The Lost Boys and Girls of October 7

On the Nova massacre

Hersh didn’t tell his mother he was going to the party on the evening of October 6th. After Shabbat dinner, he explained his plans for the evening in roundabout fashion. Years before, he had announced that he wouldn’t be keeping Shabbat the way the family kept Shabbat. He would go with them to synagogue, he would go to dinner, but after dinner, his time was his own. That night, he explained that he was “going to go do something fun” with his best friend Aner, and he’d brought a backpack along to dinner because they planned to “go camp somewhere.”

Hersh was born and initially raised in Berkeley, then moved to Israel with his family at age 8. His politics were about what you would expect in an idealistic 20-something who grew up in Berkeley. His bedroom was adorned with leftist chic—a Che poster, a raised black fist, artwork with the message, “JERUSALEM IS EVERYONE’S” in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. He helped out with an organized effort to bring Israeli and Palestinian children together through soccer.

At 11 PM, he kissed his mother and father goodbye. Turning back in the doorway, he said, “I love you. See you tomorrow.”

Some 4,000 young people descended on the site of the Nova music festival that night. By the night of October 7th, about 1 in 9 of them would be dead, with 40 more taken hostage. Hersh was among the hostages. Some of them were released. Some never came home. Some will never come home.

Hersh will never come home.

The documentary We Will Dance Again tells the story of that night through the eyes of its survivors. It is woven from their firsthand accounts (most in Hebrew, a couple in English), footage from their own phones, and, at critical moments, footage from Hamas body cameras. In the words of filmmaker Yariv Mozer, “This is true. Look at it. I’m not touching it. I’m just placing it in front of you for you to judge by yourself.”

Hersh and his friends were typical of the 20-somethings congregating on the dance floor: free-spirited, a little rebellious, uninhibited, chasing a physical and emotional high. If you asked them whether they were religious, most of them probably would have said, in the usual way, that they were “spiritual.” Some, like Hersh, came from religious families, which could make things awkward at home. Carpooling on the way there, they asked each other how they’d extracted themselves from the Shabbat table that night. “We could all relate,” laughs Halely, 21. Kfir, 23, a zany redhead, comes from “a decent Polish family.” When he got to the party, he put half of an ecstasy pill on his tongue and sighed to himself, “Today is a holiday.” Then he thought, “When my mom hears this, she’s gonna freak out.”

“Kfir” means “lion cub” in Hebrew. His T-shirt says “ROARIN’,” a subtle allusion to this. Kfir is also the name of the youngest hostage, a baby boy famously taken with his toddler brother and their mother. Their hair, like 23-year-old Kfir’s, was also carrot orange. Like Hersh, they never came home. The documentary briefly shows the footage of them being taken, clinging to each other.

Lali, 20, has been going to festivals and raves since her mother took her as a child. She always loved to hang out in “her spot,” close to the giant speaker. That night, she was planning to work Nova as a bartender, then decided she just wanted to be an attendee and enjoy herself. “There’s no place more full of love than a trance party,” she says dreamily.

Noam, 27, an artist and model with hair flowing down in ringlets, set up a table and got busy making live paintings. She was there with her boyfriend, David. They were regulars in the rave scene, where they’d fallen in love at first sight. They dreamed of the family they would build together someday.

Some attendees had children already. Elinor, 24, was a single mom stealing a night away from her adored 8-year-old son. Moran, 39, was a wife and mother of three. Then there was Erick Peretz and his daughter Ruth, under his watchful eye in a wheelchair bedecked with glowing lights. Ruth had cerebral palsy. Her wheelchair caught Kfir’s eye as the waves of euphoria started washing over him. He walked over to say hi and told Erick what a great dad he was.

It took time to find Ruth and Erick’s bodies when it was all over. They were eventually discovered in an embrace.

