My 12 days in an Israeli bomb shelter: Patience, fear and friendship

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For a few carefree days in June, I explored Rome from the back of a Vespa, then traveled to a small moshav (collective farm) in central Israel, which was bucolic and lovely until the bombs started coming.

Days later, I sat cross-legged on the floor of a neighbor’s crowded bomb shelter as the 12-day war between Israel and Iran exploded.

The experience shook me, teaching me how quickly life can change and throw you into a new and surreal reality – and how much our safety depends on strangers and random luck. Far too many people – families, children – are living with this fear and uncertainty now, and I can only hope it ends soon. 

The first day in the shelter, I was groggy, sweating and surrounded by strangers pressed against me on all sides. 

Shani, the owner of the mamad (the Israeli word for bomb shelter), perched above me in a white plastic chair, his arms in a bear hug around his little girls, about 5 and 8 years old, who were quietly balancing on his lap. I pulled my knees up to my chest, trying to shrink even smaller. The mamad was only about 9 by 8 feet and we were 19 people – from a baby to the elderly – and one dog. The neighbor’s Apple Watch said it was well after 7 a.m., but alerts from the Israeli government kept buzzing on everyone’s phone: More Iranian rockets and missiles were incoming.

That meant the cease-fire between Israel and Iran was not going as planned. Not much on my trip to Israel had. 

I had arrived in early June to visit elderly friends Uri and Yona Bar-Lev, and to work on the English translation of Uri’s memoir.

By June 24, I was on my third (and not final) trip to the mamad, which are attached to about  65% of homes in Israel. The four families I shared the mamad with had become my new best friends, all of us bonded by anxiety, fear and a desire for a lasting peace. 

The mamad was hot and steamy even before we quickly squeezed in – suddenly caught in the middle of world events. Our only window had a steel cover. We had potato chips, water and board games.  

This was a stark contrast to my day-to-day life in Santa Cruz. 

My friends Uri and Yona remained in their home next door, sheltering in their stairway, since their building did not have a mamad. Until this war, my friends had never needed one, as no rockets had ever before reached this quiet, rural part of central Israel. No longer. 

Uri, at 94, was determined to stay in his home. He has lived his entire life here – has survived five wars and cheated death multiple times (including when in 1970 he foiled the attempted invasion-air hijacking of his El Al plane by terrorist Leila Khaled). Uri did his utmost to convince me that no Iranian missiles would strike us here, in a rural area surrounded by orchards.

But once the sirens wailed, we had only 90 seconds to get to safety, so I decided I would take advantage of the neighbor’s generous offer to shelter with them.

When I heard the sirens, I grabbed my purse (stuffed with cash, my passport and prescription medications) and ran as fast as I could to the mamad. Even inside, safety is not a given. The morning of the cease-fire, four Israelis were killed in their mamad, which could not withstand the direct hit from an Iranian missile. Days before, four Palestinian Israelis died in the quiet northern town of Tamra when an Iranian missile struck their home. 

I tend to be risk-averse. A retiree, I spend my days gardening, sewing and volunteering with the Santa Cruz County chapter of Hadassah, which supports hospitals in Israel known as “the bridge to peace in the Middle East.”  

I was in Israel to celebrate Yona’s 80th birthday and to continue working on Uri’s book. I also planned to visit other friends and volunteer at a nearby high school for at-risk youth. With the start of the war, my plans dramatically shifted. 

My focus turned to my personal safety. I quickly learned to sleep in my street clothes to shave seconds off my escape prep time.  

I learned a few survival tricks, too. Sleep when you can (you never know how many times you will be running to the mamad during the night). Never have a full bladder (the mamad does not have a bathroom). I took to walking around my friends’ home, carrying my purse. I would become anxious if it was not by my side.

Before this, I had never been fully aware of how much we relied on others for our safety. One day, Shani stopped by my friends’ home and I felt a jolt of fear. Was he coming to tell me I was no longer welcome in the mamad because someone else’s family member needed it? 

No. Shani was only bringing us some groceries.

Each time the sirens sounded, I shouted to my friends, “Love you, bye!” And raced out the front door, down their long driveway and through Shani’s open front door, down the steep stone stairs and into the mamad. I was usually the last person in, but no matter how crowded it was, people squeezed together to clear a little spot for me to sit, my legs folded. Sometimes Shani and another father would remain standing, as there was simply no room to sit.

Kids, who moments before were playing and laughing with each other upstairs or outside, became silent. Some read or made shadow puppets on the wall. Parents cuddled their children or tried to comfort them while still keeping an eye on their phones for updates and whispered about how many were dead and which cities were being hit. 

There were actually benefits to being the last one in. Usually, I got a space near the fan and close to the cute dog (whose name I never learned), hiding beneath the white plastic chairs. It was cooler on the tiles than higher up on the chairs. And I was trying to make myself as small and inconspicuous as possible. These strangers always welcomed me, made me feel safer both with their friendliness and their fearlessness.

While we were together in the mamad – usually multiple times a day, but for short stretches of about 40 minutes at a time –  I made nervous small talk to try and lessen the awkwardness of having our bodies touching while we were technically strangers. We exchanged telephone numbers and social media profiles. I invited everyone to come and visit me in Santa Cruz. At times we were quiet.

There was silence – not total silence, as we were listening for the booms: one when the rocket broke the sound barrier, the second on impact or on interception. During these quiet moments, I tended to imagine my body hurtling through space. What would it be like, the impact of a missile? Only once, I was aware of my heart pounding. The other times my body felt numb.

“Ask her.”  The words in English surprised me, and I looked up and saw a mother sitting on the other side of the mamad, with her 5-year-old son on her lap. There were so many people in the mamad that we resembled a tin of sardines. One by one, the crush of people passed a tweezers toward the mother’s 11-year-old son, who sat pressed against me. Since I was the closest adult to him, he handed me the tweezers and pointed to a splinter in his bare foot. An older woman on the opposite side of the mamad passed a sterile wipe through the crowd for me to use. 

I removed the splinter and looked over to the mother across the room.  “Do you want me to ‘kiss it and make it better’?” I asked. She laughed.  

I really wish I could. For all the innocent children and their families caught up in all sides of these bloody conflicts.

Anastasia Torres-Gil is a retired attorney living in Santa Cruz. She volunteers with Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Torres-Gil serves on the board of the Hadassah Foundation, helping to fund organizations advancing gender equity in Israel and the United States.