What do you tell your child when they say that we are going to kill someone else before they have a chance to kills us?
This morning I dropped Etan off at nursery school. All the other kids had brought their hooded gas masks with them as the army gave an order for everyone to carry them around with them. The rest of the kids were hard at work drawing on the light brown cardboard boxes. If you are going to walk around with something then it ought to look good. I hadn't really thought to bring Etan's so I had to run home to get it.
The building that the nursery is in has a bomb shelter downstairs. There is now way that two or three teachers could put gas masks on 32 children so the shelter has an electronic air filter as do many safe rooms in people's homes. The gas masks for the kids are in case the need arises between home and the nursery. In our case a two minute walk.
About three weeks ago the four and five year-old kids were taken downstairs into the bomb shelter and given a lesson about the war. At home we never spoke about it, not because we were sheltering the kids but because we truly don't give it much thought. But I'd heard Etan talking about it a few times so the other night while we were having dinner with friends I asked him what he knew about the war.
I asked, "Who is Saddam Hussein?"
Etan responded, "He's the man that tells the Iraqis what to do."
"And what does he tell them?"
"He tells them to kill all of the Land of Israel."
"Why does he want to do that?"
"He doesn't like us. So we're going to kill them so they can't kill us."
"No, we're going to protect ourselves so we don't get killed."
Obviously he's getting more information about the war outside the house than inside the house. Recently he doesn't sleep well at night, doesn't want to stay at friend's houses too long. We'll see if this has anything to do with the war or not. Meanwhile this afternoon I opened Tamir's and my gas mask kits, opened up the filters, made sure everything fits and that the battery in his air cleaner works ok. Nothing is going to happen. But we're ready.