Neighbors in the Dark, Part 1: Twenty Seconds to the Safe Room

From quiet mornings to rockets overhead: an interview with an American Jew who survived Oct 7th

The Mediterranean lay black and breathless in the hours before dawn. A darkness older than the town, older than the flags and the borders that cut the land to pieces. It pressed against the windows in silence. Somewhere beyond the coastline, the war waited in its own perfect quiet, as if it were not already here.

At 6:02 a.m., a sound broke through the dark. Not the siren yet. Just the vibration of a phone on the nightstand. A high, thin alert that meant nothing and everything. Sam Kronfeld opened his eyes. The walls around him looked unchanged, the same rented apartment in Ashkelon where he’d fallen asleep believing peace was still possible, or at least probable.

His parents were in the spare bedroom down the hall. They were here on vacation. They had come to see where he worked, to understand why he’d stayed so long. Twenty seconds. That was the time he had to get them into the safe room once the siren started. He had rehearsed it in his head the night before, the small choreography of urgency: wake them, pull them, shut the steel door.

When the siren finally came, it was loud enough to strip all thought from his mind. A single, rising note that carried everything he had hoped to avoid: the memory of other sirens, other mornings, the knowledge that no matter how ordinary your life seemed, it could still be claimed by something you would never see coming.

He moved fast. You didn’t have time to feel fear in the first seconds. Only to do the next thing, and then the next. He threw open the door to the spare room. His father was already sitting up, eyes wide, the blankets bunched in his fists. His mother’s voice was high and thin. The air tasted like dust. Twenty seconds. No more.

Somewhere to Belong, For a While

Sam Kronfeld grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a family that took Jewish identity more seriously than most people took anything. His family’s home was a pre-war building from 1910, built to endure. A classic six, they called it. Two bedrooms and a living room that looked out on Broadway where the traffic passed without pause. The walls were painted in colors that seemed brighter then. The living room yellow, the hallway red, the bedrooms blue as a summer dusk.

At night the city lights crept in through the glass. On the walls hung photographs of family long vanished, faces carried out of Eastern Europe ahead of the fires. Between them were the old paintings his grandfather had made, quiet scenes that held their own kind of witness. His grandfather had been a rabbi, the kind who could quote Torah passages at the dinner table without sounding like he was showing off. His parents were active in something called Jewish renewal, which, depending on your perspective, was either a fresh take on ancient faith or an elaborate justification for wearing tie-dye to synagogue.

At eighteen, he decided he needed to see Israel for himself. He signed up for a gap year digging in the dirt around the City of David, sifting pottery shards that were either priceless antiquities or the remains of some Canaanite’s broken cereal bowl – no one could ever quite tell. The work was slow and hot and oddly comforting. By the time he flew home, he had the uneasy sense that he belonged in a place he barely understood.

A year later, he went back. This time it wasn’t archaeology. He enlisted in the Israeli army as a lone soldier, which is what they call foreigners who show up with their own private reasons for risking their lives in someone else’s country. He told people it was about service and identity. He didn’t mention that he also didn’t know what else to do with himself. There was something clarifying about uniforms and orders and the absolute certainty of what mattered and what didn’t.

When he finished, he tried to have a normal American life. He moved to New York. He took a few counterterrorism classes at John Jay, thinking maybe he’d find a way to turn all that experience into a career. Mostly, he discovered that the only thing worse than terrorism was studying it in a windowless classroom with flickering fluorescent lights. So he pivoted to construction logistics. He liked the math of it, the sense that if you planned carefully enough, nothing would collapse.

And then came the semiconductor project in Ashkelon. A chance to live in Israel again, but this time without the uniform. To wake up near the sea, go to work, make something that might outlast him. It was the closest he’d ever come to feeling like he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. The war was a distant rumor, a thing you monitored on the news ticker while deciding whether to have another beer. Most mornings, it was easy to believe it would stay that way.

Ashkelon – A Town on the Edge

Ashkelon looked like San Diego if San Diego had been periodically conquered by empires for the last three thousand years. The beaches were broad and pale, the Mediterranean so blue it seemed oblivious and indifferent. From his balcony, Sam could see the ancient ruins folded into the landscape – Byzantine walls half-buried by sand dunes, old Roman columns set off by chain-link fencing that made them look both precious and neglected.

It was a small enough place that everybody knew somebody. His neighbors included a retired IDF paratrooper, a Ukrainian family who’d arrived with three suitcases and the same hollow stare he recognized from the first weeks of his own arrival, and a Bedouin contractor who always had a joke about the city inspectors. You could walk a mile in any direction and pass three synagogues, a shawarma stand, and at least one old man who would stop you to ask where your people came from.

