LOCAL COMMENTARY | ISRAEL

Visiting Sderot under fire

A concrete bunker covers a home in Sderot. The bunker was built to protect the home from kassam fire. Photo: Rachel Schwartz

A concrete bunker covers a home in Sderot. The bunker was built to protect the home from kassam fire. Photo: Rachel Schwartz

BY RACHEL SCHWARTZ

We came prepared, or so we thought. Armed with statistics, newspaper articles, research and hours of time logged into Israeli news broadcasts, newspapers and journals. We were going to see what it was like to live in the Western Negev, in the area around the Gaza strip and the city of Sderot.

The facts themselves were frightening enough — bombs have been falling for 7 years now — but the worst bombing has been in the first six months of this year, with over 2,300 kassams falling, killing five and wounding 280. As a result, fully 96 percent of Sderot residents suffer from some degree of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Family and friends both here in St. Louis and there in Israel had their doubts about our plans, and some suggested we might consider changing them. We went anyway, and our experience there was life-altering.

In good traffic, the Sderot region is a bit over an hour's drive south of Tel Aviv, but for some reason, the day we drove down we got caught in an off-hour traffic jam just outside of Ashkelon. It was hot and dusty, and everyone seemed irritated.

We arrived late at our destination, Kibbutz Nir Oz, only to learn that just as we had stood in the traffic jam, a long range grad rocket shot from the Gaza Strip had struck a shopping mall a kilometer to our west in Ashkelon, burying people in rubble, wounding 90, many of them children, and killing two. That night we sat up with our hosts, Ruth and Lisser Lahav, watching the flashing search lights and listening to explosions and shooting as IDF helicopters hovered over the Gaza strip, a mere two kilometers away, attacking Hamas strongholds in an attempt to prevent more rocket fire and to find the Hamas cell that had launched the rockets.

Suddenly it was all very immediate to us.

The people who live with these terrorist attacks are eager, indeed, almost anxious to tell their own stories of living under fire. Again and again we heard the plea to us, other Israelis and to Jews around the world: "Do not forget us. Do not abandon us. We are living on the front lines and we need your support."

Kibbutz Nir Oz:

Ruth, Lisser and Lotus

On Nir Oz, whose fields back up to the fields of Gaza, Lisser, a soft spoken, gentle bear of a man who works as a kibbutz electrician, took us out to the fields where long sweeps of wheat grow against an astonishingly blue sky. He pointed toward the west where the sun was setting behind the minarets and towers of Gaza City in the strip. "The road we're on, he said, "leads straight to Gaza if you stay on it. Of course nobody takes it except the people who work the far fields, and they use armored tractors and keep their eyes open for snipers." We asked him how they managed with the constant danger from the kassams. He shrugged. "Usually they fall in the fields and we just have to put out the fires."

A few yards away he showed us a deep pit in the soil, littered with small curls of metal where a kassam had fallen only days earlier. "They're very inaccurate," he added. "But they can cause a lot of damage too. Especially when they (Hamas) figure out they've found the right trajectory." He showed us where a kassam had dug a pit in the asphalt, sending a spray of shrapnel into buildings, light posts and brambles, a mere 10 yards from the small house he shares with his wife, Ruth, a strong woman who, since being confined to a wheelchair after an auto accident, has worked as an advocate for the mentally and physically disabled — especially in and around Sderot. "This one we heard when it fell. We got the Tzeva Adom (red alert siren) and went to the East wall of the house in an enclosed hallway," Lisser said.

Later, outside the communal dining hall, Ruth and Lisser's granddaughter from nearby Moshav Ein Habesor, six-year-old Lotus, showed us a deep puncture in the soil beneath an impressive baobab tree. The leaves of the tree were torn and shot through with holes where the shrapnel had exploded through them, and scarred its trunk. Just over a hedge lay the children's house, a low rectangular building dwarfed by a huge concrete structure built as a second roof to protect it from rocket fire. "We're lucky it was just a kassam," Ruth said. "If it had been a grad, someone would have gotten hurt for sure."

"What do you do when you hear the siren?" we asked Lotus. "I run to a safe place" she said. "There are many safe places on the kibbutz". Indeed, we saw many as we walked around: Bomb shelters above and below ground, protected buildings, even shelters that had been used during the 1948 War of Independence and later refurbished and decorated to make them less forbidding.

Still, only a week after we left, a kassam hit the building where the kibbutz makes paints for export and two were injured, and one died. The sirens don't always work, and a 15-second warning isn't very long to get to safety.

The next morning, Ruth drove us to Sderot in a van equipped for a disabled driver.

The streets of Sderot, once a thriving town of 23,000 — mostly immigrants from Russia, Ethiopia and Morocco — were virtually empty. It's now a town of 19,000, and those people we did see hurried as they crossed open spaces, heading always toward the nearest shelter, listening for the red alert sirens. Nobody sat on the park benches under the trees, the playground was deserted, and even the shopping center was still. The small shuk had been bombed and closed. We'd read that 350 businesses had closed over the last year. Now we saw it: shuttered shops, untended flowers, wind-blown garbage collecting in corners.

We asked the owner of a knick-knack store, one of only four that were open, "How do you manage?"

"We are on the verge of bankruptcy," he said. "The locals won't come out to buy — they have little money anyway, and there are no tourists. It gets worse and worse all the time. We'll have to close, but how will we live? Most of those who could afford to leave have already left. Those were the ones who had friends, family, jobs elsewhere. Those who remained behind either didn't have anywhere to go, or had decided to fight it out. But the ones with children, they mostly want to leave."

