ANAT FROM Tel Aviv surprised her elderly mother earlier this week by buying her a new mattress and throwing out the old one.
A day later, Anat, who refused to give her full name, remembered that she had stashed $1 million in the discarded mattress.
“I woke up in the morning screaming, when it hit me what happened,” she said.
Releasing her error, she took a taxi to the main Tel Aviv rubbish tip and from there hitched a lift with a dustbin van to one of the main landfill sites in the south of the country, where garbage from central Israel is taken.
Mati Pe’er, the garbage site manager, told Israel’s Channel Two television news how the woman crawled over the site on her hands and knees searching frantically and repeating tearfully, “15 years of my life are in this mattress”.
Workers at the site and similar garbage dumps in the south of Israel joined the search for the white mattress patterned with red flowers, after Anat offered them one-third of the findings.
But Mr Pe’er, noting that 2,500 tonnes of rubbish arrive at the site every day, including hundreds of discarded mattresses, was not optimistic of a fairytale outcome.
“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack and we don’t even know which dump the mattress was taken to.” Anat explained she had stashed her life savings in the mattress. “I’ve been traumatised by banks in the past, banks have been very unfriendly to me.”
She did not elaborate.
Extra security guards were stationed at the rubbish tips to stop people searching for the mattress.
As hopes faded of retrieving her life-savings, Anat took a philosophical approach. “People have to take everything in proportion and thank God for the good and the bad,” she said.