In an emotional interview aired on Keshet 12 News on Thursday evening, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a hostage murdered by Hamas who became one of the most visible faces of the hostage crisis, spoke to anchor Yonit Levi about coping with their grief, and revealed new details about their son’s death.
Hersh, who was about 1.80 meter, or six feet tall, “weighed just 53 kilos when we buried him,” said his mother, Rachel Goldberg. He was held with hostages Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, and Alex Lobanov, who were all executed after 11 months in Hamas captivity. On October 7, 2023, Hersh and Yerushalmi, Danino, Sarusi, and Lobanov were all kidnapped from the Supernova Music Festival, while Gat was taken from Kibbutz Be’eri.
“They were found in this airless, completely pitch-black tunnel with no plumbing. They were all emaciated, and bullet-ridden… He had all sorts of wounds all over his body from the 11 months when he had been held captive,” she said. In addition to having his dominant arm blown off by a grenade when he took shelter after fleeing the festival, he had bullet wounds in his remaining hand, his shoulder, and neck, with exit wounds from bullets fired at him at the top of his head, and “then [he] was shot again, from point-blank range, with gunpowder, on the back of his neck, shot through his head a second time,” she said, using her hands to show the path of the bullets.
“Hersh was found on his knees, like he had collapsed, with Eden, beautiful, 24-year-old Eden Yerushalmi’s head was on his lap, or side. It was this horrifying scene, all of them were so thin, all of them were shot multiple times, at close range… Just a nightmare.”
She said that she and her husband, Jon Polin, referred to Hersh and the others with whom he was held as “the beautiful six,” and that as she learned more details about their ordeal they grew more beautiful in her eyes.
Stunning messages from the massacre
The Golberg-Polins, Jerusalem residents who immigrated to Israel from America when Hersh was a young child, were stunned to receive text messages from him on the morning of the massacre in 2023 saying, “I love you” and “I’m sorry,” and then to see video showing that his arm had been blown off by a grenade in the bomb shelter where he had taken shelter, along with his friend, Aner Shapira. A proof of life video was released in April and at the end of August they received the devastating news that Hersh was dead.
During their 11-month struggle to free him alive, they did everything they could to influence decision-makers around the world, including meeting with President Joe Biden and the Pope. Polin, who said they were feeling “terrible” as they coped with their son’s death, said he blamed politicians for what he termed “a lack of urgency” about getting their loved ones released. He recalled that they were told by many politicians on many occasions that the hostages would not be killed because they were seen as “assets.”
Goldberg said, “There was this idea of, ‘Oh, they’re coming home. It might take a while, but they’re coming home.’”
These anguished parents often said, “Hope is mandatory,” and Goldberg worried that their optimism may have been “too infectious, too positive in a dark time…Now that we know how they were found, it is so vastly obvious that there is not one second to waste. We need to move now,” she said.
They expressed frustration with missed opportunities. “I believe strongly there were opportunities to do deals to release hostages,” said Polin. “The rationale for not doing it changed every time.” While the defense ministers and the heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet favored making a deal in July, Polin said that he knew there was a political pressure on the government not to bring the hostages home, including a letter signed by “influential rabbis” whom he said he doubted understood what a deal would truly involve.
He criticized the current Israeli leadership: “I think a lot about prior generations of Israeli decision makers, I think of [former prime minster] Menachem Begin and [spiritual leader] Ovadia Yosef and how his daughter, and two of his sons, have been on record recently saying, ‘Had our father been alive during this, these hostages would be home.’”
They refused requests from political leaders to attend Hersh’s shiva. “We actually said, ‘Please, we don’t want those people here,’” said Goldberg. Quoting Jewish sources, Goldberg said, “When you do a sin intentionally, you bear the punishment for that sin. Don’t come and ask me to forgive you for that sin. I’m not the right address.” She said that her message for the decision makers who chose not to save her son and the other hostages was, “You have 101 chances now. Do it.” She was referring to the remaining 101 hostages remaining in Gaza. “And that’s the tchuva [Hebrew word for penitence].”
They still wear a piece of tape on their shirts with the number of days since the war broke out and the hostages were taken, as they have done throughout the ordeal. Urging people around the world to keep fighting for the release of the remaining hostages, she said that the hostage families had often felt “gaslit” and were made to feel that they were speaking in a “cliched, hysterical way because their person is there…We have tried very hard talking in a world where the only way people communicate is screaming… But sometimes I do wonder, when are we allowed to raise our voice?”
They have often expressed the hope that the shocking execution of Hersh and the others held with him will lead to a positive change, or, as Polin but it in his son's eulogy, "May his memory be a revolution," a play on the Jewish phrase of consolation, "May his memory be a blessing."
Goldberg said that they were happy that so many people felt they had gotten to know Hersh. He was someone “who could have been your son, your brother, your babysitter, your boy next door. And he did feel like that for so many people. He very much is just a regular boy. I call him a boy because he’ll always be my boy.”
Still, she was shocked at the scale of the outpouring of grief and was initially puzzled when a friend said they would need to put a tent outside to accommodate what turned out to be thousands of mourners.
“You can heal and go through life feeling blessed that you had that person when you did have them. And we do feel that,” she said.
“We’re in mourning, we’re suffering, but we are making a choice personally that we are going to live life, we need to do it for ourselves, we need to do it for our daughters, and we need to do it because Hersh would have wanted us to, so we will live life,” said Hersh's father.