Mother of October 7 hostage who was executed unpacks her grief in new memoir
Rachel Goldberg-Polin told Fox News her memoir "When We See You Again" is her answer to the question often posed to those who are bereaved: "How are you?"
Her son Hersh Goldberg-Polin — an American-Israeli citizen — was kidnapped by Hamas during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks while attending the Nova music festival in southern Israel. He was executed about a year later alongside five other hostages, with his remains recovered in Rafah.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin became a hostage advocate, wearing a piece of tape counting the days since her son was taken hostage and campaigning across the world for his release. In one video, she called out to her son from the Israeli side of the border with Gaza, just days before the IDF discovered his body.
About two years later, her book is a way of unpacking her grief, she told Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum Wednesday on "The Story."
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"My soul was buckling from the suffering of having this tragedy happen," she said. "I couldn’t shoulder the weight."
This book, she said, consists of "packages of pain."
"There are days when I break completely," she wrote in the book. "I have cried for an entire day straight."
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She described the feeling as walking along the street with her husband, Jon Polin, and being hit by a massive truck that breaks all her bones.
"It’s very descriptive and very poignant, Rachel," MacCallum said.
"To be honest, I’m not unique… all of us suffer in our lives at some point with loss and grief and mourning and pain and suffering — that is part of the human enterprise, as well as blessings and beauty and joy," Rachel Goldberg-Polin said. "And how we integrate that is going to depend on how much we accept that this is the construct of what happens here."
MacCallum asked whether she found any solace in the stories that the hostages who survived brought back about her son.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin said some of them told her that her son had shared with them a quote from Viktor Frankl, author of the Holocaust memoir "Man’s Search for Meaning," used as a mantra during his time in concentration camps, drawing on philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:
"When you have a why, when you have a purpose, when you have a goal, you can bear almost any how, you can bare almost any situation."
Rachel Goldberg-Polin said the other hostages took that saying and incorporated it into their lives during captivity.
"We now know that we can bear this why, this how, that we have been dealt. This losing of Hersh, our only son, we can bear it," she said. "Our purpose is to figure out, how do we make a difference in this life that is so messy, with so many opportunities."