Hamas Took Her Son

He will probably bite you. Scientists, ferret breeders, a heavy metal band that rescues baby puffins.

Now, the fate of those hostages is at the center of a deepening war and a deepening crisis in the Middle East and a looming ground invasion into Gaza. Today, a conversation with the mother of one of them.

It's Friday, October 20th.

I called Rachel Goldberg for the first time last Tuesday, three days after the attack on October 7th.

My name is Rachel Goldberg. I'm 53, and I am in Jerusalem.

So my son, Hirsch Goldberg-Polen, is currently missing. He's been missing since he attended the music festival that was in the southern part of Israel.

And he was there Saturday morning when the terrorist event happened there.

We received two text messages from him at 8-11, and that's the last that we've heard of him.

So he was born in Berkeley, and when he was going into second grade, our family moved to Jerusalem. He's super bright, very curious, a voracious reader, and in love with travel. He's had wanderlust since he was a little boy, to the point where he would read atlases, and he'd get to the end, and he'd start over, and get to the end and start over, and he would memorize every country in the world, along with every capital, population, elevation, just obsessed with travel. So for his bar mitzvah, he asked for only atlases, globes, and maps.

And the other thing he's passionate about is music festivals, specifically. And I think he just felt like he was going to a fun music festival here, and it ended in the worst way anybody could imagine.

So, Friday night, we had this nice meal with our family friends, and we kissed him goodbye, and he was in a great mood, and we had had a great time, and that's the last time we saw him. And he and Anar Shapira, his best friend, met up, and they went down south where this festival was, and both of them are unaccounted for.

And even though I don't use my phone on Shabbat, in cases of emergency, of course, you use your phone. And I thought, well, my son is somewhere, and I don't know where, and I'm turning on my phone to make sure he's okay. And when I turned on my phone, two texts came in, both at 8.11.. And the first text said, I love you. And the second text said, I'm sorry.

And immediately I knew something terrible had happened, because, first of all, he would never just randomly write at 8.11 in the morning, I love you. And the I'm sorry immediately to me, I know him, and he knows me so well. And my interpretation instantly was, I'm sorry, because whatever is happening is gonna cause you tremendous pain and tremendous worry. That was my first thought. And as it turns out, he was right.

And then, 10 minutes later, I wrote, I'm leaving my phone on, let me know you're okay. But those were three unanswered, they haven't been answered. So we started, one of my daughters, the older daughter, and I started to feverishly try to figure out, where exactly was he sending this from? And my daughter sent me a video that had been going around from this music festival, with people screaming and you could hear shooting. And she said, is this the festival he's at?

Like, is this where he is? And the truth is, I didn't know. So I took a screenshot of that and I sent it to their other friend. And I asked, I said, do I put an honor here? And he wrote back, yes.

So I immediately knew they were there and we started watching the news. And then, all of a sudden it was pandemonium everywhere. I mean, complete massacres taking place in all these different kibbutzes that are right on the border. I mean, it was complete, it was war.

And so we were frantic and we were in a panic, but his friend had already made a missing poster, that was of her sonaner, and saying, they wrote the thing. Do you have any information? Did you see them? And he had already posted that on all these social media places that I, as a 53-year-old mother, know nothing about. So it was very, very helpful that Yani, their third friend, was doing this.

And it was through that that, a few hours later, probably around noon, that we got a picture from inside of a bomb shelter.

And we could see on the side, sort of midway on the left side, we could see Hirsch in profile and where the door was, and it's just a normal-sized door, we could see honor. At first we were like, oh my gosh, thank God, because this means they weren't killed at the festival, because we already had heard there were scores, if not hundreds of people. We now know it's close to 300 people were killed at this festival. And what we now understand from eyewitnesses that we ended up talking to is that Hirsch and Honor and another boy named Yoad, and they had driven down together and they got in the car to drive away. And then the sirens started going off, which meant there were more incoming rockets from Gaza.

And when rockets are falling, you get off the road and you get into the shelter. So they had stopped the car to get into the shelter and there were five other cars that also pulled over. And it was also people from the music festival, and they all ran in together. They weren't friends, but I mean, they had all just been at this event together. So at first we were so happy that we were like, oh, that's wonderful.

