Mick Hartley

Sofie Berzon MacKie describes her family's ordeal in the kibbutz – ‘I Understood My Life Is Going to End’: A Mother Describes 20 Hours in a Safe Room:

We weren’t talking much. I told them, “There are terrorists in the kibbutz. Now you have to be very quiet and cannot talk.”

I was scared that my toddler wouldn’t manage the situation. You hear stories from the Holocaust of people with little children in hiding, and I always thought, “How do you keep a child that small, that young, quiet in this situation?” But the energy was so heavy and we were so quiet.

I told my daughter, “You need to be as quiet as a mouse. We’re not talking now.” And she whispered through the whole day. Even when she fell over, she didn’t cry.

And the kids at some point got so exhausted from the adrenaline and all the stress. And terrorists were shooting for hours at our house, and we could hear them outside our window of the safe room, shouting in Arabic….