Rachel Goldberg-Polin: How a mother rebuilds life after Hersh was murdered
After Hamas killed her son Hersh in Gaza, Rachel Goldberg-Polin describes living with grief, searching for “why,” and turning pain into words—and advocacy.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s son Hersh was taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7 and later murdered in Gaza, leaving her to answer a question far heavier than any headline: how do you keep going when part of you is gone?
Misryoum spoke with Goldberg-Polin as she tried to describe the shape of grief in real time—grief that did not follow a neat timeline. and grief that still forces her to “reunderstand what it means to be in this world.” She said that once she learned Hersh had been executed. she realized the long months had briefly held a kind of cruel mercy: the possibility that he was alive.. Then that last thread snapped, and what remained was the rest of her life—no longer suspended, but permanent.
Misryoum’s account begins on Oct.. 7, when sirens cut through the morning and Goldberg-Polin received two messages from her son from inside a bomb shelter.. In the first text, Hersh said, “I love you.” In the second, he apologized.. She has returned to that moment again and again because it compresses an entire life into a few lines—and then ends it.. In her telling, the day’s terror was not abstract.. It arrived with urgency, with text messages that turned family phone screens into emergency rooms.
Misryoum also highlights what the hostages’ ordeal did to the mechanics of hope.. Goldberg-Polin and her husband Jon worked to bring Hersh home as days turned into hundreds.. She described wearing a piece of tape with the number of days he had been held. a small ritual that made time visible and therefore bearable. even as it kept reminding her that survival was still uncertain.. In those months, she repeatedly chose a phrase that functioned like a lifeline—“I love you.. Stay strong.. Survive.”—because the mind will search for something to do when doing anything feels impossible.
As the captivity stretched, Hamas released footage, including a video posted by the group showing Hersh with injuries.. Goldberg-Polin said receiving proof of his condition gave them adrenaline again. not because it was less horrifying. but because it confirmed he was still there—still a person whose fate could still shift.. Misryoum’s reporting underscores a brutal paradox: visibility can be both torment and ammunition. proof that can keep a family moving even when the destination is darkness.
The later phase of her story is shaped by meeting points—moments when different families collide inside a larger tragedy.. Goldberg-Polin joined other hostage families. screaming loved ones’ names toward Gaza. not knowing it was the same day she would learn Hersh had been killed.. Misryoum emphasizes the way that the hostage crisis has created a shared vocabulary of pain across communities that do not typically speak to one another as equals.. For Goldberg-Polin. the question became not only whether he could be saved. but how to understand love after death—how to carry it without allowing it to crush her.
Then, in February, another kind of news arrived: a hostage released after spending days with Hersh in a tunnel.. Goldberg-Polin said that what he told her mattered as much as what he confirmed.. Hersh, she was told, did not spend his last days only in fear.. He laughed.. He repeated a mantra drawn from Viktor Frankl—“He who has a why can bear any how”—a belief Frankl developed through suffering in the face of a camp where meaning could be the last thing taken away.. Misryoum interprets the idea as more than a slogan: it becomes a mental structure. a way to endure not because pain is small. but because the mind insists there is still a purpose inside the unbearable.
Misryoum also draws attention to the way Goldberg-Polin’s grieving process has evolved.. She wrote that people want hope, resilience, recovery—yet her grief felt chronic, present, and circular rather than linear.. Over time, she said her understanding changed.. Grief. she began to frame. could be a “precious badge of love. ” proof that her bond did not vanish just because the body did.. That shift doesn’t erase the brutality of what happened; it’s a different arrangement of the same weight. a move from dread toward a kind of ongoing relationship with the loss.
Her story ends with a final. intimate detail that reads like a verdict on the idea that war eventually allows closure.. Goldberg-Polin kept Hersh’s room as he left it. and the tape with the day-count—symbols of failure. as she called them—was eventually taken down.. Misryoum frames this not as catharsis. but as a choice: she wanted to acknowledge what was lost while still insisting that what they fought for did happen. even if “not as we wanted.”
For many readers. Goldberg-Polin’s account offers a difficult but practical takeaway: when large events become personal tragedy. the hardest work is not only mourning—it’s translation.. Translating what happened into words you can live with. turning grief into something you can carry forward without pretending it will become easy.. Misryoum expects that her search for a “why” will resonate beyond one family. because the current era has produced too many bereaved parents—Palestinian and Israeli—who are trying to answer the same question from different places.
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