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| Mike's Survivor |
| 05.06.04 (11:27 am) [edit] |
[i]One year ago, a young Stanmore-born man was among those whose lives changed forever when a British suicide bomber blew up outside a Tel Aviv beachfront bar.
This week, Daniella Peled hears how he found a way to heal the emotional trauma of the night when three of his friends were killed. [/i]
David Leigh was running late. Due to start his shift as a barman at the popular Mike’s Place pub, the former Londoner had stopped to have a shave before leaving his flat. So he was still 100 yards away when a suicide bomber detonated his charge outside the packed venue.
That mundane delay may have saved David’s life. Three of his workmates and friends - waitress Dominique Hass, a 29-year-old who had only recently arrived from France, along with musicians Yanai Weiss, 46, and Ran Baron, 23 - died in the explosion. Dozens more sustained horrifying injuries.
Moments after the blast, 28-year old David arrived to find a scene of utter devastation. “The front of Mike’s Place was dark – completely covered in black ash,” he recalls, sipping a pint of Guinness outside the rebuilt pub, a year on filled once again with music and laughter.
“The ambulances hadn’t arrived yet and everyone on the street was just looking on in shock. It was just bodies and body parts. I remember seeing a leg very distinctly, among the black ash everywhere the flesh was bright white and it really stood out.”
Amid the confusion, David did his best to help, but with no first-aid training, he could only cradle a friend, whose leg had been torn to shreds, and try to comfort her.
Ironically, just the week before he had told his boss, pub owner Gal Ganzman, he wanted to do a first aid course with Israeli ambulance service, Magen David Adom. But Gal had said the bar was particularly busy and he couldn’t spare him.
“I had an incredible sense of clarity,” says David. “I remember crouching by my friend, thinking, “I really must tell Gal I’m going to do that medic’s course.””
When David, a veteran of Jewish student groups, made aliya five years ago, the peace process was still active. Soon, like all Israelis, security concerns became part and parcel of his daily life.
And his response following the blast was typically Israeli, just like the other mainly Anglo immigrants who make up the staff and regulars of Mike’s Place.
They unanimously decided to carry on, undefeated by terror, mobilising to reopen the bar in just seven days. Friends and relatives established the Life After Terror Fund to help other victims. Security guard Avi Tabib, - severely wounded after he prevented the bomber from entering the bar, saving many more lives – fought his injuries to return to work as soon as could.
Barman Joshua Faudem and his girlfriend Pavla Fleishcher, who had been making a film about the bar – the producer, Jack Baxter was badly hurt in the blast –carried on filming. The result, Blues on the Beach, previewed in Tel Aviv last week, shows the shocked survivors struggling with the immediate aftermath of the bombing and trying to find a way to cope with the trauma.
For David, the solution was never in doubt. Eight days after the attack, he presented himself at his first MDA training session. The reason? “Empowerment,” he says simply. “You have to take the energy you find in bad situations and use it for something good.”
He got the opportunity all too soon. In MDA headquarters in Jerusalem on 11 June 2003 as part of his 140 hours of instruction to become an ambulance driver, Egged bus number 14A was hit by a suicide bomber on the central Jaffa Road. When the call came in, he jumped on an ambulance. “I shouldn’t have,” he admits sheepishly, “I hadn’t finished my training”.
He was one of the first on the scene and immediately began to put what he had learnt into practice, running towards the most badly injured and assessing who could still be helped.
The first casualty he carried to the ambulance looked barely injured; he began CPR before he realised the man was already dead. “So I went back to the bus,” he says simply. “It felt very good to be doing something and putting my training into use.”
The grisly scenes he saw that day – even finding a part of the suicide bomber’s head on the opposite side of the street – did nothing to deter him from finishing his training.
He now keeps his MDA vest, with all of his equipment, in his car at all times. MDA, like Mike’s Place, he says, is a family. And that sense of belonging is what he made aliyah to experience.
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