‘Nobody Cares,’ Survivor Wrote on Hijacked Bus

Daisy Sorek figured that her husband and three children would go through her handbag after she died. So that’s where she put her note.

“To Yafit (age 3), Tzvika (her husband), Moshe (17), Itai (12) and Grandma: I love you,” the note read.

“Three bastard terrorists have killed us,” she continued. “Please take care of yourselves. I love you. Our government works slowly. They don’t understand what and how to do things, and nobody cares, and that’s too bad.”

Through what she now calls “a miracle,” Sorek didn’t die after all during Monday’s terrorist hijacking of an Israeli passenger bus near Aroer, southeast of her home in suburban Beersheba. Three of her friends did die, and she suffered shrapnel wounds in her leg when a special police anti-terrorist squad stormed the bus and killed the three gunmen.

Given the circumstances, Sorek was self-conscious about her note when a reporter asked her to read it during a telephone interview Tuesday. “It’s nonsense,” she said.

During the first hour of the hijacking ordeal, she recalled, while the terrorists were still talking and not shooting, she busied herself reading newspapers and knitting “to pass the time.”

But then the gunmen killed Victor Ram in front of her, and she decided there was no time to spare. “I said to myself: ‘At least, let there be a note.’ ” She had no paper, so she scribbled what she believed might be her final thoughts in her pocket diary.

Those thoughts were understandably disjointed. But what she meant, she told a Times reporter, was that it’s too bad that “nobody cares about human beings.”

“I wrote them (her family) to ask the government to speed matters along between Jews and Arabs--to do something. They’re not going to kill all of us, and we’re not going to kill all of them. Only with a peace agreement are we going to get anywhere.”