There is nothing in the whole universe sadder than the end of the summer. Many songs have been written about the coming of Autumn, but the image in my mind has always been the beach, maybe the pool. The skies of the backdrop already turning grey, the palm trees swaying in the shrill wind, and the beach umbrellas folded and tied up, facing the fact that for the time being no one is going to get in the water or come and talk to the sun about the meaning of life or the universe.
In Nir Oz, the end of September also marks the start of the long potato season. There isn't an exact date for the sowing, you simply smell the Autumn air mingling with your morning coffee, you feel the nights are no longer sweaty and you see the days are no longer aflame – that's how you know it's time to start. Somehow it always happens on my birthday, and sometimes that also coincides with the Jewish high holidays.
Everything suddenly starts, after months of lazy summer. I am 41, no longer a round number, just another year in my 5th decade. My back already hurts constantly, if I go to sleep late my eyes hurt all day, and I don't have the energy to get excited about anything. There's work, there's family, the spark of my creativity has gone out. And anyway I haven't taken any proper photos recently, after decades of always having a camera close. Who has the strength to carry around the equipment and stop the world for a frame every time that there's a ray of light that catches the eye? So the camera's in the cupboard, the battery's probably corroded. As it is the boy runs away because he's fed up of me shoving the lens in his face every day since he was born, and the fields that I spend my days wandering have already been captured a million times in every season.
Then Danny calls from Berlin. He's coming to visit with someone, she's a good friend. He asks if there's a sofa to crash in for a day or two? It's not really a question. Danny's a Nir Oz–nik. He knows the door's always open and there's always a place to sleep. Who's the lady? I ask.
"We're not together," he immediately clarifies in Hebrew, his British accent spiced with coarsely–ground Israeliness. "You'll find out, she's something specially special". His turns of phrase weren't completely smooth either…
"Ok ok Danny–boy, you can't scare Kibbutznikim with the threat of a blonde European" – I start getting the banter going, it's who we are. We're sitting in the field next to a broken tractor and taking advantage of the minutes of rest until Azili will turn up with the 8 by 100 screw from the garage in order to talk about life and the volunteers that arrived the week before.
"Really, you'll see for yourself" he laughs at me "she's a world in and of herself that girl".
Long story short, come, there's tons of space. My wife and son are at her parents' in Paris for the Sukkot holiday, I'm on my own in the house. There's work to do, we're starting to sow, I'll be a bit busy but make yourself at home. And come give me a hand for an hour or two you lazy bastard, it's been ten years since you touched a driveshaft, you've become a geek. "More than ten years", he replied. "Yalla enough with the chat, pick us up on Wednesday from the train station in Sderot".
***
I stop to buy steaks for a BBQ that evening, and park opposite the train station. I can see them coming from a distance and in a second I understand what Danny meant. Carolin's smile, even from 100 metres away, can light up the way straight to any heart.
Daniel Darlington was 34. He wasn't born on the Kibbutz – he was from Manchester. His mum's second husband was a British volunteer on the Kibbutz, and after 4 years and a daughter, they left. We would meet Danny and his sister on the Kibbutz for years during the summer holidays, when they would come to visit their older siblings from their mum's first marriage to Chaim Peri. I remember that they were always dressed in a sharp European style, while we were running around the Kibbutz with cut–off t–shirts and wild hair.
But you can't take the Kibbutz out of the kid, and in 2012 he got in touch with me and asked to come volunteer on the Kibbutz. I was in charge of the volunteers back then and I arranged his visa and his work on the farm. At the time I felt that he'd run out of steam in Europe. The open air and life with friends and the community at Nir Oz did him good, and he ended up staying for two years working on the fields with us. At Nir Oz he met a German girl, also a volunteer, and they moved together to somewhere in Germany that has a name I'll never be able to pronounce. After a couple of years they went their separate ways, and he settled in Berlin.