Two people you couldn’t miss at a party like this were Shani, 22, a tall girl with dreads, and Keshet, 21, described as a “people magnet,” who looked like some blond angel. Wherever they were, the party was alive. They could have passed for teenagers.

Shani’s broken body would be paraded around Gaza in some of the first footage of the war, surrounded by cheering men. Keshet’s body was recovered at the camp site. No one witnessed his death. All that remains is his voice on an emergency call, begging for an ambulance that never came. In a notebook someone found in his room later, he had written, “The day that I begin my journey in the world to come, I will be ready for it. I won’t jump toward it, but I will be ready.”

When the rockets first started, just as the sun was coming up and the psychedelics were peaking, some people thought they were fireworks. But then the music stopped, and they were told to go home. The party was over.

Well, some of them thought, there’s over and there’s over. Some lived near the border, where “a day with rockets” was another way of saying “Saturday.” Granted, there were an awful lot of rockets this time, but still. What was the rush? Ben, 24, ambled back to where he’d left his stuff and pulled out his phone to take a video. “Rockets from Gaza, everyone evacuates. I’m chilling.” Somewhere someone was playing a little Bob Marley. Someone else stumbled around filming, giggling, “The drugs are kicking in, I swear to God.”

Cars slowly pulled out and began erratically threading their way to the exit, many piloted by young drivers under the influence of who knows how many substances. Those who had dawdled found themselves stuck in a long line. Eventually, Noam and David got out, grabbed a blanket and chilled under a tree. “Fireworks,” she croons in a phone video she took, “your sky is thirsty for fireworks.”

As they wandered around, suddenly they saw a man running towards them. “Run!” he screamed, “Run now, or you’re finished!” That was when they heard the rat-tat-tat-tat.

It is around this point in the story that the documentary switches to the Hamas footage. We watch as the bulldozer destroys the fence, as the young men rev up their motorcycles. “Go out and get martyred!” says one. “Allahu Akbar!” say others.

They begin to divide and conquer. At the camp, some walk past the porta-potties and begin casually shooting them out. On the road, one walks toward a car, holds up his hand to make it slow down, then shoots through the windshield. We see dashcam footage, possibly from that very car, possibly another, as the vehicle drifts off course and stops. Then we hear one more shot.

Several swarm around another shot-up car. “They’re all dead,” one says. “I checked.”

The camera quickly passes by a little scene with a young man begging on his knees, hands bound. “Another dog!” “Damn dogs!” we hear someone shout in another scene. We hear the word over and over.

Lali, the girl who’d gone to raves all her life, remembers that every time there was gunfire, the birds would circle above the trees. So that was how she knew where the terrorists were coming from. Where the birds were circling above the trees.

Armed bikers approached as she was on the phone. The police call catches her screaming the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one! Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God…”

We hear several calls like this, voices pleading for someone to send the police, send the army, send anyone.

Some of the witnesses, like Noam and David, never got off the camp site. Elinor, the single mother, took shelter in a giant cooler. “I think you’re smarter than us,” others around her had said when she suggested the idea. “You should get in.” Inside, she could hear them dying one by one. When the army finally came, she almost didn’t respond. But then, she figured, it was either be shot or be suffocated.

Others managed to escape the traffic jam and hit the road, with no idea what was waiting for them. Kfir, ever the clown, is somehow still able to laugh at the memory of sticking one leg through the window of a full car, flying along half in, half out. Meanwhile, the car carrying Hersh, Aner, Halely, and others stopped at a concrete bomb shelter. This was probably a smart place to be, right?

Phone footage shows this group huddled nervously together. Eitan, 28, gives a vivid blow-by-blow account of what happened next. He remembers how Aner, who was in the military at the time, kept his voice as calm as possible as he let them know there was an attack. He remembers how his stomach sank, as he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that something terrible was about to happen.

When the terrorists came, a young Bedouin man named Osama decided to walk outside and attempt Arabic negotiation. Eitan will say only that they “did terrible things to him,” and then they shot him.