They're in a bomb shelter, they're safe. And in the picture, they don't look panicked. Like there's people's sunglasses on their heads and someone's looking at their phone. They don't look like they're in panic. They look like they're Israeli young people who are hanging out in a bomb shelter.

because yeah, yeah, maybe there's like some sort of siren going off, because maybe something's happening outside. But then we realized when was this taken and why haven't we heard from him? And we were making up all sorts of excuses. Oh, his phone must have died. or when they were running away, he dropped his phone.

So that's why he didn't answer me. What we subsequently found out is that around 8.30,.

the terrorists came to the door of the bomb shelter and apparently started throwing grenades, hand grenades into the shelter, which is like fish in a barrel. You know, there's 30 people smashed in there. Apparently, I don't know, I think someone told me at some point, you know, you usually have 10 to 15 people in those. So you had this massive pack group of people and Aner was closest to the door. He apparently, from all accounts, was the complete hero.

He quickly, as you only from the time of pin on a grenade is cold, you have four and a half seconds until it explodes. And he was picking them up and throwing them back. And they were spraying machine gun fire into there. So it was crazy and horrible. And we know now is many of those young people were killed.

Many were severely, extremely wounded, and a few were wounded, but you know, not horribly. And some of them pretended to be dead. And what we did get eyewitness accounts of is that Hersh's arm below the elbow was blown off. And I think he must've been in complete shock because we heard that he made a tourniquet. He didn't cry out.

He didn't lose consciousness.

Then the terrorists came in and at gunpoint said, everyone who can stand up, stand up and walk out. And six of them walked out, including Hersh. It was four young men and two young women.

They were put on a pickup truck and they were driven off by these terrorists. And that was around nine o'clock. And the police actually let us know that the last time that Hersh's phone was, you know, how they can trace phones. where they were last seen was on the border with Gaza.

Now we have no proof that, you know, maybe someone stole his phone. Maybe, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean anything. The assumption is that they are all, all. six of those kids are kidnapped.

And none of the parents that we've spoken to, of those six kids, none of us have had any sort of word from our children. Sadly, we do have, there was a girl who played dead, who was next to Hersh. And there was a young man who shared a lot of information. And there was another young woman who was much more able to share with us. The girl who was right next to Hersh is so horribly traumatized that it's even hard for her still today.

She can't really speak. So we don't have confirmation, you know, a lot, because there's such a pandemonium still here. So that's, you know, where we are. And what we want now is, first of all, we want to really make sure that Hersh has his arm tended to. He really needs medical treatment immediately, urgently.

And obviously what we really want is we want him to be sitting next to me right now.

Let's talk to the police. Let's talk to the, you know, the government. And then, when we heard that his arm was blown off and we realized he's probably bleeding to death. So, you know what, let's talk to everybody. And that's still where we are, because, you know, no matter how this ends, we need to know that we ran to the end of the earth for him.

We'll be right back.

And the first signal from within Gaza was at 1025.. So he got there earlier than we had thought. I don't know what that tells us, but it's just new information. The other thing that I thought was really interesting is that the young woman who was next to Hirsch, she was able to come to my house and actually talk to me. And she told us something that we hadn't known, which was that when everyone was running into this bomb shelter, that there was also a Bedouin man, who I guess we think he was a guard for the fields across the road, at the kibbutz.

across the road. This Bedouin man ran in with them. And as Hamas was coming closer and they could hear them screaming and shouting, he said to the kids inside, stay in here, don't make any noise. And he went outside and in Arabic, he said to them like, hello, how are you? Salaam alaikum or something.

And he said, oh, don't worry, we're all Muslim here. It's just my family were hiding from the rockets, but we're all Muslim.

He was trying to save them and they beat him. They may have killed him, she didn't know. She just knew she could hear them beating him.

But there was something about that story that made me so happy.

I mean, I hope he's alive, but just the fact that this man tried to save them and may have paid with his life, we don't know. It just gave me hope that maybe there's still a shred of hope in the world that people will do the right thing, even when it's scary.

And she said, and he threw eight out. She said, but three got in. And she said, the damage that three did, she said, even if four had come in, no one would have walked out of there alive.

And we had stood in the back. We didn't wanna take away from this boy's funeral, but we felt we needed to pay our respects. So we came and we went toward the back. We didn't sit up where everybody else was. But when the funeral was over, we wanted to go by and just extend our condolences just to the mom and dad, to let them know that we were there.