Even the sun was blinded by Carolin's blonde hair and her smile and we drove to the Kibbutz. Straight to the fields for a spin, to remind him where he was from and who taught him how to reverse a combine, and of course to give Carolin the full farmer show. We pass plot 11 to check the irrigation, dropped by the pomegranates – they were nearly ripe but still a bit sour – and for dessert gave the peanuts a visit. The three of us were barefoot in the fields, and the Gaza strip in the Western Horizon started to glow orange with the sunset. Carolin, like every visitor, got the quick air raid safety instructions:
"There's no need to worry, you shut the door to the safe room and you wait a couple of minutes. It's over super quick, the army takes care of it. I don't know what you see on the news in Germany, but it's 99% Garden of Eden here, and for the remaining 1% you sit in the safe room for a bit."
Carolin Bohl was 22, she and Danny met on some photography trip in Berlin. He was a photographer and she modeled for him and for some others every so often while she got ready to start a degree in fashion and sustainability. She got a haircut just before she came to Israel, so I met her with a half bob, but I was told that historically she had been the sort of girl with long long flowing hair. It feels weird to write about her now, after all I knew her for barely two weeks. Until the evening of 6.10, when we said our goodbyes before they were meant to drive to the airport the next day, I didn't even know her surname. We called her Caro, for short. But she made everyone around her feel like they were her best friends, as if I'd known her forever. That girl had something special about her, that's for sure. Not just a glowing warm smile, sparkling eyes and an infectious rolling laugh. She had a magic that made the world fall in love with her, for better or worse. She just simply had a magnetic energy, like a sun that collects planets in its orbit. Danny told me that he got confused at the beginning, when they first met, but he quickly understood and they stayed good friends.
I head to work in the morning, they wake up late. They asked to sleep in the safe room, just to be on the safe side. It's my son's room, so packed with toys, but there's space for two mattresses. We always have a spare mattress in the safe room, just in case there's an air raid at night and we want to carry on sleeping. We also have a deadlock on the inside of the door, because my wife insisted I fit one. And then we fell into a sort of Kibbutz routine: they borrow my wife's and my bikes and explored the fields. We ate lunch together at the Kibbutz cafeteria, with the whole community. After that, pool until the heat of the day settles, I lose to Danny at Backgammon and Caro learns a few new swearwords in Hebrew before we jump into the water to cool off. And then we go for a drive just before the sun sets – after all, golden hour is the best time to take photos. In the evening we sit with the gang in my front garden, have a BBQ, have a drink, and talk about everything and nothing. Danny is sharp, you can get into a deep conversation with him about anything. I love the way he talks English so fluently, with his British accent. Caro is relatively quiet, but when she talks it's the whole world. She's open and honest, smart and laughs easily. Danny and I have a sarcastic sense of humour that is characteristic of Israelis, and we laugh at her childish innocence. Sometimes we take it too far, I'd seen it with a lot of the German volunteers, at first they don't get the depth of the irony and the extent of our openness. But then after a moment she understands, and bursts with a laughter that gets us all going for long, breathless minutes. Sometimes we go and drink a beer and play snooker at the Kibbutz pub, and everyone asks who Daniel's beautiful girlfriend is. "We're not a couple", he insists on the correction, "just good friends".
It's Sukkot, and Autumn is beautiful in the desert, so whenever I can I join them for a trip. Danny's already been, of course, but Caro is hypnotized by the desert silence. We drive my car in the direction of Shivta, windows open, nice breeze, music at full volume. She goes crazy over the Israeli music, and after "The Sixteenth Sheep" she asks to listen to Tuna. Again and again.
"I love the way he says 'hi' to me," she explains, "I don't understand the words but the second he says hi it feels just for me, like, straight to my heart".
They are always photographing and being photographed and we go location–spotting in the dunes and valleys. She changes persona like a chameleon in front of the camera, and Danny directs her with a professionalism of which I am jealous. He's got an incredible eye, Danny, and he is generous with shots on his digital and medium format film cameras. I walk around them in the sand, make sure they drink water and take my own photos with my phone, they ask me to take care of the "behind the scenes" shots for Instagram.
I am fully envious of Danny, he's a professional photographer in Berlin, he works at a well–known photography lab and lives all that action surrounded by young exciting people.
"You're living my dream Danny" I tell him.