Most evenings, Sam liked to walk along the cliffs at sunset. There was a trail that skirted the edge of the city, where the ruins gave way to housing developments and eventually to the border fence you weren’t supposed to think about too much. Sometimes he’d sit on a bench overlooking the water and imagine what it must have been like to live here when the threats were Carthaginian instead of Iranian. The difference, he suspected, was mostly in the branding.

He ate dinner with his colleagues a couple nights a week – grilled fish, too many salads, a slow parade of small plates that always seemed designed to make you forget there was work to do. They talked about deadlines and permits and the peculiarities of semiconductor supply chains. If anyone mentioned the sirens or the cease-fires, it was in the same tone you’d use to complain about parking tickets. A hazard of living here, like the humidity or the stray cats.

And there was a kind of quiet luxury in being an American Jew abroad. He wasn’t a tourist exactly, but he wasn’t fully part of it either. He could enjoy the illusion of safety, the pleasant fiction that you could build something lasting on a strip of land where every civilization had eventually come to grief. The app on his phone would buzz once or twice a month – red alerts in some border town – and he would glance at the screen, nod, and go back to his dinner. It was almost comforting how predictable it all felt.

October 7 – The Day Everything Changed

The alarm on Sam’s phone went off at 6:02 a.m. A single tone, high and insistent, that had never once meant anything good. He was awake before he understood why. The sirens came a few seconds later. The sound filled every corner of the apartment, and he didn’t have to check the clock to know he had twenty seconds.

He got up fast. His parents were already moving in the spare bedroom. They were wearing the clothes they’d slept in – his father fumbling for his glasses, his mother cradling her phone, her expression steady. The siren was so loud it made conversation pointless. You just moved. You counted steps. You tried not to think about anything past the next breath.

He opened the safe room door. The air felt close, the steel walls pressing back in a way that was supposed to be reassuring. He was halfway across the hall when the first rocket hit.

The shockwave blew out the bathroom windows behind him. He felt it before he heard it – a sudden rush of air, a pressure that seemed to suck the oxygen out of his lungs. The glass exploded outward in a single sheet, fracturing into a cloud of shards that passed inches from the side of his head. For a moment, he saw each piece lit by the dawn, turning in the air like something weightless. Then it all hit the tile at once, a hard, metallic rain.

He didn’t move right away. His mind had gone blank, as if his body needed time to catch up with the fact that he was still standing there, unhurt. The hallway smelled like scorched plaster. Somewhere behind the walls, an alarm was wailing over the siren.

Then he was pulling his mother into the safe room, slamming the door shut. He could hear his own heart louder than anything.

When the barrage slowed, they made for the stairwell. It was already flooding with people from the upper floors. Someone was carrying a baby wrapped in a towel. The smell of smoke and hot concrete followed them down the steps.

They crossed the courtyard and slipped into the neighbor’s basement. It wasn’t much safer, but it was away from the windows. He tried to steady his breathing. Around him, people were checking their phones, refreshing news sites that weren’t loading fast enough.

The rumors moved faster than any official update. Shootings at the kibbutzim. Dozens taken hostage. He remembered driving past those gates two days earlier, when all of it had still felt like someone else’s problem. He could also hear whispers about paragliders. Bright shapes drifting out of the dawn, slow and deliberate. They came on the wind, their canopies billowing in the pale sky. Beneath them the men hung silent as seeds falling to earth. They landed in the fields beyond the houses. No hurry to them. No sound but the hiss of fabric and the soft crunch of boots in the dirt. They rose from their harnesses and began to walk, rifles in their hands, as if they had come to claim what was always theirs.

Escape and Exile

The evacuation was arranged by the company’s private security team. There was no drama to it, no sense of rescue. Just a phone call and a set of instructions: be ready in an hour, bring only what you can carry, wait by the curb. He packed the essentials – a passport, a few shirts, the laptop he hadn’t shut down in three days. He left everything else behind.

At Ben Gurion Airport, the sirens started again. Everyone moved with a kind of rehearsed urgency, a choreography he recognized from old training drills. You crouched by the nearest wall. You covered your head with your hands. You waited for the thud that meant the missile had missed or been intercepted. When the all-clear sounded, he stood up with the others and went back to the line for passport control. No one spoke. There was nothing left to say.

