48 Today – 51 Years Ago

On this day 51 years ago I sat in an air raid shelter (in the picture I am sitting in the upper left hand corner, a lively, curly headed boy in shorts and a sweater that my mother knitted and listened to a story that Malvina told us. What stories did we hear at that time? Who knows. But I do remember from about that time the story of "Little Hunchback Horse". I remember that we sat between the bushes when the shelter was being dug and the gigantic bulldozer uprooted bushes near us. Afterwards, when the building of the shelter was completed, we ran from the children's house to the little wooden bunks under the ground to see how long that took. And all the nights of the Sinai War we slept crowded together there in three tiers. In the evenings, together with our parents, we listened to the 'central radio' (the loudspeaker connected to the only radio set in the kibbutz) and heard an authoritative voice talking about the battles that were taking place.

At that time children from the nearby air force base were added to my "group". And one night Benny Peled came to us in his flying overalls and gear to visit his son Yoram.

At the top of the picture, opposite me to my right sits Yaron. Under him Malvina is reading us a story. And next to her is Hagit (looking at the camera). Below her is – Amos. Above him, standing and leaning on the wooden pillar is Ishai. And to his left (next to me) is Bina. Under me you can see Gilead's head. In front, before Malvina sits (with his hand under his chin) Yair. The rest I can't identify with certainly.

In the course of time Ishai and I became pilots in the air force. So did Yoram, Benny Peled's son. Ishai's plane was shot down at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War in the Bardawil region of Sinai. For some time he was considered missing in action until we learned that he was a prisoner of war in Egypt. Today he is an El Al pilot. Gilead was killed toward the end of the war in the Golan. He did not have a permanent assignment when the war broke out; he was in an 'officers pool'. A group from that 'pool' joined a force that fought in the Golan. He was in a jeep when he was hit by a shell.

Yaron, Hagit, Bina, Ishai and Yair continue to live on the kibbutz to this day.