"Idiot," he replies, "you're the one living the dream, working the fields with a family on the Kibbutz".
"Anyone who comes to the Kibbutz never really leaves." Danny and I sum up for Carolin the feeling of the last week: there is not one person who doesn't fall in love with the place. It's Sukkot, the weather's perfect, and we visit endless friends. Everyone invites Danny round, everyone had missed him. Caro spends the week with a huge smile on her face, she's happy on the Kibbutz and the atmosphere is addictive. They take photos in the fields and in corners of the Kibbutz, including a long session in the Lifshitz family's impressive cactus garden. I noticed that she never smiles in front of the camera, she puts a serious filter on her face with a piercing look that threatens to crack the lens at any moment. I ask her why, because she really does have a smile like infinite sunshine.
"I don't know, that's what I'm used to," she answers, "maybe it's another me that needs to be aired out every so often".
They carry on wandering and taking photos around the Kibbutz, and I start to wake up, Danny with all his kit and Carolin the muse that she is. I get up and start to get all my own photography equipment out from storage, I have collected a fair bit over the years and my dad also has his own supply. I spread everything out on the table in my kitchen, clean it all and charge the batteries – the cameras', but also my own. Bodies, lenses, flash, tripods, and all sorts of other gadgets, organised in two camera bags and ready for inspiration to hit. I have to get back into it, I refuse to be an old man with extinguished creativity who opens dusty albums and talks nostalgically about once upon a time.
Danny and Caro take a drive further out every so often, looking for a location in the Dead Sea, and then to visit Danny's brother in Tel Aviv. In fact they are meant to stay in Tel Aviv until Saturday 7th of October, for their flight back to Berlin. But it kept getting pushed back one more day and then one more day, they just had so much fun at the Kibbutz.
My wife and son come back from their holiday in Paris on Tuesday, so I suggest that Danny and Caro stay at my brother Omer's house, he was planning to spend a couple of days in the city anyway. On Thursday they are all packed up to head to Tel Aviv, but change their minds at the last minute. Yalla one last night at the Nir Oz pub.
"On Friday I'm not working, we'll drive up to Tel Aviv for a drink and I'll take you to the airport, no problem".
Friday morning passes, and they stay. The last day before the pool closes for the season, end of the summer, the eve of Simchat Torah, the last day of Sukkot. They arranged a lift to the airport on Saturday, with Keren Munder who came down to visit her parents on the Kibbutz: departure 9:00 am.
The day before, Thursday, they stopped by Shachar Butler's house on the Kibbutz, to get tattooed. He'd just opened his studio in the old children's dorm, and they had ideas. I took Daniel to the Kibbutz archives to find something with his mum's handwriting. A tattoo on his wrist with his mum's name in her handwriting – "Batya". That's what he wanted and what he got. His mum had died 20 years earlier and was buried on Nir Oz, before it got crowded on that small plot of land. Over the years he would occasionally ask me to pop over and check that everything was clean and tidy.
Carolin also wants a word in Hebrew and spends the whole week deciding what to get. In the end she chooses "gufi" – "my body". Of course we laugh because it's a word that rolls weirdly on the tongue, but she insists. I am sure there's a story behind that decision, but she didn't get a chance to tell it.
Friday afternoon we play football with my son, who normally doesn't remember people he saw for the last time two years ago, but Danny had taught him how to use the old camera the last time he visited the Kibbutz, and he has loads of tattoos and funny Hebrew with an English accent…so, easy to remember. I am rubbish at football so the kid runs rings around me, but Danny has moves, and he's a City fan, not United, so they have stuff to talk about. Carolin joins in and goes wild so everyone starts chasing after everyone and occasionally also the ball. Just before dinner at my parents' house we take a quick trip to the fields for one last shoot. On Friday evenings everything is quiet and we stand on the road that bisects the fields, facing West past the sunset and past the Strip. Tomorrow morning this narrow busted–up road will turn into an autobahn for the commerce of death.
