When We See You Again

Rachel Goldberg-Polin's memoir is a raw, unmediated account of losing her twenty-three-year-old son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and executed 328 days later in a tunnel beneath Gaza. Written without temporal distance, the book moves between reconstruction of the family's history, the frantic months of advocacy to save Hersh, and the fractured landscape of grief that follows his death.

Rachel opens with a detailed catalog of Hersh's physical features, habits, and mannerisms: his narrow shoulders, raspy voice, and the way he always carried her bag without being asked. She includes a message Hersh sent his parents just before Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement) in 2023, expressing gratitude and a desire for independence, along with her response blessing him with "a good, long and beautiful life."

The memoir traces Rachel's journey from a non-observant Jewish childhood in Chicago to deepening Orthodox observance. She attended Brandeis University and studied at Pardes, a Jewish learning institute in Jerusalem, where she reconnected with Jon Polin, a boy from her high school. They married in January 1997, lived in California and Virginia, and moved to Jerusalem in 2008. Hersh was born in October 2000, followed by daughters Leebie and Orly. Over the years, Hersh became a devoted soccer fan, served in the Israeli army as a combat medic, and planned a two-year trip around the world. In the summer of 2023, he returned from a solo trip to European music festivals radiating happiness, on the verge of adventure.

Rachel reconstructs the family's last days through text messages and memory. On October 6, three days after Hersh's 23rd birthday, he returned home for Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath) dinner at a friend's house, where Jon and Rachel blessed all three children. At 11:00 PM, Hersh kissed his parents and said, "Love you, see you tomorrow." He left to meet his best friend, Aner Shapiro, and drive south to the Nova Music Festival. Rachel invokes Viktor Frankl's parable of Death in Tehran, in which a servant flees to a distant city only to find Death waiting, and applies it to Hersh's trajectory that night.

The next morning, sirens sounded across Israel. Rachel found two WhatsApp messages from Hersh, both sent at 8:11 AM: "I love you guys" and "I'm sorry." She called repeatedly with no answer. Through social media and survivor testimony, the family pieced together what happened: Terrorists had attacked the festival and the surrounding region, killing over 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 hostages from 28 countries. After a grenade blew off Hersh's dominant left forearm, he was loaded onto a pickup truck and driven into Gaza.

What follows is 330 days of relentless advocacy. Rachel and Jon launched a media campaign to publicize Hersh's captivity, traveling to the United Nations, Washington, Rome to meet the Pope, Geneva, and Davos. On Day 201, a Hamas propaganda video showed Hersh alive, waving the stump of his left arm. At Passover, the family wept through the seder, the ritual meal retelling the Israelites' exodus from slavery, while Hersh remained captive underground. On Day 320, Rachel and Jon spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where the arena chanted "Bring Them Home."

On Day 328, hostage families gathered at the Gaza border to shout through loudspeakers to their loved ones underground. Rachel climbed a wooden platform and screamed to Hersh through a microphone. Only hours after the families went home, Hamas executed Hersh and five other hostages: Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, and Alex Lobanov.

On Night 330, Rachel learned of Hersh's death. Jon received a call reporting rumors of six bodies found in a tunnel under Rafah. When Rachel heard Carmel Gat's name, she knew it was true: Their intelligence officer had confirmed Hersh was being held with a forty-year-old woman from a kibbutz (a communal Israeli village), and Carmel matched that description. At 4:00 AM, military officials arrived. Rachel was frozen. She and Jon bought three adjacent graves so that they would one day flank their son.

Thousands lined the 6.2-mile route to the cemetery, holding posters and signs reading "sorry." Rachel walked behind the van carrying Hersh's body, repeating, "I love you my sweet boy. You are home." Hersh's last words on October 7 were "I'm sorry," and Rachel's last words at the graveside were also "I'm sorry," for not saving him. During shiva (the seven-day Jewish mourning period), Jon revealed he had been asked to identify Hersh's body before the funeral. Rachel said she might never have believed it was real without his confirmation. Jon replied, "I saw him, and I still don't believe it."

In the months that follow, Rachel confronts grief that does not diminish, framing it through the myth of Sisyphus as a burden that must nonetheless be carried daily. She shares a journal entry Hersh wrote at age 15, which uses the word "tunnel" 12 times: "Every so often you arrive at a tunnel and you enter the unknown and you don't know when you will get out. . . . What is certain is there is an end." The family finds the entry prophetic.

On Day 496, Rachel and Jon met Or Levy, a freed hostage who had spent time with Hersh in a tunnel during the first hostage deal in November 2023. Or reveals that Hersh went three days without treatment until fellow hostage Ori Danino forced the captors to intervene; both were shackled for seven weeks. Hersh convinced his captors to bring him Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo, which he read repeatedly. He quoted Viktor Frankl: "He who has a WHY can bear any how," urging everyone to identify their reason for living. Most critically, Or tells Rachel that Hersh heard her voice on a news broadcast and knew his parents were fighting for him.

Rachel describes other encounters with Hersh in what she calls "The After," her term for life after his death: classified footage showing him alive in the tunnels; Guy, a soldier from Hersh's army unit, who has the words LIGHT, LOVE, PEACE from Hersh's headstone tattooed on his body; and two young Germans, Leonard and Alex, who visit his grave to thank Hersh for being their matchmaker. She shares five dreams, the last of which features five-year-old Hersh saying one word: "Remember."

On Day 738, the final 20 living hostages were released. Rachel felt overwhelming relief rather than the anger journalists expected. She reframes grief not as an enemy but as "a badge of the love that continues to grow after its recipient is no longer here," arguing that wanting the bereaved to overcome grief is misguided, because love did not die, only the person loved.

In the final chapter, Rachel writes directly to Hersh about the reunion she believes awaits in The World to Come, the Jewish concept of the afterlife. She accepts his purpose as her own: "Your WHY was to make Dada and me pick up your WHY and keep running forward," using Hersh's name for his father. Each night she says, "Another day closer until I see you again." In an afterword, Jon writes to Hersh about the Priestly Blessing, a synagogue ritual in which fathers cover their sons under a prayer shawl, which they shared over a thousand times. Now Jon stands alone. He closes with, "May Hersh's memory be a revolution . . . for good!"