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The Story of a Survivor from Arad
by Lipa Wagshal
The miracles are heard from all sides. Our hearts overflow with emotion. Hashem unleashed His wrath on trees and stones, but the reports of losses of homes and their entire interiors, when two hundred families were involved who lost everything they once possessed, defies all credibility.
Reb M.D. a young learned avreich, resident of a building neighboring the one which was hit directly, tells of his experience:
"The motzei Shabbos of the third of Nisan was initially a routine one of wartime. The children were sleeping in their beds when the warning sirens went off. During that Shabbos, there had been several warnings without actual sirens. We adhered to the Torah dictum of being cautious for our lives and began organizing ourselves to go down to the shelter, calmly, when moments before we descended, the alarms went off. I realized that we would not succeed in reaching the shelter within 90 seconds, and remained in the stairwell, surrounded by protective walls.
The sirens ceased. Several seconds of quiet ensued, following by an ear-shattering blast with shattering glass and chunks of stone and plaster falling. The building shook; the children trembled even more. Electric cables were torn and everything was plunged into total darkness.
We waited a few minutes, trying to calm the children down while many missile shards continued to land, until all was quiet. We began emerging from the hallway. It took some pressure to enable me to open the door of our apartment. A column of smoke burst into the apartment.
I realized that we couldn't wait and made our way inside, babies in arms and toddlers being led inside. We made our way between mounds of rubble, afraid of proceeding forward, but an electrician who lived in a nearby building shouted up to us to be very cautious of electric wires that were still charged and were very dangerous. I was very afraid of proceeding forward but very miraculously, our whole family succeeded in escaping the death trap of what had once been our home and building. We hurried out and when on to my in-laws who lived not far away.
It was only on the following morning that I began to understood the full picture of our situation. Many hours passed after the previous night before things began to calm down, the crying subsided and the breathing returned to normal. The children received first aid and I was able to approach the home front army station. The following morning, after a crazy, sleepless night, i realized that i needed a pair of tefillin, and returned to what had once been my home.
It was only then that it hit me: almost nothing was left. Everything around me lay in ruins. Shards of glass were strewn everywhere; the window frames were bent out of shape; chunks of wall, broken lighting fixtures — everything in total destruction. A portion of the clothing and articles inside closets survived, as miraculously as well; the bookcase, which remained without its glass doors, was not harmed. A window frame which suddenly flew towards me, missed me by a fraction and landed on the floor.
Everything else that had been flung outside the closets was rendered absolutely useless — and unrecoverable — like bed linen, bedding, clothing that hung on the line, coats and suits, toys, to say nothing of furniture like mattresses and couch - all were covered by small slivers of glass.
I retrieved my tefillin and hurried off to daven. In the afternoon, when people from the home front corps came to inspect, they allowed us to enter the apartment accompanied by an officer and remove anything still salvageable. Friends came and helped me to remove whatever was still usable. They examined whatever could be cleaned from broken glass and helped throw away whatever was totaled. When we had finished rescuing what we could, we were ordered to leave the apartment, which was then sealed off.
The small things and the big disaster.
I cannot even begin to describe this terrible feeling: no home, no minimal belongings and essentials, to say nothing about the immediate need, in all of this horrible situation, to go and buy diapers, pacifiers, baby bottles and formula, including other minimal needs that we didn't have in my in-laws' home. But in the course of the two following days, amazing chessed enveloped me on all sides and in every corner.
One of my children, for example, is Celiac, and we cannot find the usual nourishment available in most stores. At home, we had a freezer-full of food he could eat while now, we had to 'break our heads' to find food for him. So much for the big problems, but even the lack of a small elementary device like a phone charger can be a major hurdle and I had to find a solution for such minor setbacks.
Above all, these past two days clarify to me the entity of a 'home.' We are not always able to appreciate the simple, basic function of a home, a place to be, a primary roof over one's head where one can be independent, without having to depend on the goodwill of others.
During these past two days, when we have been living by my in-laws, I totally forgot what day it was, whether in Nisan or Kislev. This morning, i finally woke up to the realization that i could not dump an entire family with very small children upon another household, especially right before Pesach. Children need to recover from a traumatic experience; it is very difficult to restrain and limit them.
The emotional atmosphere all around is tense and pressured and I have reached the realization that while staying in a hotel is not the optimal solution, it is preferable to other options. In the end, a group of eighty families in our identical situation made arrangements with a Jerusalem hotel, hoping to find an apartment after Pesach.
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