"Tell me. Is it dangerous, to live so close to Gaza?" She asks. She's young and innocent but it looks like she's a bit uneasy. For my part, like the laid back Nir Oz–nik that I am, I tell her:
"Of course not! We're 500 metres from the border, in the middle of Nir Oz land, I spend most of my day on this road."
With a confident hand on her shoulder I reassure her:
"We have the best and most advanced border fence in the world, above and below ground," I confidently repeat the Israel Defence Force slogans. "From every corner of the world people come to learn about how to build an impenetrable border! There are fences, remote–controlled machine guns, sensors, booby traps, cameras, satellites and even automatic robots, and let's not forget the drones and the observation balloons. All that in addition to army bases full of hot soldiers that eat tahini all day, the most technologically advanced tanks, and stealth planes in the sky. A rabbit couldn't even get across without being ambushed from all sides! And anyway, I'm on guard at the Kibbutz tonight, so there's nothing to worry about."
…
06:33
Air raid sirens, everyone in the safe rooms, for now. I text Danny, I start with "fuck". "Fuck indeed" he replies, he knows this shit. I'm standing on my own in the shelter near the Kibbutz garage – it's a small concrete structure, without a door. In the next few minutes the situation starts to heat up and I understand that this is not just a "normal" case of a few missiles. "Something major is happening in the whole area, stay in the safe room", I write to him while also checking that everything is OK with my wife. For now, it still is.
"What's going on, there's a ton of explosions and noise, is it us or them?" He asks. "It's all the big loud mess of war, I assume that most of the loud noises you can hear are Iron Dome doing its thing, don't leave the room".
06:55
"It looks like we're stuck here, no way we'll be able to leave on time hahaha". He's talking about their flight, and I get the impression that he doesn't think it's such a bad thing to spend a few more days on the Kibbutz.
I start to get messages from the Kibbutz Whatsapp group, and clips of militants in Sderot are uploaded to Facebook, and I understand that something here is not normal.
"Lock all the doors and windows and stay inside! I'm not kidding, something's up." It is an order. I don't know what's happening but it's bad.
"There are terrorists trying to get in somewhere, but there isn't any information yet, stay locked inside, the army will get here any minute." I'm still imagining that the worst will come when the army starts to respond to this little idiocy that the Gazans decided to embark on, and we'll need to get out of the Kibbutz like we do about twice a year, with every military operation. I tell them to pack bags because the minute it calms down we'll have to leave and drive somewhere, or they'll go with Keren Munder as was planned.
08:20
"Gunshots in the Kibbutz?" He asks.
"It looks like it, stay in the safe room, don't open the door to ANYONE! There's talk of terrorists pretending to be soldiers"
"Is there any way to lock the door?"
"No", I answer, and curse myself. At Omer's house there isn't a lock on the inside of the safe room. "Turn the handle all the way up, it doesn't lock it but it's the best there is. I'm not kidding Danny, don't answer anyone and don't open the door to anyone, there's some serious shit going on. Keep it to yourself, don't tell her so that she doesn't get scared, but there are terrorists in the Kibbutz. The army is here but it's going to get worse. Don't open the door to anyone. Don't worry, soon we'll get out of here."
"Good," he replies, "I'm dying for a piss".
At this point I was still sure that the army was clearling the Kibbutz of terrorists, at least that's what I assumed the non–stop gunshots and explosions were. I couldn't conceive that what I was hearing was Hamas slaughtering its way through the Kibbutz while our small security team – a group of Kibbutzniks in underwear and a couple of bullets left in the cartridge – were fighting a losing battle to keep them at bay. It didn't even occur to me, even when I knew they were in the Kibbutz, that they'd have such fire power.
09:00
I flick madly through all the news channels on my phone while writing to as many people as I can all the while listening to militants around me. My wife writes that there are terrorists inside our house and they're trying to get into the safe room. I immediately tell Danny, and he answers that there are terrorists all around and that someone is also trying to get into where they are. At the same time I write to Elad Katzir and Arbel Yehud, they're the neighbours on either side of Omer's house, where Danny and Caro are. "Try to see what's going on with Danny and Caro."
