2023-10-14 16:00:00
For approximately six hours, Costa Rican Sharon Schwartz was detained at sea with a terrible uncertainty: she did not know if she would make it back home alive.
On Saturday, October 7, Schwartz was returning from Turkey on a cruise, along with his parents, when the attacks by the Hamas terrorist group against Israel began.
The boat was moving through the north of the Middle Eastern country, with about 2,000 people on board, near Lebanon, where the terrorist group Hezbollah is located.
“Hezbollah said that if Israel defends itself and enters Gaza, they will start attacking too. Since they are next to Lebanon, we were an easy target, especially since it is an Israeli ship,” Schwartz, 36, told Teletica.com.
The Costa Rican recalled that all the passengers were having a “great time” during their trip, but that morning everything changed: “It was as if everyone was grieving.”
She and several other people had anxiety and panic attacks because they believed that “they were going to throw a bomb at the ship.” The situation worsened when the first reports and stories began to arrive about the victims, many of them relatives of crew members: “People were going crazy because they couldn’t protect their relatives from where we were.”
“They kidnapped someone and, when they killed him, they grabbed that same person’s cell phone and uploaded it to Facebook while they killed him; “That was how people found out that their relatives were dead,” Schwartz said, devastated.
The next day, Sunday, was when the cruise ship touched port and they managed to disembark in Israel. “We didn’t know if we were going to get there or not,” the Costa Rican confessed and recalled that “many people didn’t know if they could get to the house because it was full of terrorists.”
Schwartz, who has lived in Israel for six years and is a communicator, explained that, although she knew the risks involved in living in this country, what has happened on this occasion “is something that one would not imagine is possible.”
After arriving on land, the national took a train with her family to her home, in the center of the country, 20 minutes from Tel Aviv. That was where she encountered a twenty-something soldier who was heading to the war field and had burst into tears. “That was truly the strongest thing I have ever experienced,” she noted.
The communicator tried to look after the soldier, but she seemed inconsolable. In any case, she says, “we both knew that I couldn’t help her,” which made her also catch those cold tears: “I spent the entire train crying, seeing all the soldiers going to the reserve service and to the service.” military, who are children of 18, 20, 21…”
When they arrived home, the first thing the Tica did was pack a suitcase with food, passports and important belongings, in addition to putting water and dry food in the shelter/bunker. She only needed a radio with batteries to comply with the instructions of the authorities, so she went out to buy one.
When he was coming back, they began launching missiles at nearby areas. “I started to shake and drove at 150 km/h to try to get to my house,” commented the Costa Rican, while war planes could be heard in the moments she spoke her words.
On the seventh day since the attacks began, Schwartz assures that “people are totally in shock, they don’t sleep and they don’t stop crying.” He also told how last Thursday he woke up to the sound of a missile being exploded by the Israeli defense system.
The Ethics, which is still struggling to move forward, emphasizes, however, that we must “know how to differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas.” This last group is the one he blames for “a second holocaust” against the Israeli population.
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