“I set out on an adventure. I didn’t think it would end this way”

Where were you and what were you doing when you learned about the October 7^th attacks? There isn’t an Israeli who cannot answer this question, and the trauma is branded into our flesh. Shaked Luria, second-year electrical engineering student, was on a mountaintop in Slovenia. “Summer exams had just ended, I had to take the summer term because I spent my second semester on reserve duty and missed some classes. I decided to use my short break and spend two weeks in Slovenia, to do their cross-country track. I went by myself, at the end of September, and October 7^th caught me at the middle of the Triglav National Park. There’s no reception there, so I didn’t have my phone with me during the day and had no idea of what was going on. Around 4 PM I reached a high point, the top, and wanted to send my parents a few photos. I turned on the phone and was bombarded with texts,” he recalls. “At first I didn’t understand what was going on, I thought it might be a virus, that someone was trying to hack my phone. I immediately called my parents, who happened to have gone abroad just the day before, and my brothers, who both got drafted – one is in regular service, one in reserves. Then I called my buddies from my reserve unit, and they just laughed at me. They had already arrived at the unit, on their own accord.”

Luria, 27, is a munitions officer at Division 6 patrol battalion, a NAHAL reserve unit. His first duty before any operation is to go over the inventory and prep everything for action. Due to the circumstances, his unit was left without its munitions officer. “Once I figured out what was going on, I made it my mission to get home as soon as possible. My original plan was to spend that night in a cabin along the trail, with all my belongings on my back. I had no gear, no car, no other place to stay, nothing,” he shares. “I started walking to the nearest village, semi-jogging through all sorts of unmarked trails. I did about 40 km on foot that day, until I reached this farm that rented out rooms during ski season. I spent the night, and the next day they gave me a ride by tractor to the nearest town. It was Sunday, no public transportation, so I started hitching rides: from that town to a bigger city, on to the capital, Ljubljana, then headed north to Hungary, crossed the border to Austria and arrived at the Vienna airport where I was going to board an El-Al flight, because there are no flights from Slovenia. It took an entire day, maybe 12 hours, and I crossed three countries.”

Naturally, Luria did not have a ticket for a flight from Vienna, nor did he have any possibility of booking one. “I didn’t have a sim card because I passed through several countries, and I couldn’t communicate with anyone. I just blindly went to the counter, approached the El-Al security officer, showed him the draft summons from my commander, and he let me on a flight without a ticket or a seat. He truly did everything he could to help. I set out on an adventure. I didn’t think it would end this way. On the plane I met other reserve soldiers who were in the same boat as me.”

He landed in Israel in the early hours of Monday morning and hitched the last ride of his journey, from the airport to his Ramat Gan home, where he packed up and drove off to the base. “My guys went through two very complex days because I wasn’t there. By the time I made it they did most of the work themselves, and they did a great job. It left me feeling like I had people I could trust,” he says. That same day his unit made it to the northern border, under the threat of another front opening from the north. They stayed there for almost six months. “I spend the entire first semester on reserve duty. I got special permission to take most of the classes remotely, and was able to complete about half of that semester’s duties.”

Luria completed his tour in early May, and returned to Bar-Ilan for the second semester. The university, he says, is trying to make his life easier and come up with solutions. “I didn’t take any test this semester, I mainly did assignments, and I feel like there’s a gap. At the end of the day, no matter how much help the university offers – these are things I need to study. I feel like what I did borders on the impossible, that this is an extremely complicated situation. Despite everything, I’m glad I was able to do some of it, and hope I can bridge the gap during this semester.”