09:06
Elad is still trying to call Danny, but Danny writes that he doesn't want to answer, he doesn't want to be heard. Arbel doesn't reply to my message. On the news I can see a clip of a Gazan "journalist" and immediately send a screenshot to Danny. He's right behind the Bibas family's house, and it's the moment that I connect the dots and understand that Nir Oz has been conquered and the situation is bad to the point of being utterly fucked. Elad has also stopped answering his phone, unheard of in an emergency.
09:06, still.
"They're standing outside the house!" I write to him alongside the photo.
"Are you OK?"
–
"Danny, are you OK??"
…
The town of Verden has a very impressive church, especially taking into consideration the relative size of the quiet town in northern Germany. I sit on one of the wooden benches and above me stretch imposing stone arches that support huge windows made of thousands of squares of multi–coloured glass. I'd been living in Paris since October, and the day before I took a quick flight to Hanover, from there to Otersen, a little village near Verden. I know no one, but everyone greets me like they've known me forever.
They're Carolin's family, and the image of the young woman I met barely two weeks ago comes more into focus. Her mum and sisters are so similar to her, and for a moment I get confused and start to behave as if Danny and I are still laughing with Caro at the Kibbutz pool. And then they cry, and reality hits. It's the beginning of November, and the picture perfect village is painted in the stunning colours of Autumn. Little streams flow around the house and the cows in the fields seem to have come straight from a chocolate wrapper. I even saw a small old tractor. Made me surprisingly emotional, I hadn't seen a tractor in a month.
It's a cold, grey day, and it's dark in the church. The priest finishes speaking and I can understand only one word. "Carolin". The sun comes out from behind the clouds, and as if in a well–planned screenplay, at exactly the right moment, the giant windows flood the space with a quality of light like nothing I had seen before, the type of light that only thousands of delicate multi–coloured glass squares could refract. The light opens everyone's hearts, and the photos of Carolin on the plinth in the centre of the space are suddenly lit and her smile is given the stage it deserves.
At the same time, in Israel, my father's funeral is taking place. He was also murdered in Nir Oz a month before, and I won't be there because I'm here in the German autumn. It wasn't easy to make this journey, I left my wife and son at home, very aware of the symbolism that mirrored me alone in the shelter near the Kibbutz garage while terrorists were in my house trying to open the door to where my family hid. I called my mum and asked if it was ok if I didn't come to my father's funeral, I owe it to Carolin's family to go to them. "Of course," she says, "you're their only connection to the Kibbutz and to what happened, you have to go to them".
…
Back to that Saturday, 23:00.
I arrive at the bomb–proof kindergarten where everyone was gathered. I was the last to be rescued, everyone else was freed in the afternoon. Soldiers, accompanied by the few security volunteers that survived, lead me from the garage through the whole burning Kibbutz to the war room and then the kindergarten. I already know a lot of what happened during the day, despite not being able to see anything but a burned tractor on the way. I know that my wife and son are ok and waiting for me at the kindergarten, so I don't have to worry about them. The first thing I ask one of my friends from the security team is if he knows what happened to Daniel and Carolin, I lost contact with them at 9:06 in the morning. I don't get an answer, just a tired look and a nod of the head that says everything.
At the kindergarten everyone is tightly packed and sooty, and despite it being past bedtime it's the kids who are running around and playing – those that survived. After 12 hours of hell in their safe rooms they need the release. But my head's somewhere else: Daniel has family here and they'll take care of all the messages and details, but Carolin has nothing to do with anyone. She's Daniel's friend from Berlin, who came with him for a half–improvised holiday in Israel. They changed their plans at the last minute every day for a week, and I'm the only person who knows where they were and what happened. And who she even is. The last two weeks with them were filled with adventure, we really connected and behaved like best friends but in fact I have no idea who she is.
She presented herself as "Caro" and that's what I called her. On the Friday night we exchanged numbers so that we could share photos – "write your full name" I ask her, "otherwise I won't remember."