We went looking for a café, and found several, but they were all closed. Ruth was having trouble getting around in her wheelchair as the sidewalks weren't handicapped accessible, nor, for that matter, were the bomb shelters. She pointed out many: bus stop bomb shelters, apartment bomb shelters, bomb shelters made of enormous segments of the Moveel Haartzi (the national water carrier pipe) — all of them cement, and none accessible to our wheelchair bound companion.

"What happens if an old person, or a woman with a stroller or a wheelchair is caught out in a red alert? What will they do?"

In several spots we came upon deep dents in the road or sidewalk surrounded by pitting and pockmarks where kassams had landed, spraying shrapnel into anything that lay around them. People just walked by them as if they didn't exist, but we stopped and took pictures.

Our world has nothing to compare.

We did finally find a café, tucked in the eastern side of an apartment complex, its western entrance closed off to minimize exposure to kassams. We sat down to order and found only ourselves and one other party was there. The waitress was the owner's sister. We asked her to join us and tell us about her experience living in Sderot.

Her name is Geut Aragon, and she is beautiful in the delicate and graceful manner of a daughter of Moroccan olim. Thirty-four years old, a nurse and mother of two, she was born and raised in Sderot. She remembers it as a place of sunshine, with a lively and friendly community of open, warm people who loved to celebrate.

"I have friends in Gaza, too," she told us. "We used to talk on the phone and visit sometimes. They are not all our enemies." But when we asked her about how the bombing had affected her, her face changed.

Geut's Story:

"Four months ago (in January), my four-year-old son Nir and his friend, a five-year-old girl from next door, were playing in the house. I had such a beautiful house with two stories and big bedrooms upstairs with air and light. But we always stay in the lower part now and at night we all sleep in one small, protected room," Geut said.

That day, Geut said the children begged her to be allowed to play on the computer upstairs. "I guess I just felt sorry for them since they can't play outside anymore and they're stuck in the house, so I said 'yes.'"

"We barely got up there when I felt something hit me and everything went black," she continued. "I could hear the little girl screaming and crying but I couldn't see anything. I reached for where I heard her and found her hand. She was buried underneath rubble. I pulled until she was free, but I could still hear screaming," she said.

It was her son, Nir.

"I crawled to where I heard the sound and found a door. I opened it and he was there —only he had stopped screaming and was staring at me terrified. I didn't know why. But he almost didn't recognize me. I was so covered with blood."

Geut still has shrapnel in her head and knee. Geut and the young neighbor underwent surgery.

Geut's son was not hurt, but he has not recovered from the shock.

"The psychologists say he has PTSD," Geut said. "He has nightmares and can't concentrate. He's always afraid. My older son is nine and thank god he wasn't home. But he also had a trauma. His grades have fallen. He misbehaves. He has trouble with everything."

"It is so hard," she said. "Some days you think you feel better, but last Saturday 25-30 kassams fell and it takes you back. I think it's hardest on the children. They're not like normal children. They don't go to play, calm, happy, running around, feeling freedom. They have no routine. Nobody does," Geut said. Sderot residents "build our lives around the kassams," she added.

"Do I dare to go out this morning to the supermarket? We all debate with ourselves every day. We feel crazy. We're afraid. We're depressed. These things do not go away, they will stay with us for the rest of our lives, even if they stop tomorrow."

Geut's story was dramatic, heartbreaking, and not so different from others living in Sderot and the region during our stay. How brave she and the others are for withstanding this terrorism for so long without giving up entirely. Living in terror with no end in sight.

"What can we do?" we asked her, wishing there were some easy answer to ending the bombardment. "How can we help?"

Geut said people used to come to Sderot every Friday from all around the country and buy their food for Shabbat. "It was so wonderful, our hearts were full and we were so excited when we saw everyone coming to help us." But after a month, fewer and fewer people would come.

"Now very few people come," she said. "Our sister cities in America have helped, and sometimes someone will pay for some of the children to go away for a weekend to refresh themselves, but we feel we have been forgotten. In America many Jews don't even know who we are."

We left Sderot and drove back north after having promised Geut, Ruth and Lisser that we would do everything we could to spread the word and find ways to support them in America. Our luck was with us that day.

Within 30 minutes of our leaving, 30 more kassams slammed into Sderot and the surrounding area. We watched the news feeling helpless and full of despair.

Since our return to St. Louis we have spoken at several events about the importance of finding ways to support these people, our people living in conditions of war, suffering from trauma and loss.

So far we have arranged to have children from a local Jewish camp send cards and letters to Israeli children under fire at Moshav Ein Habesor. We have also worked with Torah Mitzion Kollel to create "Shana Tova" cards from drawings made by Sderot children, which are being sold to support the building of a bomb-proof indoor recreational area where children can play, families can meet, see movies and plays, attend classes and even receive assistance dealing with trauma.

It is a Jewish National Fund (JNF)/Keren Kayemet Liyisrael (KKL) project, and we are proud to be able to contribute in any way we can.

It is our hope that others in the St. Louis Jewish community will join us in trying to give hope to these Israeli families by participating in the JNF/KKL program, or by getting involved in a number of other projects we'd like to get going, including a pen-pal project for school-aged children, support for family counseling and the building of accessible bomb shelters.

We will be glad to speak to any group interested in hearing about our experience and about the life under fire in Israel.

It has been said that all Jews are responsible for each other. We see this as an opportunity to make a real difference to our brothers and sisters. We owe it to them.

Rachel Schwartz, Ph.D., is an assistant professor with Saint Louis University's Institute for Biosecurity and Disaster Preparedness. While Schwartz was born in America, she is a citizen of Israel, a graduate of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a regular visitor to Israel. Schwartz traveled to Sderot and the Western Negev in May with her husband, R. Gregory Evans, the institute's director, as part of a joint research project with The Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma at the Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem. To contact Schwartz, email: rschwar7@slu.edu.