Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s extended interview 

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0:30Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. When you use Angie for your home projects, you know all your jobs will be done well. Roof repair? Done well. Kitchen sink install? Done well. Deck upgrades? Done well. Electrical upgrade? Done well. Angie's been connecting homeowners with skilled pros for nearly 30 years, so we know the difference between done and done well. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at Angie.com. 60 Minutes Overtime Rachel Goldberg-Polin is an American-Israeli living in Jerusalem whose life was forever changed on October 7, 2023, when her only son Hirsch was taken hostage by Hamas.

1:16Rachel and her husband John worked tirelessly to bring Hirsch and the other hostages home, crossing the globe, meeting with world leaders. They did everything they could to get their son back. After 328 days in captivity, however, Hirsch was executed by Hamas in a tunnel in Gaza. I spoke with Rachel in February about Hirsch, the pain of losing her son, and what she's learned from her grief. This is an extended version of that 60 Minutes conversation. What was Hirsch like? Easy. Easy? The universe really knew what it was doing. when it said, Rachel's going to have one son, so this is the one for her.

2:02I was really blessed. When we met Rachel in Jerusalem, she'd recently finished writing a book called When We See You Again, which comes out this week. You write in the book that Hirsch was on the brink of budding, becoming, and blooming. He was on the cusp of adulthood. Yeah. I had found a note that he had written to us right before the Yom Kippur holiday came in in 2023. He wrote to John and me, that's the day of atonement. That's the one day a year when Jewish people kind of try to do real introspection and self-reflection and think about maybe I have not exactly hit the mark where I wanted to.

2:46and he wrote us this really beautiful short message and he was saying I'm about to become my own adult and thank you for you know being with me on this ride basically. He had a real drive even as a young age of wanting to be independent. Yeah. You were all together the night before the attack. Yeah thankfully. October 6th. Yes it was a Friday night and we walked to synagogue together, John, Hirsch, and my two daughters. Shabbat is the weekly day of rest in the Jewish faith. Right. And you all gather together. You actually gave him a traditional blessing that night. Yes. Every Friday night in many Jewish households, parents bless their children.

3:35And since Hirsch had been born, every Friday night of his life, even when he wasn't home, If he was away for whatever reason, we would call and say, put the phone on your head. And we still do this to our girls. Put the phone on your head. And we would give him the blessing before Shabbat would start. And in person, you put your hands on his head. Yes, put both hands on his head. So we both were able to bless him Friday night. And then we had this beautiful meal with good friends. And Hirsch was regaling everyone about these fun adventures he had just come back from. He had been in Europe on his mini prep trip for nine weeks.

4:14He was going to be taking a year-long adventure around the world starting December 27th. Right. In the summer of 2023, he thought, let me go and see what it's like for, you know, a chunk as a practice run. And he had just come back, and so he was telling us all these fabulous stories. And then right around 11 o 'clock, He leaned forward, he came up behind me and he kissed me right here. And he kissed John. And he hugged our hostess. And I thought, what a good boy. And he turned around in the doorway and he said, I love you, I'll see you tomorrow. And that was 900 and something days ago. And I never saw him again.

5:05That was the end of the before? It was, and I didn't know. And then we were on this odyssey for 330 days straight, 18 to 20 hours a day of trying desperately to save him and the other hostages. And what's so complex for me about that time is that it was so torturous and very difficult to describe what it feels like to know that your child is being tortured, tormented, starved, abused, is maimed. And that's an excruciating form of suffering. And then what's so fascinating to me is that when they came to tell us that Hirsch had been executed, then I realized that those 330 days had been the good part because he was alive.

6:07And now I'm in this place and this is the rest of my life. How do I walk through this place without a piece of me here? Have you figured that out yet? I'm trying to re-understand what it means to be in this world. There are millions of us right now who have buried children. There's nothing unique about me, but it creates light for me to try to give words to the pain. Hirsch and his best friend, Anir Shapira, were at the Nova Music Festival near the Gaza border on the morning of October 7th when Hamas terrorists attacked. They slaughtered 378 people and wounded hundreds more. What do you remember about the morning October 7th?

