The family I found in a hostel in Australia

I arrived in Margaret River, Western Australia, completely alone with my backpack and my surfboard. After months of traveling surrounded by friends, I now had to start over to find farm work and earn my second-year visa. Again I had to build a life from scratch in a small, slightly run-down hostel that felt more like a shared apartment than a place for travellers passing through.

I didn’t expect to find family there. But within days, I did.

The kitchen was always full. Italians, Argentinians, Israelis, all cooking together, filling the room with an energy I can only describe as familial. A guy with dark curls and a charming smile offered me tea before I had even unpacked. There was help finding a job before I had even asked. When my backpack was stolen with my phone, my wallet and my grandmother’s ring, I came back to the hostel and everyone was there for me right away. Don’t worry, we can feed you. If you need money, I’ll lend you some. We’re here for you. People I had known for barely a week, acting like people I had known my whole life.

Among them was my friend Nitzan, who never went anywhere without his poncho, who made rosemary tea every evening and taught me to play chess. There was a woman named Lior, a yoga teacher who practiced Chinese medicine, whose presence alone made me feel steadier, safer, more myself. There was Yoti, with whom I shared quiet mornings over coffee and long afternoons at the lake, talking about everything and nothing.

Most of them were Israelis. Most of them, I later learned, had already held a weapon in their hands before they turned 20. All of them had served in the army, maybe not by choice, but because that’s what their country asked of them. They had grown up with rockets in the sky and safe rooms in their homes. And yet, somehow, they were among the warmest, most emotionally present people I had ever met. Maybe it was because of what they had lived through, not in spite of it.

We built a life together in that small town. Shakshuka and hummus twice a week, ice baths in the lake next to the hostel, sunsets that felt like they would last forever and endless talks about the meaning of life.

Then, on October 7, everything changed.

I remember the messages arriving one after another in our group chat, while I was at work. I’m flying back tomorrow, but I want to say goodbye before. I remember walking into the hostel after my work to find everyone sitting on the floor already in each other’s arms, crying. I remember Lior calling me, sobbing, telling me her boyfriend, also named Lior, had to return to his unit immediately. In the days that followed, my friends found out about friends or family who got killed, captured or wounded. I watched people I loved pack their bags to fly toward danger, not away from it, because for them it was the right thing to do.

I have never forgotten the unfairness of it. People I got to know as endlessly compassionate, joyful, and open-hearted were the ones forced to carry so much grief. I remember how privileged I felt and how helpless, watching them leave one after another to serve, to rebuild, to grieve while I stayed behind in a world that mostly continued as if nothing had happened.

That experience never left me. And eventually, it became the seed of something I needed to create: a short film called We Were Celebrating Life. The story of two women, a German and an Israeli, who meet while traveling through Spain and fall in love on the open road, before October 7 interrupts everything and one of them must return home, leaving behind the person she loves.

It isn’t a political film. I know I don’t have the answers, but it’s a film about the people I came to love, the ordinary joy we shared before everything changed and the impossible moment when the news stopped being something on a screen and became someone packing a bag in front of me. I am not Jewish; I am from Germany, but I feel a deep connection to the Jewish people.

We’re currently raising funds to bring this story to the screen through Kickstarter, and if it resonates with you the way it still resonates with me, I invite you to have a look at it.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/werecelebratinglife/we-were-celebrating-life-a-queer-short-film-between-worlds?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=We%20were%20celebrating%20&total_hits=1