On October 7, Efrat Silberhaft and her family were in Vienna on their way to the synagogue where her father is the cantor. Since it was Shabbat and they didn’t have any phones with them, they were informed by the security guards at the synagogue about the Hamas attack. When she and her husband, Yossi, and their two toddlers managed to return to Israel as soon as possible, Yossi was immediately called up to serve in the reserves in the Golani Brigade.
Home alone for eight months, with no school for the children, Efrat started sketching as a way of coping with the stress and isolation. Her drawings became a form of diary entries: Each one was dated with a caption that described not what was happening in the war but her own situation and feelings. “I found solace in sketching my feelings and emotions when my husband was called up to the army,” she relates. One sketch, for example, shows her toddler son playing on a blanket, oblivious, of course, to all the scenes going through her mind.
