were used to going there when there was a military operation in Gaza, but this time it wasn’t a choice. I always told the girls that we weren’t running away, we were only getting some distance until it was quiet again. This time, we ran for our lives.
Like a never-ending shiva (week of Jewish mourning), the lobby in Eilat became a place where people sat and cried. People weren’t sleeping because of panic attacks, children were in a state that went back and forth between hyperactivity and severe rage attacks. People were walking around with shocked and confused faces, and all this was stuffed into one place and you find yourself in a hotel with 400 people who were traumatized.
For the first month, I could barely pull myself together. I could only think of how to get up and succeed in taking care of my daughters who had spent 30 hours in a dark bomb shelter with their father holding a knife and trying to protect them with all his might.
One day, they came back from the children’s club at the hotel with red paint on their heads. When I asked them what it was, they told me nonchalantly, “Oh, we were pretending to be children who murder terrorists.” At that moment, after a month of being depressed and turned off, I woke up. I understood that there were children who needed an organized response.
I was supposed to start a yearlong sabbatical from my job in education, but when I started to understand the consequences, I contacted the Eshkol Regional Council’s head of education. I made a list of equipment, the hotel gave us a small and dusty shelter that needed to be cleaned and organized, and we opened a kindergarten. It worked wonderfully.
The children, including my younger daughter, were in kindergarten four hours a day and had a routine. Suddenly, they had some normalcy. They sat and drew and did puzzles with friends as well as talked about what they had been through. This activity uplifted me.
Last year, I taught first grade and also worked as a substitute kindergarten teacher in the Strawberry Kindergarten in Nir Oz. Ariel Bibas, the sweet four-year-old redhead who was kidnapped with his mother and younger brother, was in this kindergarten as well as Tamar Kedem Siman Tov‘s twin daughters who were murdered.
A few days before the war, we planted a vegetable garden with the children, and I took a photo of Ariel sowing seeds. It was the last time I saw him.
Not long ago, someone asked me if I wanted to go back to working in that kindergarten, which had been reopened in Eilat. I said no. The last time I saw the children, we were strolling through the green fields of Nir Oz and they were so happy. I couldn’t bear going to the kindergarten. Not yet.
Finding a way through the fog
For a month and a half I worked in our kindergarten in Eilat, and at the same time, Doron and I decided to move in together. He has three children from his former marriage, and our relationship is relatively new, but what we went through together on October 7 and the days after strengthened the bond between us, which had been strong to begin with. When we understood the evacuation would drag on, people started looking for more stable temporary solutions.
I never thought I would leave Yated. I got there five years ago and felt like I was living in paradise, that I had found my home, but something about the war opened a hatch.
Here we are, we were saved, we are physically healthy. I could continue crying and thinking about the people who are no longer with us and the places that were home for me and that I cannot go near now because they’ve been desecrated with blood, but I was given another chance.
Doron and I decided we wanted to grow from the pain and the grief. A few weeks ago, we moved to Nir Akiva in the Merhavim regional council in the north-west of the Negev because we wanted to be close to his children.
My daughters have joined a routine here. There are difficult days, but I always remind myself of two things: First, this is our second chance, and second, I have a lot of support from Doron. Nothing is taken for granted.
A month after the disaster, I went to Nikko’s house in Yated. Before the war, we lived there together and nested, meaning the girls stayed in one house, and we alternated. I went to pick up some things, and when I saw a knife on the bookshelf and a baton under the bed, I understood the magnitude of terror for the first time.
Nikko was alone in the safe room with two small girls and gunshots in the background, and they heard everything. He had to stay calm and make sure they kept quiet and that was really difficult. Three of Yated’s emergency response team members were murdered that day.
My brother, his wife, and their four children now live in my house in Yated. They rented it from me after two months in a hotel. My brother and his wife are religious, and if you ask me what we’ll see here in a year, I think there will be a lot more religious people in Eshkol who think we have to settle the land because of what happened.
And then there are people like me who lost their faith in the place and the security system and don’t want to go back. At least not now.
Have you decided not to go back?
