Hostage

If Chapters 10-12 focus on the Hamas captors’ coercion of Sharabi through scripts and spectacle, Chapters 13-14 show what happens when those scripts fall away and the body must begin learning how to exist again. Sharabi describes release not as an emotional breakthrough but as a cautiously managed process—rides, rooms, personnel, instructions—that feels clinical and strange. This freedom is marked by procedure. By lingering on the logistics, the memoir signals that release is not freedom from control, but a transition into another structured environment, one that replaces threat with supervision while still directing movement and choice.

Sharabi’s first sustained encounter with himself emphasizes how reintegration begins in the body before it becomes emotional or symbolic. When he writes, “For the first time, after so long, I see myself in the mirror” (147), his reaction registers as both factual and disorienting. The mirror provides a moment of reckoning, shifting his attention from the overwhelming events to the physical cost of his survival. The plain, declarative phrasing keeps the shock understated, allowing the reader to feel the weight of recognition without interpretive guidance. In this way, the memoir extends the theme of Testimony as an Ethical Obligation, treating self-perception as something to be recorded honestly, even if it presents an uncomfortable truth.

Acts of cleansing recur as attempts to mark distance from captivity without claiming that such distance can be completed. Sharabi’s repeated showering and scrubbing with hot water and soap externalize his psychological and emotional need to remove all vestiges of his captivity experience. His clean clothes stand in for a sense of control slowly returning to the body. Recovery, the text suggests, arrives through small physical acts that restore agency one moment at a time. At the same time, the surrounding infrastructure of care—officers, therapists, prepared spaces—echoes earlier systems that also managed his movements. The difference is intention, raising a question that lingers beneath the narrative: How does it feel to be guided again, even when guidance is meant to protect rather than dominate?

Grief enters this system abruptly when Osnat whispers, “They were murdered” (147). Sharabi does not expand on the moment or interpret it for the reader, allowing the words to carry their full weight. This choice reflects the memoir’s broader commitment to factual reporting over editorialization, particularly at moments of maximum loss.

Even after release, Sharabi returns to a familiar role he developed during imprisonment: attending to others. His conversations with family and his calls on behalf of fellow hostages extend the patterns of Caretaking as Resistance that helped him and the others survive. Witnessing now becomes a form of caretaking, as he offers reassurance, continuity, and recognition to those still waiting. The need for this kind of caretaking—providing reliable information as well as emotional reassurance—shows that his mindset as a survivor did not change on his release: It is cemented as part of his identity.

Chapter 14 brings the memoir’s final movement into focus through a confrontation of loss. The calm of the cemetery—open fields, blue sky, birdsong—does not soften his grief so much as give it space. Sharabi’s perception narrows completely, culminating in the line “Only Yahel, Noiya, and Lianne exist” (151). Its simplicity mirrors how trauma collapses the world to what cannot be negotiated or explained. The closing declaration—“This here is rock bottom. / I’ve seen it. I’ve touched it. / Now, life” (151)—does not offer a resolution or consolation. Instead, it marks a decision: to continue living without denying what has been fully faced.