'We didn't think we would come back to this'

Yaniv, Gil and Idan hadn't seen their homes in Kibbutz Beit Oren since fleeing at a moment's notice as fires closed in.

By BEN HARTMAN
Burnt out car Beit Oren 311 (photo credit: Ben Hartman)
Burnt out car Beit Oren 311
(photo credit: Ben Hartman)
Yaniv, Gil, and Idan hadn't seen their homes on Kibbutz Beit Oren since Thursday, when they fled at a moment's notice as the flames of the Carmel fire closed in on them. Hoping for the best, they didn't bother grabbing anything to take with them.
"We thought we'd be back the next day, we didn't think we'd come back to this" said Idan, 27, standing outside the hollowed shell of his boyhood home in the kibbutz's scorched southern neighborhood. Soldiers and police barricaded the only entrances to the road leading to the kibbutz, but the three friends begged and pleaded to be allowed in to see their homes, hoping to find something to take with them.
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Wearing the same clothes as the night before, Idan and his friends climbed the stairs into Idan's building, using their cellphones as torches in the pitch black night.
Perched on a hilltop above the Carmel, the houses afforded a sweeping view of the neighboring hillsides and the constellation of embers and small fires twinkling in the night sky. In the distance, convoys of fire trucks could be seen making their way up and down the hills beset upon by flames. All around, the air was choked with the stench of ash and smoldering pine.  Much of the kibbutz appeared to have been spared by the flames, save the southern neighborhood which was scorched and covered in soot and ash.
"This was my room, all my clothes were right here, my playstation over there", Idan added, pointing at a mound of soot and ash in the corner.
The concrete ceiling of the two-story building had collapsed, warped and twisted by the flames that tore through Thursday.
"We shouldn't be in here man, it's an 80 yr old building, it could fall any second", Gil said, and the three scrambled down the stairs into the night.
On the street outside, still covered in ash, Yaniv, 25, stood outside the burned shell of his Subaru, abandoned to the flames which had blocked the only road out on Thursday.
"I really loved this car," Yaniv said, and kicked the crumpled driver’s side door.
"On Thursday, we saw the flames coming towards the kibbutz but we didn't leave right away. We ran over to the B-Side, the kibbutz pub, to see if anyone was over there and we saw a few of our friends on the rooftop with a hose trying to put out the flames on the ground,” Shahar said, adding that from the rooftop they could hear the screams for help coming from the Prisons Service officers trapped in a burning bus on the way to evacuate detainees at Damon prison. No help arrived in time, and 36 officers burned to death in the flames.
“Pretty soon we saw that the flames were getting closer and we ran”, Yaniv added describing how he and Gil dashed through the forest from the kibbutz to Moshav Megadim near Atlit. Idan had managed to flee earlier before the road was closed off.
“The roads were blocked by the fire so we fled through the woods. We grew up in these woods, we know the way down. So we just ran, the whole time looking over our shoulders for the fire,” Yaniv said.
In the scramble they lost track of Bruno, a black and white mutt Yaniv found on the side of the road a week earlier and adopted. When the three friends pulled into the abandoned kibbutz on Friday, they were tailed by Bruno, who came out of the darkness running alongside their car.
The three friends appeared to be in good spirits, even though they were without a change of clothes and couch-surfing with friends and relatives in Haifa. They hoped to be able to salvage something from their homes but so far were out of luck.
“We’ll go check at my parents house, it’s up in the northern neighborhood, the fire didn’t really make it there,” Idan said, and the three childhood friends from Kibbutz Beit Oren headed off into the darkness, trailed by Bruno leaving paw prints in the ash.