SATURDAY NIGHT IN SDEROT

During Saturday afternoon, I heard a number of alarms followed by a number of loud explosions as rockets hit this town and exploded. I did not know where they had hit. I decided to go looking for them when the sun went down and the Sabbath ended.

A constant problem here is that we hear the loud KABOOM! when the rocket lands, but we often have no way of knowing exactly where the explosion occurred - unless, of course, the rocket went through the roof of my house. We too are dependent on the news media to learn exactly what has happened, but the TV and radio do not mention the address where the rocket fell, because most of their audience does not live in Sderot.

I walked along the street using my customary rocket-finding method of asking everybody I met until I found somebody who knew. This man was standing behind the counter in a little cafe that he owns. He told me that a rocket had landed just across the street from him that afternoon. Other people in the cafe were astonished to hear that the rocket has been so close.

I crossed the street to look at the mess. The Kassam had fallen between two blocks of old-fashioned shikun apartment houses. I knew these buildings quite well. I have interviewed people who live there. These apartment blocks were among the earliest buildings built in Sderot in the 1950's and the early 1960's.

I looked at the courtyard between them. Nearly all the windows of the two buildings were broken. Glass was everywhere on the ground. I have seen quite a few of these rocket attacks by now, but it never stops amazing me how many shards of glass even one broken window could make, and here were dozens and dozens broken simultaneously.

People were walking around in this courtyard talking with each other. Those whose electricity had been knocked out were trying to run electric wires up the stairs to get an emergency supply of power. Children were everywhere, police and firefighters were present.

In the middle of this courtyard was the hole the blast had made. This crater was about two feet deep, and two feet by three feet wide. It had thrown earth and rocks up and out of the ground. Everybody wanted to see it; children, evidently those who lived in the neighborhood, were pointing this hole out to their friends. If you live in Sderot, you learn what different kinds of craters a rocket can make - what it looks like if it lands on pavement, in contrast to this kind of hole on naked earth and rocks.

I walked around to the other side of one of the buildings. I spoke to some teenagers there. They told me they had come to visit their grandparents, who live in the building. They pointed out their grandparents' flat to me, and one of them offered to take me up to meet them.

We walked up the stairs together. The young person introduced me to his parents and to his grandparents. It seems that, when the rocket hit, the grandparents immediately called their children, who live at the other end of Sderot, to tell them that they had been hit. These people walked over to their parents' home as quickly as they could. Several adult children of the grandparents were there, as well as young children, the grandchildren of the old people.

A daughter offered me something to drink, apologizing for the mess, and for the fact that the Coke was not cold. It seems that the refrigerator had stopped working when the rocket hit. All the windows on the side of the building were blown in, leaving piles and piles of broken glass on the floor. Much of this glass had been cleaned up by the time I arrived, but they will surely be finding bits of broken glass underfoot for weeks.

This same daughter then gave me a tour of the flat. She showed me each broken window, as well as clothing on a clothing line that had a couple of holes in it from flying shrapnel. Fmily pictures of their great-grandparents and other family members from Morocco had been blown off the walls.

The old grandfather had been saying his Sabbath prayers in the kitchen. Had he been less religious, he would likely have been in the livingroom watching TV, and he would have received a shower of hundreds of pieces of glass. "The Sabbath preserves from death", he told me - in this case, literally true.

The old man seemed in good spirits, bantering with his grandchildren and telling me about his first years in Sderot half a century ago, when they lived in pachonim, which were big tin cans deposited in the desert. From those remote beginnings came the city of Sderot. This family, who had been part of those beginnings, were now dealing with rockets in their old age.

The grandmother looked rather dazed. She spoke little. This attack was their second; another rocket had landed next to their home some months ago. The family cursed the government for allowing these rocket attacks to continue for years and years. Having spent their youthful energy building Sderot up, they must now watch Arabs blow it down.

On the way out, I met a younger man sitting on a park bench in front of the buildings. He told me that he had been sitting in his little garden enjoying the day when the alarm sounded. He stood up and walked into the entrance hall of his building. The crater of the rocket was a few feet from where he had been sitting; had he not walked inside, he would probably have been killed.

I asked him what he was thinking about. He, like almost everybody in Sderot, cursed the Israeli government for not doing enough to protect them. Of his narrow escape, he said, "There are two things to say. The first is Thank God, and the second is also Thank God."