7:00The siren started and I went and turned on my phone and at 8-11, two messages had come in from her. The first one said, I love you. And the second one said, I'm sorry. And that was it. Everything that had ever happened in my life from the day I was born until that second was over. Hirsch sent those texts from inside this bomb shelter, crammed with more than two dozen people. That's Hirsch against the wall and Aner near the entrance. 29 of them were hiding in this 5-foot-by-8-foot shelter that Hamas came to the doorway and was throwing in hand grenades. Aner was picking them up and throwing them out.

7:45Picking them up and throwing them out. Heroically, and he said to them, if something happens to me, you keep doing this. Keep your eyes open. Honor kind of took control in the bomb shelter and announced himself, said, this is what I'm going to do. If I die, you do this as well. Yes. Hamas came to the doorway when it was just spraying the room with machine gun fire and had thrown in additional hand grenades. What we heard is there was screaming, there was blood, there was dying. there were some survivors who were luckily able to hide underneath the dead bodies and pretend to be dead because they were covered with gore and blood and horrific things.

8:28Was Hersh's hand blown off by a grenade? Yes. He picked up a grenade and we know from survivors that the grenade went off in his hand and blew off his hand. There were four young men who were not able to hide under bodies. They were all wounded, and they were taken outside and put on a pickup truck and driven into Gaza. And that footage we saw for the first time when we talked with you. We spoke on October 16th on CNN, you and John. Our son, by all accounts of the witnesses, had his left arm blown off. When John said that, I realized I'd seen their son being kidnapped. Four days earlier at the Nova festival site, Israeli soldiers showed me this gruesome video recovered from a terrorist cell phone.

9:19That's Hirsch with the bones sticking out of his left forearm, being forced into a pickup truck. As soon as we got off, I said, I need to call you. But I still found...

9:35To this day, I am sorry that that is how you found out that I was the one to tell you that there's this video. But we were so thankful. And it made us know that he was taken alive, that he walked on his own two feet. And we also were really grateful that you did it in such a human way. in this sideways world, when we had the proof that he was kidnapped, that was actually good. There was a thought which ran through your mind, you write, that you would repeat over and over and over throughout the days, a kind of a message to Hirsch. I was always saying, I love you, stay strong, survive. I love you, stay strong, survive.

10:19I love you, stay strong, survive. Was it a command to you as well? Yes, because there were times when I would just get seized with emotional and psychological and physical pain. And I would keel over onto John and I would just say, how much longer, how much longer, how much longer? You would say a prayer every morning for a long time when you woke up and you had a kind of a mantra that you would say, what was it? Well, the prayer that I have said for many, many years, and I still say, I'm grateful to you, creator of the universe, for returning my soul to me. You have tremendous faith in me, which I've always loved because I like the idea that God has faith in us instead of us having faith in God.

11:12So I would say that when I woke up, and then I would say, when Hirsch was still alive, then I would say, hope is mandatory. Hope is mandatory. Hope is mandatory. Hope is mandatory for you in order to be able to get through the day and do what you had to do. Because otherwise, I would probably lie on the floor in a ball. You know, it was so traumatic. It was the most confusing, violent torture that I understand why so many of the families who had loved ones kidnapped couldn't get out of bed, couldn't leave their room, couldn't leave their house. There were plenty in the street. There were plenty doing advocacy, but there were plenty who couldn't function because everyone responds to pain differently.

12:15And this kind of cosmic, mental, psychological, spiritual pain was so enormous. And so I just said, hope is mandatory. And then I would fling the blanket back and propel myself into the day. You likened it to being hit with a semi-truck, an 18-wheeler, but one that not only crushes you and flattens you and breaks all your bones, but also then parks on top of you. Right. So you're rendered paralyzed. There's no movement. And that's how you felt all that time. Yes, the idea that someone would steal my child, blow off his arm, and keep him in a deep, dark tunnel, starving him and torturing him. There's no way to try to digest that, because you shouldn't digest that.

13:13And that was so much of our advocacy, was this is not acceptable. I never want to accept that this is happening. How did you know how to navigate this? How did you know where to go, who to speak to, how to speak at the UN? None of us knew anything. We were all running like crazed maniacs. All of us, every single parent, spouse, child, grandchild, grandparent, best friend, boyfriend, girlfriend. and everyone was just, we were running like mad in whatever way felt that we should be doing in that moment. I mean, we were just trying to speak to anyone at all who had power or influence who could help us.

