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100 human stories from 10/7 reveal Israel’s resilience in the face of terror and the power of hope amid tragedy.
By SABRINA SOFFER DECEMBER 5, 2024 02:30
Lee Yaron participates in a book-signing event in Nevada.
(photo credit: Courtesy Jewish Nevada)
When I was little, I crafted a birdhouse covered in mosaic tiles of many colors, shapes, and sizes. Wrapped in shades of purple, blue, white, and emerald green, the birdhouse possessed a single round opening – an entrance that reveals the interior of the home. To the distant naked eye, the hole appears black, rendering the inside of the home void of light and life.
This childhood creation of mine resurfaced in my mind as I turned the last few pages of the gut-wrenching, yet gracefully written 10/7: 100 Human Stories by Lee Yaron. The tiled birdhouse felt akin to the mosaic of the diverse communities of Israel – each piece, a community or a family – unique and interconnected. In Yaron’s telling, this symbol of home, refuge, and vibrancy was swept by a darkness, a black hole that engulfed every life, every family, and every community.
Ukrainian immigrants who had fled the terror of one totalitarian regime only to be met with the wave of war in what was supposed to be their sanctuary of safety in Israel; a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor, who slept soundly through gunshots and the smell of smoking homes, killed during his uninterrupted serene slumber; teenaged Nepalese students, just seeking to make money for their families, whose make-shift walls of rice sacks could not protect them from the lethal threat of working for Jews; a wife who was agonizingly forced to use her husband’s dead body as a shield in a bomb shelter infiltrated by Hamas terrorists to save herself; crimson-cheeked enamored couples, and wondrously dressed stunning women, who simply wanted to dance at a rave, raped and ravaged by knives and gunshots to their genitals; a nine-year-old girl who had survived the attacks, but whose trauma was so severe that it triggered premature menstruation and then – a fatal heart attack.
These are just a few of the tragic stories that investigative journalist Yaron so masterfully recounts in an evocative and intimate page-turner. Meshed with fragments of Israeli history and highlighting communities on the margins – Bedouin in the Negev, Thai and Nepalese in Kibbutz Alumim, Ukrainian Jews in Ashkelon, and more.
Religious Zionists, rabbis, secular peaceniks, Arabs, foreigners, and Jews alike suffered the same fate that dark Saturday simply for living in the Jewish state. A competition for massacring Jews, 10/7: 100 Human Stories’ account of Hamas’s attacks, immersed me in scenes that echoed Babyn Yar or the Farhud (an outbreak of mob violence against Baghdad Jewry in June 1941 – torches set to Jewish homes like Kristallnacht in 1938, or as my grandmother described, the fire that ravaged a street in Cairo’s Jewish Quarter in 1952.
Evil in action
Yaron’s book transcends race, religion, and politics. It is a story of sheer evil in action, an attack on our common conscience. It recounts how our supposed advanced species of humankind can rape, mutilate, and burn bodies of their own kind – not only in good conscience but in a sort of ritual slaughter, and celebrate it by posting videos of it online, like parading the body of German-Israeli Shani Louk in Gaza’s rejoicing streets. It shows the power of hate-filled indoctrination, whereby a cultural marker is embodied in, “Dad! Look how many Jews I killed!”
The questions that arose as I read these 10/7: 100 Human Stories resembled those I had asked my 13-year-old self when visiting Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem and the sites of the Holocaust in Germany and Poland. How could people commit such horror upon other people? How could the world stay silent? How can we still have hope for a better world in the aftermath of such calamities?
Studying the Holocaust and Jewish history throughout high school and college has taught me that immense tragedy often illuminates and allows us to cherish stories of profound goodness. Such goodness and spirit can reignite hope we thought was lost. That is why, no matter how bleak or gruesome the content of its pages, reading Yaron’s book made me long for Israel because the nation’s commitment to life personifies hope.
In Israel, people make sacrifices in streets lined with blazing cars with their souls devoted to the tenet of pikuach nefesh, saving a life. In Israel, families shelter complete strangers – despite differences in faith, ethnicity, or deep political disagreements – like brothers and sisters.
In Israel, the ZAKA rescue and recovery organization heroes at the scene of the Supernova music festival identified body after body from sunrise to sunset, ensuring that each stolen life could be given a dignified burial In Israel, unlike any other country, wedding ceremonies took place under rocket fire and skies of ash. Yes, wedding ceremonies went on, because in Israel, love for life, and making a dignified and meaningful life, prevails above all.
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In Israel, enveloped by the holiness of three monotheistic religions united by the patriarch Abraham, we also find tales of divine intervention amid waves of terror. Yaron tells the story of Sujood, a pregnant Bedouin woman, who was on her way to the hospital to bring new life into the world, only to be shot in the stomach by the devils of death. She survived, shielded by her fetus, then a newborn, and moved into intensive care, which had protected her mother’s internal organs. Such a case was never seen before by the team of doctors whose combined medical experience amounted to over 100 years. In an inferno, thank you God for just one miracle.
Yaron introduces readers not only to the individuals she interviewed and befriended, but also to their children, parents, and the generations that came before them – each with their own journey to Israel from places like Morocco, Tunisia, Tajikistan, Germany, the United States, Argentina, and France.
From Sharif Abu Taha, the bus driver who led tours to the Dead Sea, to the Canadian-Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver murdered in her burned home, and many others, each person Yaron brings to life became someone to whom I felt deeply connected – whether clinging onto their memory if lost, or longing to spend time with them if they are still living.
As I will soon travel to Israel to visit my family and friends and pay homage to the victims and sites of the October 7 massacre by Hamas terrorists, these 100 Human Stories will whisper in my ears and reverberate in my heart. Yaron’s work should remind Jews around the world, especially in the Diaspora, of the importance of the Jewish state.
We must never take our security, or the protection afforded to us by the forces of the Western world, for granted. This book, a poignant reminder of how vital yet fragile civilization is, should be read, shared, and retold by every humanity-caring and civic-minded individual.
For these 100 stories, and so many more, we must never forget – amid the noise of the mundane and routine – the value of friendship and family. And we can never forget, even in the darkest times, the acts of righteousness that, in a world seemingly consumed by flames of wrath, rekindle our faith in a better world.
That faith, embodied by the innovative spirit of Israel just 76 years ago, instructs us to transform feelings of anger and rage into constructive actions for forming healthy friendships and contributing to our communities for the collective good. Then, in the words of Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah,” our hope – the 2,000-year-old hope – to live as a free people in our land, and in the amelioration of humanity, will not be lost.
The writer is a senior at George Washington University.
English (US) ·