There is something unexpected about the community that forms in a bomb shelter, about the stories that are told, the stories that are requested, and the conversations that ensue.

Saturday morning

Sirens: war has started. We sit in the shelter. Everyone looks very tense and stressed. We can all hear the explosions from above.

By evening, people’s faces begin to look more familiar, and conversations start.

The person across from me asks a random question that leads to a conversation about Raul Wallenberg and the Righteous Among the Nations. Others listen in. I tell them about Carl Lutz and the Glass House. I tell them the story of Testimony House in Nir Galim: how some of the Glass House survivors and other young Hungarian Jews built the museum so that the memory would be preserved.

One of the women asks if I have heard of Chiune Sugihara. She tells us that her father was rescued by Sugihara! I excitedly tell her about Teach the Shoah, and how we would love for her to learn how to tell her father’s story and to share it with others.

The Following Week

Sirens go off without a pre-warning. (A 3-min warning issued by the homefront that sirens will go off soon.) Without the pre-warning, we have 90 seconds to get to shelter.

As I rush out of my apartment building, a lovely woman who lives in the private house across the street opens her front door and invites me into her shelter. I run to join her.

I have always admired this house. There is a sculpture in the front garden of a stack of books: the top part has open books which remind me of butterflies.

In the shelter, I ask her about the sculpture. She tells me that it was created especially for the house symbolizing the different literary people who lived there.

I knew the house was built by an Israeli author and publisher named of Rabinski. Sitting in the shelter, I learn that right after the war, the house was rented by Yehiel Di Nur, aka Ka-Tsetnik.

Ka-Tsetnik coined the phrase “Auschwitz, the other planet.” I grew up reading his work. And he lived here. He wrote here right in this spot! One of the books I grew up reading might have been written right here!

I think this may have been the first time in a shelter that I didn’t know how long it was before we got the all-clear and I could go home.

Passover in the Shelter

By Passover, there is a regular group in the local shelter. We know each other: a small, strange community that exists underground.

Someone asks me to tell a story of a Jewish hero from the Holocaust. There are so many choices. I tell them about Rozka Korczak, one of the resistance leaders from Vilna. A teenage girl says she never heard of such a thing. She starts googling Rozka and her partner, Vitka Kempner.

Someone asks me to tell them about Albania. Why are they so special in the Shoah? I tell them about the first Albanian to be recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, Refik Veseli. This leads to a conversation about where we find light in humanity.

We come out of the shelter into the fresh air. A few clouds are scattered in the sky, but a ray of sun shines through.

Another cease fire is declared. Another light through the darkness.