The story of Gizela - Afik Shiraz. Abinun Shmuel

Much to the relief, some passengers descended near Netanya because they went to live in one of the sites in the area, and another group came down at the station whose name I do not remember, and so there was some space in the truck. At the end of the hard and long journey we arrived at sunset to Beer Yaakov.

Beer Yaakov

The first thought that passed through my mind, when I saw the place there was, "Here, I went back to camp." The place used to be a barracks of the British army and now stood empty, and the living quarters were arranged in straight lines, similar to the barracks where we lived in Bergen-Belsen. This impression was reinforced by the distribution of food, which resembled the one it was practiced in the camp. On top of that, at night the jackals howled freezing blood, and war was still going on at that time and it was dark we couldn't turn on a light. But I quickly realized this was not a camp, since instead of the meager bread, in the Beer Yaakov we could take bread as much as we could, even white bread, which was tasty like a cake. In addition, in Beer Yaakov we were not under arrest, and those of us who already mastered the Hebrew language came out and returned as much as they wanted. The residential buildings that we received were made of plaster and mesh. In many terms it was our destiny to have a permanent building with window and door, compared to immigrants from Turkey and Yemen who joined later and who had to live in tents in the fiery heat of summer and in rainy days in the winter. We had to share the room, we were given, with another man from Yugoslavia, he had a family in Tel Aviv. That person left some of his belongings on the bed to signal that it was his, and went to them. So out in fact we got a luxury, considering the conditions of those days. Most of my days in Beer Yaakov have been spent on the care of little Samuel in the laundry of the endless piles of bedding and clothing that were piled up every day, and having conversations with our neighbors. At this point, my only encounter with the old Israelis was about the distribution of food, and so the first word I learned in Hebrew was "patience": stand in that que - patience, stand in other que - patience. For sleeping, we were handed simple straw mattresses, but surprisingly, the blankets we actually got were made of great English cloth. Many people gave my husband their blankets to sew coats for payment. These coats were called "kulieka" - a collarless jacket with buttons, missing lining but made entirely by hand. I would have helped Leon to heat the coal iron, and because we had no coal at hand, we also had to pick up bits of wood and make them into coal. It was our first source of livelihood in the country; however, the four pounds my husband earned from sewing these coats we had to pay back to the agency as a payment for the trip to Israel. Samuel, our son was already two and a half years old and weaned from diapers. It spared me a lot of trouble washing and drying, but still the shortage continued. For six months we waited for the movable that we sent in the lift, to arrive. It might have come to Israel even earlier, but we didn't have the money to go to Haifa's storage and take it from there. The lift was huge, almost the size of a room. Later we really covered it with tar paper and opened a door on it, and it served as a workroom for my husband. To make room in the kitchen we set up outside the house, a block on which we put the wick for cooking. It wasn't an easy life,

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