When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, two and a half years ago, the violence set off a war that would cost countless lives on both sides. Among the many parents left bereft was Rachel Goldberg-Polin, an American‑Israeli who moved to Jerusalem with her husband Jon and their three children 18 years earlier. Their only son, Hersh, was badly wounded and taken captive at the Nova music festival near the Gaza border. What began as a campaign to bring him and the other hostages home became, for Rachel and Jon, a long public fight and then, ultimately, the private work of learning how to live after their child’s death.
On the morning of October 7, Rachel received two texts from Hersh from inside a crowded shelter: first, “I love you,” then, “I’m sorry.” Those messages, she says, marked a before and after in her life. Survivors later described how Hamas fighters stormed parts of the festival, killing and wounding hundreds. In one shelter Hersh and his friend Aner Shapira tried to resist; witnesses said Aner threw grenades until he was killed and others took his place. Sixteen people who had sheltered together were slain; Hersh survived the initial attack but was seriously injured by a grenade blast.
Witness video recovered by Israeli forces showed Hersh with his left forearm grievously damaged as he was forced into a pickup truck and driven into Gaza. That footage made it clear to Rachel and Jon that their son had been taken alive. The knowledge sustained them and mobilized them to plead publicly for the hostages’ release. Rachel became a visible face of the hostage families, meeting world leaders, addressing the media and carrying a strip of tape with the number of days since the abductions written on it, a daily marker of their vigil.
For months, the couple alternated between advocacy and agony. On the 201st day of captivity, Hamas released a propaganda video that showed Hersh’s stump, fueling both outrage and renewed urgency in the families’ campaign. On the 328th day, Rachel and Jon joined other families to shout the hostages’ names toward Gaza from a microphone. Unknown to them then, that was the same day Hersh was executed in an underground tunnel in Rafah; Israeli forces later recovered his body with multiple gunshot wounds.
The official discovery came on August 31, 2024, when soldiers found Hersh and five other hostages killed in a tunnel. When his body returned to Israel, thousands stood in the streets for his funeral. Rachel and Jon continued campaigning for the remaining hostages and pressing for information about the last year of their son’s life.
In February 2025, a breakthrough arrived when Hamas released three captives, including a man named Or Levy. Or had spent several days with Hersh in the tunnel and would become the source of details that brought both pain and consolation. He told the family that despite his wounds, Hersh laughed, smiled and sustained others with a mantra he had adopted from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: “He who has a why can bear any how.” That line became a shared refrain among the prisoners and, after Or’s return, a tattoo on his arm.
Or also relayed that Hersh had heard Rachel’s voice on the news after she spoke to U.S. officials. For Rachel, who had often told the world about her son, the knowledge that he heard her was a small mercy: proof that her words had reached him in captivity.
Those fragments—the messages, the video, Or’s testimony—became the threads from which Rachel has been trying to stitch a life. She writes about grief in her new book, When We See You Again, released this week. Rather than depicting loss as something to be overcome by a steady arc of healing, she argues that grief is persistent and circular: chronic, present and always part of living. At times, she has come to see grief not only as suffering but as a continuing sign of love, a “precious badge” worn for the person who has died.
Even after Hersh’s death, Rachel and Jon remained determined to bring home the remaining captives. When the last hostage’s body was returned this past January—843 days after October 7—their family took down the strips of tape they had worn and posted in their home. They kept Hersh’s room untouched, as he left it, a private memorial where the ordinary objects of a young life continue to mark an absence.
Rachel is candid about the sense of failure that haunts her. She and Jon did everything in the public eye to secure the hostages’ freedom, and they speak openly about the lingering question of whether more could have been done. Yet she also acknowledges that they did everything they could; sometimes effort—even total effort—is not enough to change the outcome.
What has sustained Rachel, she says, are the small proofs that reach across the abyss: the texts he sent, the witnesses who confirmed he had been alive for part of his captivity, the man who remembered his laughter and the phrase he repeated. Those details have shaped how she talks about meaning now: not as a promise of recovery, but as a reason to keep going. She asks, and asks others, what will be their “why.”
Rachel’s story is one of public grief and private reckoning: a mother transformed from advocate into mourner, searching for a way to carry on. She honors the memory of her son by keeping his presence close and by continuing to press for the truth about what happened to all the hostages. Her account reminds us that when wars take children, the consequences last long after headlines fade—resonating in bedrooms kept as shrines, in conversations with survivors, and in the daily work of learning to live with a loss that does not end.