"I'm 85 and live in Tel Aviv. I was born in Galicia, which is now Ukraine," Shosh Trister tells Israel Hayom.
During the Holocaust, she says, she and her family were sent to a labor camp, from which they escaped and managed to make it back to the area where they had lived. They found various hiding places – including the forest, and with gentile families.
"For two years, we lived underground, nine people underneath a pigpen," Trister says.
In 1950, Trister made aliyah.
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"At first, we lived in a ma'abra [immigrant camp] in Kfar Saba. Mom and Dad got typhus there and were hospitalized. I remember it as a very hard time, because I was far away. I thought it would be a day or two, but it was a few weeks. After the Holocaust, it was a major blow. I stayed in tent and cried."
Now, as the novel coronavirus outbreak is posing a new kind of threat to the Israeli population, Trister is confined to her home.
"It's very hard for me. Hard isn't the word – the distance makes me cry. When I'm alone, I remember the loneliness, my mother and father, and my husband, Shlomo, who died four and a half months ago," she says.
"I'm used to being an active person, going out, speaking to students, painting. Every day, I [usually] walk to our local community center and meet my friends. Now, I'm forced to stay home alone. Every morning I exercise on at home, water the plants, take care of the apartment, and then I sit down to write or paint my memories.
"I have a son who takes care of me. He comes and does my shopping. The rest of the kids also call, but it's terribly hard not seeing them."
Despite everything she has experienced in her life, Trister says she is "an optimist by nature."
"What we went through dwarfs everything. We might be stuck at home, but we have the freedom of being in Israel. We survived the Holocaust. In the end, we won. We'll beat corona, and get through it. We are strengthening everyone around us and taking strength from them. It will all be over – they'll find a cure and we'll go back to our daily routines. We overcame everything, and so will you – we owe it to future generations.