They would throw eight grenades into the shelter, and eight times, Aner threw them back. Eitan had served his military time already. As he watched, he knew it was only a matter of time before someone would have to take Aner’s place. Then the ninth grenade exploded.

When Eitan staggered to his feet, Aner was no longer standing, and Hersh was frantically trying to tie off the stump where his hand had been. Then the tenth grenade landed, the flame getting shorter and shorter. As if in a trance, Eitan picked it up and threw it back. He will tell you that he can’t remember how many times he did this. He remembers only the first one, and the last two. Then blackness. Then waking up in a pile of bodies.

Eitan still struggles to walk without losing his balance. Shrapnel still lives in most of his body, burning his skin. By day, he finds himself crying for no reason. By night, “Sleep has become a mission.”

Back at the camp, David told Noam and others to hide in two industrial garbage cans. Over the next few hours, he would keep climbing back out to go gather more people and guide them back. As Noam crouched down, she could hear the shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” along with the screams of her friend Shani being taken away. Then another girl in the container lifted her head and was spotted. Noam remembers the sound of bullets, then the burning as she realized she was hit. She switches briefly from Hebrew to English as she remembers, perhaps recalling some fragment of a song or a poem she once heard: “Russian roulette, who gets the bullet?” The film then cuts to a wide shot of her, and for the first time we see that she is in a wheelchair.

Noam is not permanently paralyzed. She’s learning to walk again. But David has died, and with him all her dreams.

Yuval and his best friend Tamir, both 23, tried to flee in a car but were forced to abandon it when the driver was killed. As they ran, Yuval dropped to the ground to play dead, thinking this would draw fire away from his friend, only to realize the very opposite was happening. “I thought I was sacrificing myself, then I realize I might have sacrificed him.” They both live to tell the story.

Ben, who had stayed behind to “chill,” found himself flung together with Moran, the 39-year-old wife and mother. A phone video shows him comforting her, asking how many kids she has. She says three, and he says, “They’re gonna see their mom again really soon.” From that moment on, he never leaves her side. At one point, she says she is slowing him down, and he has to leave her. “I won’t hear of it,” he says. “Don’t ever say that again.”

They would both survive. Ben plays a message Moran left for his father, explaining that she owes him her life. As he wraps up his story, he looks to his right and starts laughing. She has come on set to surprise him. They share a hug.

I think of the filmmaker’s simple invitation to the viewer, to look at the unvarnished facts as he’s arranged them here and “judge by yourself.” I think of what Douglas Murray has said about wanting to grab young campus “Free Palestine” protestors by the lapels and shake them, saying, “Don’t you understand? They were just like you! They were just like you!”

Yet, like Douglas writing here, I know that it’s not enough. It never will be:

It seems to be in the nature of many who support the Jewish state to imagine that if we refine our arguments, find a better way of explaining the history, or counter each piece of misinformation, we will be able to change hearts and minds.

But at some stage you have to admit that this tactic has largely failed. We may have the facts on our side, but the facts have become meaningless to so many.

The reasons for this are complicated. I’ve spent years trying to work them out. Maybe on another day I’ll write about it. But not today.

Remembering a friend who bled out in front of him, Tamir says, “I feel like one day I’ll be walking somewhere, and he’ll pop up around the corner like ‘Here I am!’”

If one should bring me this report,

That thou hadst touch’d the land to-day,

And I went down unto the quay,

And found thee lying in the port;

And standing, muffled round with woe,

Should see thy passengers in rank

Come stepping lightly down the plank,

And beckoning unto those they know;

And if along with these should come

The man I held as half-divine;

Should strike a sudden hand in mine,

And ask a thousand things of home;

And I should tell him all my pain,

And how my life had droop’d of late,

And he should sorrow o’er my state

And marvel what possess’d my brain;

And I perceived no touch of change,

No hint of death in all his frame,

But found him all in all the same,

I should not feel it to be strange.