I won’t go back until I feel safe. We got used to saying that it was okay, but October 7 made me understand that as long as road 232 leading to my house is closed every few months and I’m forced to drive through open fields with my daughters, it means there’s no security and we’re not going back.
I think people shouldn’t go back until there is a feeling that we can move freely in our country. Going back now means agreeing to be okay with what was before.
On the other hand, I’m full of appreciation for people who go back and say, “This is our home and we cannot give up on it.” I have mixed feelings. It’s hard for me to predict anything. This crisis made me understand that we need to take it week by week, and in the worst case, day to day.
Do you feel at home now?
Home is wherever I decide it is. Home is what I create for myself. I am what makes a place home. The rituals, the routines. Since October 7, I’ve understood that home can be anywhere. Even in a hotel room if that’s what I decide. And even in a new moshav.
And how are the girls doing?
Emotionally, there are some challenges that they didn’t have before the war. Eleanor got a teddy bear from kindergarten with an “ID card” that we had to fill out. What’s the bear’s favorite color? What is he scared of? She said that he’s scared of terrorists taking him.
At the same time, their routines are good for them. They have order and friends and they like their new life. I am comforted by it and am even proud of myself that within this chaos, I was able to create some stability for them.
The obvious thing as a mother is to give your children stability and security, but suddenly you don’t have that yourself, and you need flexibility and creativity to make it for them. You learn to take notice of the small things: Today you sat and played with them for 10 minutes even though your mind was frazzled. Tomorrow you’ll sit with them for five minutes, and thus, you collect moments. You hug them and say that you love them and that you are family and that’s all that matters.
Arian asks a lot of questions. There are people she knows who were murdered or kidnapped. You cannot filter all the information past her. My job is to mediate between the things she hears and the images she gets so that she can contain it and move on. Meaning, I have to retain her sense of security in the world.
How do you manage that mediation?
When she asks if something like this could happen again, I don’t sugarcoat it. I don’t say of course not. I say things simply: We will live in a place where we feel safe, and as long as it isn’t safe, we won’t live there. I have to give her space for her experience and her trauma.
We lived in the delusion that everything was stable and permanent, and now I understand that life needs to be lived without too many plans. We must realize that everything is right only for a certain amount of time.
I haven’t gone back to doing things I did before the war yet. I don’t go out, and I drive as little as possible. Every move is like starting anew: The first time I went to Yated, the first time I listened to a song, cooked a meal, or went grocery shopping since the evacuation.
What do you miss?
The sunsets near the Gaza border. My community that fell apart. Nighttime walks with the dog in the moshav. My dog is being fostered by a woman whose husband is on reserve duty and her children no longer live at home. She wanted to do something for someone from the South and took my dog and gave him a home while we were in the hotel.
When I told her I was leaving Eilat and was taking him back, she started crying and asked me to leave him with her. He’s happy there, he sleeps in her bed with her. She fell in love with him. I was happy because a dog requires a lot of care and attention and we agreed that she could always bring him back to me if it wasn’t working.
I miss my friends. One of them moved to Arava. Another close friend of mine from Yated left the country. We were neighbors and used to have a lot of meals together and the kids would hang out together. My mother, who moved to Yated after my father passed away and was an anchor for me, flew to my sister in Florida. She doesn’t see a reason to keep living here.
I miss everyone. I miss my faith that I was living in paradise because that was how I felt until October 7 and something broke inside me that day.
I am hopeful that I can go back to feeling safe. The level of faith I had in the army, the surveillance soldiers, and the security teams, was high. I knew that if I went out into the field with a jeep, a head of security would be over within minutes to ask if everything was okay. That was the level of faith I had, and I want it to come back, but I doubt it will.
What gives you strength these days?
The knowledge that in the end, life goes on. Action and helping others not to sink.
We can stay angry, and frustrated, and feeling like, “How could they do this to us?” We can focus on what happened and analyze it from every possible angle, or we can go on and do our best to create a good life for ourselves.
My dream is simple: To live somewhere isolated and quiet, grow my own food, and tend to a vegetable garden. I don’t need more than that. And love of course. Love is the force of life. It’s the power with which you can pass any obstacle and difficulty.
