By Anderson Cooper, Aliza Chasan, Katie Brennan, Matt Riley
April 19, 2026 / 7:00 PM EDT / CBS News
Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the grieving mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin — an Israeli-American taken hostage Oct. 7, 2023 and murdered nearly a year later — has kept her son’s room as he left it, with one striking exception: a ball of tape. Each piece of tape bears a number. After her son’s abduction, Rachel began writing the number of days since Hersh and the other roughly 250 hostages were taken on pieces of tape, wearing one each day and placing them on her wall at night. She took them down earlier this year when the bodies of the last hostages were returned to Israel in January; the strips now rest in a ball in Hersh’s room.
When Rachel looks at that ball of tape, she said, she sees “symbols of failure.”
“What we were fighting for did happen. We got all of these people home, not as we wanted. We wanted them home, alive, but they had come home,” she said. Though she and her husband, Jon, fought tirelessly for the return of their son and the other hostages, Rachel said she feels she failed. “Sometimes 100% is not enough,” she added.
October 7 attack
Hersh, the Goldberg-Polins’ only son, was at the Nova Music Festival near the Gaza border when Hamas terrorists attacked, killing 378 people and wounding hundreds more. Rachel, an American who moved to Jerusalem with Jon and their three children 18 years ago, turned on her phone that morning after sirens sounded and found two messages from her son: the first, “I love you”; the second, “I’m sorry.” He had sent them from inside a bomb shelter crowded with more than two dozen people, including his best friend, Aner Shapira.
Survivors say Hamas repeatedly threw hand grenades into the shelter. Shapira picked up and threw back at least 10 grenades before he was killed — one of 16 casualties in that shelter. Some survivors hid under bodies; others were taken hostage, including Hersh. After being severely wounded by a grenade, Hersh was dragged from the shelter, forced into a pickup truck and driven into Gaza with three other hostages.
Fighting for answers and her son’s return
On Oct. 16, 2023, Rachel and Jon spoke with Anderson Cooper on CNN. Survivors had told them Hersh had been kidnapped and that his left hand had been blown off. Cooper recognized a video he’d seen earlier, recovered from a Hamas operative’s phone, showing a wounded Hersh being forced into a truck with the bone of his left forearm exposed. Cooper called the family after the interview to tell them about the footage.
“It made us know that he was taken alive, that he walked on his own two feet,” Rachel said.
The family joined other relatives in relentless advocacy for the 251 hostages. Rachel met with the pope and world leaders and gave hundreds of interviews. She repeatedly told Hersh, in public pleas and private prayers, “I love you. Stay strong. Survive.” The refrain was for him and a command to herself during moments of overwhelming pain. “There were times when I would just get seized with emotional and psychological and physical pain,” she said. “And I would keel over onto Jon and I would just say, ‘How much longer? How much longer? How much longer?'”
On day 201 of captivity, Hamas released a propaganda video of Hersh — a moment that renewed the family’s hope. “That gave us another bolt of adrenaline. Keep going, keep going, this child needs you,” Rachel said.
The day Hersh died
On day 328, Rachel and Jon joined other hostage families in screaming their loved ones’ names into a microphone toward Gaza. Unknown to them then, that was the day Hersh was murdered. Since learning of his death, Rachel has wondered whether her son could somehow have sensed her cries. “I think there are other ways that you can hear your parents screaming for you, even if you don’t hear them,” she said.
Hersh’s body, along with several other executed hostages, was found in an underground tunnel in Rafah on Aug. 31, 2024. He had been shot six times at close range.
Learning about the last year of their son’s life
After Hersh’s death, Rachel and Jon continued advocating for remaining hostages but longed for information about his last year. In February 2025, Hamas released Israeli hostage Or Levy, who had spent time in a tunnel with Hersh. Levy, reunited with his family and learning of his wife’s death in the attack, also learned Hersh had been murdered.
Levy told Rachel and Jon five days after his release that Hersh was not broken in captivity — he laughed, smiled and kept repeating a mantra: “He who has a why can bear any how.” The phrase, from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, had become a life-saving refrain in the tunnel. Levy tattooed the phrase on his arm and said his young son, who doesn’t speak English, asked what it meant; Levy answered, “You.” He told Rachel that she was Hersh’s “why.”
“It was this shocking, life-affirming CPR from beyond, to have Hersh, through Or, telling us, ‘what’s your why going to be, because you can bear this, even this, even losing me, you can do it,'” Rachel said. “Part of what I’m trying so hard to do now is to figure out what is my why.”
Levy also told Rachel that Hersh knew she was fighting for him. While captive, Levy said, Hersh heard Rachel on the news after she spoke to the U.S. secretary of state. “It was like, all the sudden, thank God, first of all, that he heard my voice, and that he knew,” Rachel said. “We are nobodies. We are absolute nobodies. I even say, the equivalent of John Doe in the Jewish world, is Rachel Goldberg. But we tried, so hard. And he knew.”
Reckoning with grief
Today, Rachel is trying to figure out how to live after her child’s death. “And then what’s so fascinating to me is that when they came to tell us that Hersh had been executed, then I realized that those 330 days had been the good part, because he was alive,” she said. “And now I’m in this place, and this is the rest of my life. How do I walk through this place without a piece of me here?”
In her book When We See You Again, out this week, Rachel writes that “the pain is chronic, ever-present, constant. Gnawing. Circular, not linear.” Her understanding of grief has shifted; what once felt unbearable has also become, she says, a “precious badge of love” that testifies to a love that continues to grow even after loss.