Mother of Oct. 7 captive executed by Hamas details agonizing moments of ‘son’s last day:’ ‘Howled like a wounded animal’
For 328 days, Rachel Goldberg-Polin couldn’t bring herself to visit the last place where her son knew freedom.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, his arm blown off by a grenade, was abducted from the Nova music festival in South Israel’s Negev desert during the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.
“I initially said, ‘No, I don’t want to go there,’” his mother, whose book, “When We See You Again” (Random House), is out now, told The Post. “It was just excruciating.”
But on Aug. 30, 2024, the American-Israeli pushed herself despite feeling “physically, mentally and spiritually” sick.
Surrounded by other hostage families, she climbed onto a platform — what she calls the “gallows” — and with a megaphone directed toward Gaza, Rachel yelled out the name of her 23-year-old son, a noise she has compared to that of a “wounded animal.”
“When I screamed Hersh’s name, there was a cameraman in front of me who burst into tears,” Rachel told The Post.
The idea was to be loud enough that Hersh, buried alive deep in the tunnels on the other side of the Gaza border, might hear.
She didn’t know it would be his last day alive.
Only hours later, her beloved boy would be executed along with others who came to be known as the “Beautiful Six.” Riddled with six bullets, Hersh was shot at such close range that his hair was dyed with gunpowder.
“I think it is providence,” Rachel told The Post about the timing of his passing. “I would have felt so terrible had I not gone and found out that he was killed because maybe he heard me … I think he heard me.”
Now, the numbered pieces of masking tape that she dutifully wore to mark each passing day that the hostages were gone have been gathered into a ball — one she can’t bring herself to throw away — in her son’s old bedroom at the family’s home in Jerusalem.
On his nightstand is the Dalai Lama’s “The Art of Happiness,” forever bookmarked in chapter 6.
Normally, her floppy-haired, curious, book-loving son was never without a book. But on the night of Oct. 6, 2023, when he left home with his best friend, Aner Shapira, he told his mom he was leaving his current book at home because, “I’m only going for one night.”
Both Rachel, an educator, and her husband, Jon, an entrepreneur, were originally from Chicago and had moved their family to Berkeley — where Hersh was born in 2000 — and Richmond, Va., before immigrating to Israel in 2008. (The couple also share daughters Leebie, now 22, and Orly, 20.)
When his parents broached moving to Jerusalem and changing his name to make it easier for Israelis to pronounce, 7-year-old Hersh “said with conviction, ‘I’m Hersh and the Israelis will deal with it,’” Goldberg-Polin writes.
Having only finished his IDF service six months before he was kidnapped, Hersh was waiting tables and working as a medic while living at home to save up for his “big trip:” a one-way ticket to India, scheduled for December 2023.
Rachel doesn’t normally use her phone on Shabbat. But the morning of the attack, she opened it to find two texts from Hersh: one that read “I love you,” immediately followed by “I’m sorry.”
“My throat fell on the floor,” she writes.
“Everything from there goes to fragments of what I remember. For the next 330 days,” she writes.
The early-morning, cross-border attack, starting at 6:29 a.m., had sent Hersh, Shapira and more than two dozen other young adults to take refuge in a nearby tiny roadside bomb shelter near the festival. Hamas fighters lobbed grenade after grenade at the shelter. One blew off Hersh’s left arm, leaving him with jagged bone sticking out.
Shapira heroically managed to throw seven of the devices away from the group before an eighth exploded in his hand, killing him.
Hersh was tossed into the back of a truck, along with three other wounded men, by terrorists and whisked away to tunnels 66 feet under the streets of Gaza.
After nearly bleeding to death and receiving no medical treatment for three days, Hersh managed to recover against all odds.
Freed hostages later told his family how this young man, who had lost his arm and nearly lost his life, managed to inspire them with optimism and wisdom.
He adopted a mantra: “He who has a ‘why’ can bear any ‘how,’” a riff on a quote from Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
Fellow hostage Or Levy later told Rachel that Hersh repeated that line to everyone — whether they were dealing with pain from torture, starvation or just the depravation of missing their loved ones and freedom — in the tunnels.
“You have a son — get home to your son,” Hersh said to new dad Levy, who was released after 491 days in captivity. Today, he bears a tattoo with Hersh’s mantra. When his young son asked what it means, Levy told him simply: “It means you.”
When Rachel dared to ask Levy what Hersh’s “why” was, he looked at her like she was crazy, she told The Post. “It was you,” he said.
Rachel writes how, after Oct. 7, “I never got my period again. My body died.” Later, she said, “I buried my son and myself.”
Since Hersh’s death, her grief remains “steadfast, in the worst way. It sits in the fluorescently lit waiting room filled with vinyl couches and outdated magazines. With a dusty plastic plant in the corner that somehow has an errant fake leaf on the floor next to it.”
Still, Rachel told The Post, she knows it is her own “why.”
“It’s obvious to me that it is tied to [the tragedy],” she said. “I feel that grief is a privilege because it means that you love someone who’s not here anymore.”
Throughout the ordeal of the hostages’ captivity, Rachel had her own words to live by: “Hope is mandatory.” Even after everything, she said, “It’s a commandment to be hopeful.”