Under the Siren: Alexandria, 1973

The photograph shows me at three years old, seated before a cake on a pedestal, flowers arranged like sentries at the edge of the frame. I wear a white lace dress that scratches my collarbone and a veil pinned into the heavy part of my long, dark hair. My eyes are lowered, solemn, as if I understood the weight of the moment. But the truth is simpler: I had a fever, my eyes watered constantly, and the photographer’s lights were too sharp for me to face. “Look down at the cake,” he instructed, and I obeyed. No child looked more serious than I did in that picture.

It was October 1973 in Alexandria, Egypt, and the city was at war. My parents had braved the blackout, the barricades, and the fear to bring me to that studio because they wanted proof—a record that their daughter had a birthday, even under the siren.

By three years old I was already fluent in the language of danger. The “danger siren,” my mother called it, wailed its orders: lights off, voices low, tar paper sealed to the windows. Outside our building, a red-brick barricade cut the street short, an abrupt wall in the middle of everyday life.

I knew the rules, even then. Don’t touch toys left in the street: they might be traps disguised as playthings. Don’t stand near the window. Don’t wander past the barricade. Adults whispered these warnings, not because they wanted to frighten us, but because they wanted us alive. Years later, someone scoffed when I told the story. “No such bombs existed,” he said. “That’s just village gossip.” But he hadn’t been there. I had. And I hadn’t lived in a village. I lived in Alexandria, a city with a library that once held the world. In a season of danger, rules that protect small hands are not myths. They are survival.

I was sick that night, chest rattling, eyes watering, but I wanted the celebration. No friends came—it was too dangerous. Instead, the grownups filled the room: my grandparents, my aunts with bracelets sliding down their wrists, my uncles with their jokes, my parents arranging the cake as if arranging a fragile world. My grandmother had chosen the dress, my mother smoothed my hair with oil, and the veil was her idea—a small act of sweetness because I was so enchanted by my parents’ wedding photograph.

The candles were lit and everyone leaned close. They sang “Happy Birthday” in hushed voices, the melody pressed down until it barely floated above the table. When I blew the candles out, they raised their hands and mimed applause, palms meeting the air but never each other. Silent clapping, joy without noise. I remember looking up at their faces and thinking, you can clap with a smile? That night I learned it was true.

What I remember most are sensations. The smell of sugar icing mixing with the chemical bite of tar paper. The heat of the candles turning into halos through my watery eyes. The weight of the veil tugging on my scalp where my mother had pinned it too tight. My grandmother’s hand on my shoulder, steady, rhythmic—one, two, three—as if counting me anchored to the room. My father, at the window, two fingers slipping into the seam, listening to the city more than looking at it.

I don’t remember the words adults said that night. I remember the quiet choreography of protection. A hand smoothing hair. A match striking. A song sung carefully. A smile that took the place of clapping.

That picture has followed me through the decades, but even without it, I would remember. Some memories lodge themselves so deeply they never leave. I’ve carried that night with me for fifty-one years. I’ve thought of it during other storms in my life, whenever the world felt unsafe or when voices around me said be small, be silent, don’t be seen.

The siren taught me silence. But the cake, the song, the mimed applause—they taught me something stronger. Joy doesn’t need permission. It can whisper and still survive.

When I think of that night, I sometimes think of Anne Frank in the annex—writing about a jar of jam, a string of beads, or a chestnut tree glimpsed through a window. She recorded not only fear, but the small joys that made survival human. Her story has always felt close to me, not only because of its universal truth, but because my own mother—Muslim—carried Jewish roots in her family history. Anne Frank is not distant from me; she threads through my bloodline.

That connection reminds me that no matter the era, no matter the war, families insist on memory. They record birthdays, they sing softly, they protect joy because they know children will carry those moments forward long after the sirens stop.

And so I cannot forget, as I write this, that children in Gaza today are also blowing out candles in blackouts. Mothers there are smoothing hair in the dark. Families are whispering lullabies and miming clapping so that joy does not alert danger. Those children will carry these moments, too—not as statistics or politics—but as memories of how love refused to vanish. Fifty years from now, they will remember, just as I do.

The photograph from October 1973 shows a solemn child in lace, eyes lowered toward a cake, flowers arranged around her. It does not show the barricade waiting outside, the tar paper over the windows, or the warnings about toys. It does not capture the sound of hushed voices singing or the sight of silent clapping.

But I remember. I remember perfectly.

That is what it meant to live under the siren.