Tag #127707 - Interview #89861 (Dan Mizrahy)

In May or at the beginning of June 1941, in the middle of the night, we were woken up by the sirens. We were warned not to turn on the lights and to go to the shelters. Soon after, we where shaken by repeated explosions. In a totally unprecedented act, the German air force was bombing the oil refineries in the Gulf of Haifa, located very close to ‘Ahava.’ We went to the ‘shelters’ – actually some ditches one meter wide, ten meters long and, I think, about one meter deep. Some tin barrels filled with sand placed on the two sides of the ditches leaned on one another, forming a sort of ‘roof’ that protected the ditches. Sometimes the planes came all at once, sometimes they came in waves. At that time of the year, the sky was always clear – there is no drop of rain from April till October – so the ‘show’ was absolutely fantastic, especially in the nights with a full moon. The searchlights installed along the coastline, all the way to the harbor of Haifa, were lighting the skies, crossing their blue rays and sometimes catching the planes that glittered like aluminum toys.