Rachel Goldberg-Polin has kept her son’s bedroom unchanged since he was taken — everything the way he left it, except for a ball of tape. After Oct. 7, 2023, she began writing the number of days since Hersh and the roughly 250 others were abducted on strips of tape, wearing one each day and hanging them on her wall at night. In January, when the bodies of the remaining hostages were returned to Israel, she removed the strips. They now sit in a wadded ball on a shelf in his room.
When she looks at that ball, Rachel said, she sees more than paper: she sees “symbols of failure.” She and her husband, Jon, poured themselves into the campaign to bring Hersh and the other hostages home — meeting world leaders, speaking repeatedly in media interviews and joining other families in urgent public appeals — but the returns were not what they wanted. “What we were fighting for did happen,” she said, reflecting on the recent returns. “We wanted them home alive. We wanted them alive.” Even so, she added, the outcome makes her feel as if she fell short. “Sometimes 100% is not enough,” she said.
Hersh, the couple’s only son, was at the Nova Music Festival near the Gaza border when Hamas fighters struck, killing hundreds and injuring many more. That morning Rachel turned on her phone after air-raid sirens and found two messages from her son: first, “I love you,” then, “I’m sorry.” He sent them from inside a crowded bomb shelter where more than two dozen people had taken refuge, including his close friend Aner Shapira.
Survivors later described fighters hurling grenades into the shelter. Shapira picked up and threw back several grenades before he was killed. Some people in the shelter hid under bodies to survive; others were taken. Hersh was severely wounded by a grenade and forced out of the shelter, loaded into a pickup truck and driven into Gaza with three other captives.
A few days after the attack, on Oct. 16, Rachel and Jon appeared on television with Anderson Cooper. Cooper recognized footage he had previously seen — video from a Hamas operative’s phone that showed a wounded Hersh being put into a truck, his left forearm badly injured. Cooper called the family after the interview to tell them about that clip. For Rachel, confirmation that he had been taken alive and had been able to walk on his own for at least a time provided a hard, small consolation.
The Goldberg-Polins joined other relatives in tireless advocacy for the 251 hostages. Rachel traveled, spoke to political and religious leaders and granted hundreds of interviews. In public pleas and private prayers she kept repeating the same urgings to her son: stay strong, survive, hold on. Those words were meant both for Hersh and for herself, an anchor during moments when the pain felt physically overwhelming. “There were times when I would just get seized with emotional and psychological and physical pain,” she said, describing collapses of exhaustion and fear and her husband’s embrace as the only refuge.
Hope flickered at times. On the 201st day of captivity, Hamas released a propaganda video showing Hersh — a brief, stark reminder that he remained alive and visible. That footage gave the family a surge of energy to keep pushing for his release.
On the 328th day, Rachel and Jon stood with other families and screamed their loved ones’ names into a microphone toward Gaza. They did not then know that Hersh had been killed that same day. Months later, on Aug. 31, 2024, his body and those of several other executed captives were discovered in an underground tunnel in Rafah. He had been shot multiple times at close range.
After his death, the Goldberg-Polins kept advocating for hostages still missing and searched for information about their son’s final year. In February 2025, Israeli hostage Or Levy — released earlier — spoke with them and reported having spent time in a tunnel with Hersh. Levy said Hersh had not been broken: he laughed and smiled, and he sustained himself by repeating a phrase from Viktor Frankl — “He who has a why can bear any how.” Levy had even tattooed the line on his arm. When Levy’s young son asked what the phrase meant, Levy answered simply: “You.” He told the Goldberg-Polins that Rachel had been Hersh’s “why.”
Levy also said Hersh knew his mother was fighting publicly for him; he heard Rachel’s voice on the news after she spoke with the U.S. secretary of state. That knowledge, Rachel said, felt like a lifeline — proof that their efforts reached him. “We are nobodies,” she said, yet the idea that he knew they were trying gave meaning to what they did, even now.
Rachel is now navigating life after her son’s death, trying to find a path forward and to name a reason to keep going. She has written about the experience in a new book, When We See You Again, which is being published this week. In it she describes grief not as a linear progression that eases with time but as a chronic, constant presence — gnawing and circular. At the same time, she writes, the pain is also a “precious badge of love,” a testament to a love that endures and even grows after loss. She is working to discover what her “why” will be now, as she lives with the ache and the memory of her son.