The plane lifted off into a pale, cloudless sky. A few rows back, someone started to cry softly, the kind of crying that didn’t stop once it started. Sam closed his eyes and counted his breaths until they were over the Mediterranean.

Dubai felt like a Dr. Seuss fever dream – neon towers, mirrored lobbies, air conditioning so cold it hurt. He walked through the arrivals hall in the same clothes he’d worn for three days, carrying a plastic shopping bag with his toothbrush and the charger for his phone. There were hotel staff waiting with little signs, and businessmen in suits, and for a moment it all seemed like a mistake, like he’d wandered onto the set of someone else’s life.

In the first hours of safety, he felt nothing he expected. No relief, no triumph. Just an exhaustion so complete it hollowed him out. He ate a meal he couldn’t taste. He lay on a hotel bed and watched the ceiling until dawn.

Coming home was stranger than any of it. The city was unchanged – traffic, sirens of a different kind, people shouting into their phones. He spent days moving through it in a fog. He drank because it was easier than explaining anything. He smoked weed because it quieted the loop in his head. He signed up for a speed dating event because the idea of sitting alone in his apartment was worse than any awkward conversation.

He didn’t know what he was looking for. Maybe proof that he could still belong somewhere. Maybe just a reason to stay awake.

The Softest Targets

The first names to surface were almost always the same kind of people. The Nova festival organizers who spent their weekends collecting donations for refugee clinics. The young kibbutz families who had voted for every cease-fire, even the ones that seemed impossible. The men who drove sick Palestinians across the border for dialysis appointments, because it was the right thing to do.

They weren’t soldiers. They weren’t hardliners. Most of them had built their lives around the belief that proximity could soften hatred, that if you planted something or taught someone or sat across a table long enough, the distance would shrink. For decades, they’d been the ones making room, taking the risk of living closer to the fence because they thought it mattered.

Sam had never spent much time in the kibbutzim. He knew them mainly as glimpses out the window – low houses, bright murals on concrete walls, small playgrounds baking in the sun. They looked ordinary in a way that almost dared you to forget how vulnerable they were.

In the days after the attack, it became clear how deliberate the targeting had been. Paragliders landing in open fields. Trucks pulling up to gates that were mostly symbolic. The first gunshots in communities that had long considered themselves the least likely to be hurt. There was a particular kind of horror in that: not just the violence itself, but the fact that it had found the people who had worked hardest to keep it away.

He read the lists of the dead in the same way everyone did – scrolling past names, stopping at photos, feeling a small shudder when he recognized a face. It didn’t make sense, even by the warped logic of war. If you were going to hate someone enough to kill them, it seemed you would choose the ones who made it easy. Instead, they went after the ones who refused to stop believing in coexistence.

In quieter moments, he wondered what it meant to hate so indiscriminately. Or maybe it wasn’t indiscriminate at all. Maybe that was the point: to prove that no amount of empathy could save you, that no good deed would buy you a second of mercy when the siren started.

And what did it mean to survive something like that? To stand on the safe side of the border, counting your luck, knowing you hadn’t done anything special to deserve it. He thought about the rows of houses he’d passed, the people who’d woken up in the dark, the same as he had, and never got the chance to make it to the door.

What Remains

At night he dreamed of men he’d never seen standing at the foot of his bed. Their faces were calm, almost tender, as if they’d come to witness him rather than to harm him. They did not speak. Sometimes he dreamed he was back in the bathroom, the window intact, the air unbroken. And then the glass would lift itself from the sill and hang in the dark, each shard turning slow as a falling leaf, until it came apart in a silence deeper than any he had ever known.

In the mornings he lay still and counted the ways his life had stopped. The apartment in Ashkelon was still there. The dishes in the sink, the shirts folded in drawers, the small artifacts of an ordinary life abandoned in an hour. He thought sometimes he would go back for them, that there was some dignity in returning for the things you once believed you’d keep. Most days he knew he wouldn’t.

No reckoning would ever come. No voice would tell him why he had been spared or what debt that survival carried. He knew only that he had lived and others had not. That the difference between any two lives was measured in seconds and inches and nothing more. He understood that everything you love will always cost you. And he understood that sometimes the price is paid in the lives of strangers you will never have the chance to mourn by name.

If he thought of Ashkelon, he thought of the balcony. The black water at dawn, unmoved by anything that had come or would come. The hush before the sirens. The hour when you could almost believe the city would go on forever.

He remembered standing there in the half-light, his hands resting on the rail, and thinking there was nothing in the world he wanted to leave. And he thought of it now, all that darkness waiting offshore, and he knew it had been waiting all along.