"She's called Carolin Bohl, she lives in Berlin now but her family's from a little village near Bremen in Northern Germany, that's all I know, please help me get in touch with her family". I started sending messages to my friends in Germany, colleagues – we do some potato business around there. The next day I got a message: "We've reached her mother's neighbours, we sent her your number". Sunday morning we are still at the Kibbutz after we slept, all of us, on the floor of the kindergarten, thick smoke still blowing from all directions – the Kibbutz is still aflame. Any moment now they'll take us to our houses to collect belongings – "walk of shame" I think to myself. We move like refugees through the paths of our own Kibbutz under endless shell– and missile–fire. Even the air raid siren isn't working for the first time in years and we have no way of knowing what will land and where. I stand in front of the blue kindergarten, the outside wall spray painted with Arabic, just one path and a half away from the house where Danny and Caro were, and suddenly I get a call from a German number. Sonja, Carolin's mother. The conversation is short and to the point, we are both still in some sort of shock.
"They were at the Kibbutz, at my brother's house. I spoke to them the whole morning, I know they were locked in the safe room, 09:06 was the last contact I had with them, I haven't seen them since. I suggest you get in touch with the embassy, they'll take it from here".
I do know what has happened to them – at least, I think I know. Over the last few hours a lot of information about a lot of people has been passed around through stories across the playground and the little patch of grass outside the kindergarten. The intensity of the terror on that day was so overwhelming that a lot of what we heard would turn out to be not true, or not quite accurate. People that we thought were kidnapped came out of the toilets next to us, and people who we thought were killed we discovered were kidnapped… it took a few days until the puzzle started to be pieced together properly. I couldn't say anything until there was a formal identification.
…
From the service at the church we move to a small pub in the village. There's tasty soup, sandwiches, and a lot of friends. Everyone is still a bit confused – do we need to celebrate or mourn? "She would have wanted us to be happy" they tell me. On the other hand you can't be happy when the sun has been switched off. That night her friends gather, we drink the first mulled wine of the winter, sing and play guitar. Some tell stories about Caro, and I start to understand what I felt from the first moment I saw her in Sderot – there was something special about that girl, she had a talent for spreading light and warmth, and it pulled everyone towards her. Everyone was younger than me by about 20 years, and I envied their innocence and am enraged by the lack of justice of losing a friend at that age under those circumstances. They're German, after all, they're all in the middle of studying, at the start of their lives, without their ranks sewn onto their uniform and wars to deal with.
I do know what has happened to them – at least, I think I know. Over the last few hours a lot of information about a lot of people has been passed around through stories across the playground and the little patch of grass outside the kindergarten. The intensity of the terror on that day was so overwhelming that a lot of what we heard would turn out to be not true, or not quite accurate. People that we thought were kidnapped came out of the toilets next to us, and people who we thought were killed we discovered were kidnapped… it took a few days until the puzzle started to be pieced together properly. I couldn't say anything until there was a formal identification.
On Sunday evening we all get on a bus on the one actual road in the Kibbutz and start the drive to Eilat, our new home for the coming months. When we get to the hotel Sonja calls again and says the embassy had given them the awful news. She wasn't sobbing or crying and she sounded like a very strong woman on the other end of the line. "I'm so sorry". I don't have much more I can say, "we all lost so much today". Immediately after we hang up I get a call from a nice woman from the Holon city council, and she's sorry, she's asking after Carolin. Someone from Verden city council in Germany called, it's Holon's twin city, she explained, to help them with the arrangements. For the first time since Friday evening I laugh. I grew up in Holon, my whole childhood I looked out the rear windscreen of the Subaru and wondered what those signs were on Kogel roundabout, with those crests and funny names.
"Those are Holon's sister cities in different countries," my father explained, and until that very day I didn't really understand what sister cities actually do. Turns out that when you need them, they're there for you.
…
A few days after Carolin's funeral I land in Manchester and meet Daniel's family. The oranges and yellows of the Autumn have floated to the ground, the trees are mostly naked, and it's cold oh how cold. Only a month ago I was sweating and dehydrated in the bomb shelter on the Kibbutz, and now I'm shivering in a cemetery in Stockport. We walk through the gravestones covered with moss that the trees have pushed up and around as if they object to the burials and are trying to shake them off. At Carolin's service we were asked to wear something colourful, but here the black procession marches and I see some familiar faces. Danny's older siblings have arrived from Israel, and his sister from Australia. They're from the Kibbutz, I know them; despite the difference in generation and current address, we're all from Nir Oz. At the wake we mingle. I meet Danny's childhood friends from Stockport, friends from Berlin, family, and a couple of other volunteers from the Kibbutz. It's nice to see everyone, I just wish it wasn't under these circumstances.
