Air Raid Sirens

The air raid sirens went off this morning.

Today is the day Israelis remember the Holocaust. So instead of being scary, the two minutes of sirens were just sad and eerie.

Our hostess for the Seder supper told me that her mother in law, was raised in the city Warsaw and was a real city girl. In what probably was the 20s, she met a very dashing young man who was moving to Israel soon as he had purchased a house there. They fell in love, got married and got on a train all within the space of a few weeks. She had been imagining a life similar to to the one in Warsaw but when she arrived in Israel in her fur coat and heels, she discovered that her new husband had purchased not a house in one of the cities, but a farm house, complete with farm. Later in life, when they had retired and moved off the farm, she and always said she would die five years ahead of her time. She claimed that everyday on the farm she would wake up and pray "Please God, I will give you five years of my life if you would just take away the cows!" We all laughed and laughed at the story.

But then our hostess shrugged and said something that stuck with me.

"Well, even though she hated the cows, look what would have happened if she had stayed in Warsaw."

So many people died that the decedents of survivors are left to tell the quirky stories of why their families remain.