14:06And it was obvious that there were people who could do stuff and for whatever reason, they were not doing it. I mean, you had not been in many of these rooms before. You had not been meeting with the president of here and there and the ambassador to here and there and this secretary of whatever. Do you feel they let you down? I do, but I also think that we regular people let ourselves down. I think I let Hirsch down. You feel you did? I didn't get him home outside of that bag. And I think that John and I talk a lot about how we kept on trying to stress the urgency. This is urgent. And we could not convince the right people that it was urgent.

15:00Every day, she wore a piece of tape. On it, she'd written the number of days since Hirsch and the other 250 hostages were taken. You decided to start putting the numbers on you. Why? Well, we were doing a lot of media. We were doing between, I think it was like 15 to 20 interviews a day, because we happened to have spoken English. So we were able to do a lot of international media, and the interviews or conversations would always start with them saying, how long has it been since you've seen your son or since you've spoken to your son? It started to feel actually aggressive. They weren't being aggressive, but I was so raw and tender and in so much pain that I found it insulting that they were asking me that.

15:50So I thought, this is going to become my identity. I'm going to change my name every day. And I also felt that for me, it was holding people accountable. And it made an impression, because I remember going to see many different people all over the world and they would say, oh wow, it's day 113. I saw you last on day 66. There were times along the way where you would get proof of life. You would get a word that it had been confirmed that Hirsch had been alive at a certain point. Right. When did you actually see him in a video? So Passover in April of 2024, that was excruciating going to a Passover Seder.

16:36Passover is the holiday that celebrates the freedom from slavery, the freedom from being held in Egypt. and it was impossible. How are we going to have this celebration of freedom when all of these people are still being held? And I got a call from someone at the CIA saying, someone is going to be sending you a video now. And we thought, what are they even talking about? And then someone who we had been in touch with from a country that was sort of involved with all of these negotiations, sent us this video, and it was Hirsch, and I fell back on the couch. I hadn't seen him in six months. His head was shaved.

17:29He looked terrible, and he was speaking in English directly to John, Lebe, Orly, and me. And he was clearly suffering. and we didn't share that video with anyone. That's never been seen. And then, 36 hours later, we were notified by the Israeli intelligence units that there was going to be a video released by Hamas. It was a different video where Hirsch is screaming and moving his arm. On the 201st day, Hamas posted this video of Hirsch. And we see the stump of his arm. It was a propaganda video. Yes. And that gave us another bolt of adrenaline. Keep going, keep going. This child needs you. 11 months after Hirsch was taken, you and other families went to the border with Gaza to scream messages to your loved ones.

18:35Do you remember that day? So that was day 328. They had erected this platform and this very loud sound system right on the border with Gaza and they were inviting families of hostages being held to shout to our loved ones.

18:57So we drove down there and they handed me the microphone and I screamed Hirsch's name.

19:12It's mama.

19:18Hersh. It's day 328. We are all here. All the families of the remaining 107 hostages.

19:36Hirsch, we are working day and night, and we will never stop. You know, I think I gave him the blessing. I think I gave him a blessing that day. May God bless you and keep you. May God shine his face upon you. We ended up finding out he killed him that day. And so I wonder, did he hear me? Do you think he did? I think there are other ways that you can hear your parents screaming for you, even if you don't hear them. When did you find out that he was dead? Saturday morning of day 3.30, I woke up, and I thought, oh my gosh, I just had this horrible dream. And I debated if I should tell John about the dream, because it was bad.

20:30And I told him, I just dreamt I was in a cemetery, and there were these planks, like a deck on the ground, and through two of the planks was a little tiny olive tree growing, and there was a plaque on it, like a death plaque. And I walked over, and the plaque had Hersh's name on it in Hebrew and in English. There were rumors online that six bodies had been found in a tunnel in Rafa and that Hirsch was one of them. John handed me my book of Psalms, which I keep next to my bed, and he said, now it's time to pray. And we started to just say Psalms repetitively, repetitively, repetitively. We stayed up saying Psalms from 9.15 in the evening until 4 o 'clock in the morning when John's phone rang, and I could hear, sitting next to him, the woman who had been assigned to our family on October 7th from military intelligence, Israel intelligence.

21:41She said, we're downstairs. And I knew no one comes at 4 in the morning to your house to tell you great news. In the book you refer to them as messengers of death. Yeah. And the messengers of death came in.