And as we got closer to them, his mom had just swooned and they had gotten her a chair. And there was a medic there trying to give her some sort of oxygen or something. And then the father saw us coming. And he said to her, it's Hersh's parents. And she jumped out of her chair.

And the four of us were hugging and sobbing. In Israel, we're not afraid to let it out. Like there's no holding back. And we were sobbing and sobbing and everyone around us was screaming out. It wasn't this like demure tears.

And she started screaming out, he's coming home. He's coming home. And she screamed to everybody, everyone has to pray for Hersh to come home. And part of it is that she loves us and Hersh, and she wants Hersh to come home. And part of it is that she has to feel like on her saved another life.

The only condolence, the only comfort that she can get is that these people walked out because of what he did.

So that was an awful funeral to attend. And also to see all of these graves of these young people, all of them, you know, it looks like beds. Like it just was like heaps, heaps of dirt and flowers, on all these heaps of dirt, fresh dirt. And it was just sickening.

But Hirsch may have died 13 days ago and I don't know about it. He may have died an hour ago. Like he may have died five days ago. He may have died on my birthday last week. I don't know.

and I see these people and these friends and I'm hugging people and I'm very, very close to them and I can smell them and I can see their pores and their skin, but I'm different. There's like a film between us, because I'm not in their world. Like I'm super close, but I'm not in their world. And the only time that I feel that I'm in a world that's familiar to me is when I'm with, last night I went to an event that a few different families of American hostages were meeting at. And when I'm with those people, we all know that parallel universe.

We're all in that place. And this one woman and I, every time we see each other, we hug each other and we feel such a closeness, which is this like sick, grotesque, perverse closeness, but it's that we're both in this same devastating and unknown and unfamiliar universe.

Knowing that there might be so many civilian casualties, knowing that your son is there. How are you seeing this?

And I am hopeful that the innocent people, and I'm not talking only about the, you know, hostages, but there are innocent, you know, 2 million Palestinian people who are not in Hamas, who are also trapped in Gaza. And I hope that it's to a minimum, the agony and suffering is kept to a minimum, but Israel has got to defend itself.

Because I care for anyone who is an innocent civilian who's swept up and being held hostage. And it might be the Palestinian Gazan kid that you spoke to.

Obviously, there's a tremendous amount of pain and agony behind a group of people who want the destruction completely of another people. You know, and I'm not sure how you work through that or how you try to talk to that. So I don't know that there's anything that I can really, you know, say to Hamas. I don't think Hamas has any interest in hearing anything I have to say, but I am really interested in hearing what they have to say. I really am.

You know, like, I want to really understand what's the goal and what, you know, are there options? I don't get it. I would like to get it.

Do you see there being context here? that is important to understand? How do you see that?

And when I see footage of Palestinian children getting killed, I am crying. I am not saying they deserve that. Never, never in my life have I said that. And I pray to God, never in my life will I say that. And so when I hear people saying that, it's concerning.

We're in a frightening place. And I would love for, to see some light on the horizon. But right now, at least where I am, it's very, very dark. And I'm just, you know, running out of time and hoping that I will see my son again alive.

For a teeny tiny molecule in a universe of haystacks. And that molecule is named Hirsch-Goldberg-Pollan. And I want him home with me.

We'll be right back.

Here's what else you should know today. House Republicans, unable to elect a speaker for 16 straight days, engaged in bitter infighting on Thursday about how to move forward. During an emotional private meeting, they were demanding that the U.S. Congress rejected a plan to empower an interim speaker to lead the chamber until the end of the year. That left them with few options.

The Republican nominee for speaker, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, has failed to win two rounds of voting and appears unlikely to win in a third round. Nevertheless, Jordan said that he would push for another vote. And Sidney Powell, a prominent member of Donald Trump's legal team, pleaded guilty on Thursday to trying to overturn Trump's 2020 election loss in Georgia. The guilty plea, which allows Powell to avoid jail time in a criminal trial, requires her to testify against her co-defendants in the case, including, potentially, Trump himself.

Today's episode was produced by Lindsey Garrison, Claire Tennesgetter, and Shannon Lin, with help from Ricky Nowetzki. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Linn with help from Michael Benoit, contains original music by Marian Lozano, Dan Powell, and Rowan Nemesto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Jeffrey Gettleman.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you on Monday.