“The Long Road Home”

"I flew to a professional conference in Heidelberg, Germany. On early Friday morning I woke up to a phone call from home," said Dr. Eran Berkowitz, Director of the Glaucoma Service in the Ophthalmology Department at Hillel Yaffe Medical Center. "I thought I was dreaming. It took me a few minutes to get a grip. I traveled to Frankfurt to try to find a flight back to Israel. When I realized the situation was impossible, I took a flight to Athens and waited for the first rescue flight back home."

"We were in contact with the Ministry of Health’s situation room and the hospital's Human Resources Department. They told me to get to the airport in the morning hours. It was utter chaos - thousands of people who just wanted to get back home - to their families, their children. I must say that the hospital administration made sure to keep us up to date, support us from afar and help us to the extent possible. It's definitely not a given that such extensive efforts are made to bring you home under these circumstances. Only Israelis can understand that in a time of war all you want is to get home, even when there are explosions and sirens," said Dr. Berkowitz.

Dr. Berkowitz and Dr. Shichter-Confino - met on the plane on the flight to Israel

Dr. Vered Shichter-Confino, Allergy and Immunology Unit Director and senior physician in the Pediatrics Department at Hillel Yaffe, was also among the medical teams stranded overseas. "I flew to Scotland for the European Association of Allergy and Immunology Congress along with other colleagues. When we heard that sirens and missiles had started, we continued to London and waited for a rescue flight to bring us back home. It's hard to explain the stress you feel when you're overseas, your family is at home and there's nothing you can do from far away. You just feel helpless," noted Dr. Shichter-Confino. Dr. Shichter-Confino lives in a town near Haifa, one of the cities that has been hit by a good number of missiles in this war. "At first I received a never-ending stream of alerts to enter protected spaces and heard about impacts and casualties in the area - there's nothing more stressful than being far away from your loved ones and knowing they're now sitting in the safe room, hearing constant sirens and explosions while your hands are tied."

Dr. Shichter-Confino shares that amid all the chaos and stress, there was also a lovely and moving gesture. "An Orthodox Jewish lecturer from London offered to put us up with Jewish families who agreed to open their homes to us. Some of the staff indeed stayed with a few families and others preferred to stay together. Then we got a message from the Ministry of Health and the hospital to travel to Athens and report the next morning for the rescue flight." "It's a surreal situation. You find yourself in the middle of the night, in a typical London pub, looking for a hotel for the night when all hotels are fully booked. We managed to find some rooms in nearby hotels, and the next day we reported to the airport with many other people - with and without flight confirmations, begging to return home."

Even after landing in Israel and a weight was lifted from her heart, life had its own plans. "On my way home, I was caught by a siren. I was with my husband in the middle of the freeway, and we quickly pulled over and hid in the bushes. It's simply a crazy reality that no outsider can understand."

The Polanskis on the plane back from Larnaca

Vladislav and Irena Polansky - she is a head nurse in the Oncology Department, and he is a registered nurse in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Hillel Yaffe - flew Thursday morning to celebrate Irena's birthday in Rome. "We were supposed to return Sunday morning. A short weekend. Our kids stayed with their grandparents. When the reports and alerts from Israel started, I was in contact with the hospital's Human Resources Department to tell us what to do. On Tuesday we were informed that we were registered for a rescue flight leaving the next day from Larnaca. We immediately searched for flight tickets to Larnaca and luckily, we managed to get the last 2 tickets on the flight. "Our luck is that we're both registered nurses, so we were both registered for the rescue flight for medical teams. There were quite a few health care professionals who were forced to stay abroad, because it wasn't possible to bring back their spouses/children who were with them," the Polanskys recall.

For them too, the trip home from Ben Gurion Airport wasn't smooth sailing. "When we reached Ra'anana Junction, a siren started wailing. We had to hide in an underground passage near Ra'anana Junction. Until we got home, we didn't tell the children that we were returning because we were afraid that something might go wrong and we wouldn't manage to get back to Israel as planned. Fortunately, now we're in Israel, we're back at work at Hillel Yaffe and like everyone else - we're trying to navigate between work, children and quite a few sirens and explosions in the background," the two shared.