22:05And it was so confusing because when you've been running on adrenaline for so long,

22:17I was completely broken. meaning I didn't cry. I didn't scream. I was broken. I had been running and fighting for so long that I didn't understand how to compute this horrific end. What do you recall about the funeral? I had flashes. I remember driving there and being very confused. I remember... There were thousands of people in the streets. Yeah, there were thousands of people. And I said to the girls, what's happening? You didn't know that they were there. It was, right. And Levy said, read the signs. And every sign had his name or a picture of him or just one word, sorry. Signs just saying sorry, sorry, for six miles from our house until the cemetery.

23:15Do you remember what you said? I don't remember everything I said. I do remember saying, finally, finally, finally, you're free. And when I said that, there was like this roll of... of...

23:34pain. And I could feel it. Hirsch was wrapped in a prayer shawl, and I could see the contour of his face through the shawl. and I remember putting my face up and screaming, I'm sorry. And now I'm living in the world of the after where Hirsch is gone and every day I wake up and he's still gone. And I had so many parents say to me during Shiva, during the week where we sit in a morning tent, and people come to pay their condolences, I had so many parents coming, saying, you're never gonna be okay. And I thought, what the heck? Like, kick a girl when she's down. I mean, you know, I didn't understand, and now I understand that they were trying to warn me.

24:34But that is the truth. That is the truth. They were right. They were right. Do you think it ever will be? I don't know. Well, I want to be fair and open to the possibility that, you know, it's been a little less than a year and a half since Hersha was killed. Maybe there will be progress. My goal for a long time is, okay, I'm carrying this tremendous ball of weight, of struggle. What if I get stronger? Like the ball of weight is always going to be that. It's not changing. But can I get stronger? And so I am trying to figure out what does this look like? A huge pivot for us was on day 496 when we met Orr Levy.

25:31In February 2025, a hostage named Orr Levy was released by Hamas along with two others. Orr had spent three days with Hirsch in a tunnel. What did Orr give you? Well, first, Orr's name in Hebrew, the name Orr, means light. And we actually have this belief that your name, what name you're given, is very much helping describe what your purpose in life is. And I think he was so properly named because we were in horrible darkness. You had had no actual information about Hersh's time in captivity. Who he was with, what happened. And we went on day 496 to meet Orr. And he shined this bright light of OR into our lives.

26:33And I was speaking to a group of students last week, and they said, when did your life change forever? I said, I actually think my life changed forever on October 7th, on August 31st, and on day 496 when we met OR. Orr had been in the bomb shelter. Orr was in the truck. Yes. And we went and we met with Orr, and he's just a really special person. First of all, the fact that he got released and said to his brother, let them know I want to meet them. He had just been released. He had just been told his wife had been killed. His wife was killed in? In the bomb shelter. In the bomb shelter. He hadn't seen his son in 491 days.

27:24His son was two years old. His parents, his brothers. Who are we? We're no one to him. And yet he said, these people need to hear about their child. I mean, every time retelling is very emotionally challenging and psychologically challenging and mentally challenging. And so that told me everything about him already, that I knew that this is a person of great generosity, of kindness, spirit, and heart. Orr was in the tunnels, and Hirsch and Ori Danino are brought into the tunnel that he's in. And they spent two and a half days together, but when you're doing nothing and you're basically in a teeny tiny closet, that's a very long time.

28:09And he and Hirsch started to talk, and Hirsch suddenly said, you're the guy from the bomb shelter. You have a son. Because at some point, Orr had said to the terrorist, please, I have a son at home. Don't kill me, please. And suddenly, Orr realized, oh my gosh, you're alive? Because he saw that this boy he was speaking to in the tunnel had an arm missing. What did Orr tell you about Hirsch getting medical attention? So Hirsch was bleeding to death. and for the first three days he was not treated. And on day three was now unconscious and Ori Danino was screaming at the captors, you need to get him treated.

28:54He's going to die. He's worth much more to you alive than dead. He's American. Treat him, treat him. And they did come in with a burqa and they dressed Hirsch as a woman and they took him to the hospital and they had the jagged bone amputated. They took him to Al-Shifa Hospital. Yes. We found out all of this information that had been a black hole, and that was when he also said that Hirsch was saying to everyone this quote from Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, that when you have a why, you can bear any how. Viktor Frankl's book is said in a concentration camp, and it's all about his own experiences and about how people survive.