After most people have left, I manage to sit with Dave, Daniel's dad, for a bit. He's a polite and quiet Brit, and I'm taken aback by how similar Daniel was to him – they even sound exactly the same. He lived on the Kibbutz for a few years and everyone loved him. He started to ask me what happened to people on the Kibbutz and we go through each one, one by one. There are a lot of stories; some of them I don't even know, yet – it's only been a month and a lot of people are somewhere in Gaza and their fate unknown. There are also, simply, so many casualties. It's hard to remember: is he kidnapped, was she killed? Honestly, everything is hazy in my mind and I will only be able to start filling in the gaps when I go back to Israel next week, for the first time since…He stays surprisingly cool given the situation, until we get to Sa'id and Adina. They were essentially his family in the Kibbutz, and Sa'id was murdered and Adina is still in the tunnels at this point. They were also family to me, and my facade cracks too and we cry – maybe the first time since the 7th of October. I can only imagine what it's like to lose a son; one Saturday at Nir Oz the Roulette wheel spun – red or black. I was lucky and I won, my son is alive and healthy. "It's as if my limbs have been torn away", Carolin's mother describes it. "You can learn to live with it and you can make accommodations, but you can't bring them back".
…
Another week passes and I wander around the paths and the Kibbutz is a ghost town. There isn't even one bicycle, in a place where two wheels was the main mode of transport. Daniel borrowed my bicycle just two days before to take photos in the pomegranate orchard alongside the border fence, even though I warned him. After all everyone knows it's a recipe for a puncture. The bicycle was, of course, returned with a hole in the tyre and I get a strange sort of satisfaction knowing that whoever stole them had to carry them on their back instead of cycling.
I go into the house where they were in order to gather some of their personal items to give their families. Their bags were half packed on the floor inbetween overturned furniture. On the shelf next to the entrance is a diary, in English, a pendant, earphones and a couple of strewn drawings. In the safe room I find a scene now familiar in Nir Oz – bullet holes in the door that shot through the hands that held the handle that didn't lock. On the wall opposite the safe room door is a distorted Impressionist painting – "Lead 7.72 on reinforced concrete" and one bullet hole straight into the floor that leaves no room for doubt about the intentions of the hundreds of visitors to Nir Oz that morning. As in my house, here too the laptops and camera equipment was stolen, taking with them the chronicles of the last two weeks. Unfortunately the photo studios in Gaza aren't working anymore, so it seems like those photos will never see the light of day.
However, on a shelf I see a single roll of film, medium format, rolled after use but before development – the last surviving frames that Danny took. I wonder what's on them.
I'm sitting and writing all this, and in order to remember I am scrolling through my phone's gallery. The photos roll from September to October to November, and it's the essence of it all. The trips, the pool, desert, Kibbutz grass, friends in the pub, children playing, pomegranate trees with heavy red branches, smiles, a beautiful orange sunset from a Friday night, bomb shelter, smoke, a burnt tractor, sad faces, mourners, a funeral in a church and moss–covered graves. We can still somehow make excuses for what happened to us. We lived on the border, we got complacent and ignored the "Gaza problem" on the other side of the fence underneath the beautiful sunset for too many years. But Daniel and Carolin, why for the sun's sake did they deserve this? They're from Europe after all.
A year has passed, the summer has turned into the smell of Autumn again. All I can do now is apologise to them, on behalf of us all, because in retrospect all this was to be expected and Chaim Peri was always right.
Their only sin was love – they loved life, the loved people, they loved creation, they loved art, and they fell in love with Kibbutz Nir Oz. They loved it so much they couldn't leave until their very last moments. There is nothing in the whole universe sadder than the end of the summer.
