Shelter [or my first memory] 2019-2022
Ramat-Gan Israel / Brighton UK

It is night.

I am three years old.

Alarm sounding.

I get up and sleepily walk to the living room.

My parents grab my little sister.

We rush down the staircase.

We step into the building’s bomb shelter.

Our neighbours are already in a circle, gathered around a transistor radio.

It is October 1973.

I think that from this point on, home, for me, has never really felt like a safe place. It was the shelter with its solid, cool, damp, bare concrete walls which I leaned into.

And the communion of strangers sitting silently in a circle in the dark.