Orly Doron
“When we first heard the sirens I thought that this was just another round of mortars and rockets.
Will get into the safe room and ten minutes later will go out and I will have my morning coffee on the porch.
In my wildest imagination, I could think of the carnage that Kfar Aza will suffer by Hamas terrorists.
My husband ran to get his gun and in my mind, I thought: ‘Is he planning to shout down the rockets with it?’
In the first minutes of the attack, I couldn’t really comprehend what was really going on. We saw in the Closed-circuit television of our community that heavily armed terrorists were entering our village in pickup trucks.
Later on, we started to get messages in our WhatsApp community group from people who were pleading for help as terrorists entered their homes. In the Kfar Aza massacre, a QUARTER of the residents were either killed or kidnapped and taken to Gaza.
It was Russian roulette. The fact that me and my husband survived the massacre was pure luck. We have in our house a solid decorated door and the terrorists were trying to break it down. When they saw they couldn’t they just moved to the next house. If they really wanted to get in it was only a matter of time and I don’t know if I would be speaking with you today.
We were hiding in our safe room for about thirty long hours until we were rescued. We didn’t have an internet connection and couldn’t really connect with the outside world so our family thought we were all gone.
When we were evacuated to a safe place outside our village we started to hear the grim news about close friends and families we knew that were killed or kidnapped. The list of names just kept mounting. It was so overwhelming that I couldn’t really internalize it. At first, I felt Survivor’s guilt and couldn’t really look at the faces of my community members that their loved ones were killed or kidnapped. Kfar Aza is such a small community so you can figure out how hard it was.
A month later I’ve been relocated and I’m living in a different kfar. A much urban one called Kfar Saba which is actually a city. When I realized that coming back home would take more than a while I went back to my house in Kfar Aza and brought back with me my dresser which you can see in the background.
I guess I needed something that would remind me of my home while I was away.
I hope to bring it back as soon as I can.”