From 95% heaven to 100% hell: Two years on

Today, October 724th, 2023, I had the honor of addressing a delegation of ambassadors from the European Union, who came to pay their respects to those who lost their lives in the third bloodiest terror attack in history. Following is the text of what I said. 

Ambassador of the European Union, ambassadors of EU member states — thank you for inviting me. 

This place used to be our favorite picnic spot. Imagine this: it’s February, the red anemones carpet the earth, families lounging on blankets, my grandchildren romping among them, parents snapping pictures, the smell of coffee. We called it our ninety-five percent Heaven. 

At 6:29 on October 7th 2023, our region flipped to one hundred percent Hell, and our lives changed forever. 

I am one of the lucky ones. I survived. 

My name is Adele.  I was born in the US, came to Israel at nineteen because I believed this was where Jews could breathe, raise families, build a future. Since 1975 I’ve lived on Kibbutz Nirim, just down the road, where my four children grew up among the wheatfields and playgrounds. 

One of them — my daughter Lilach — was the anxious one. As a child she used to be frightened of terrorists infiltrating just under her bedroom window. We told her it couldn’t happen.  And yet she married a man also born on Nirim. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. They gave me three little stars in my sky — Ziv, Raz and Yuval, aged 8, 6 and 2 – three grandchildren who lived 2 minutes away, lighting up my world.. My dream was fulfilled, as a grandmother who – at any time during the day – could be surprised by their knocks on my door, or run into them unexpectedly on their morning walks with the other kibbutz children. My Paradise was complete. 

On October 6th, 2023, the kibbutz celebrated its 77th anniversary. There was live music, bouncy castles, kids running everywhere.  That night I told Adam, my son who was visiting, that if he didn’t see me when he woke up, not to worry, because at sunrise I  planned to take my camera and drive around on my own to find a field of wildflowers, to photograph them at sunrise. That’s how safe I felt.  

But at 5:30 on Oct 7th I was too tired to get up. That tiredness is the only reason I’m standing here today. 

At 6:29 the alarms began — shrill, relentless.  

Living so close to the border means you have seconds — sometimes none — between the rocket alert and the explosion.  I sprinted from my bed to the saferoom, where Adam was sleeping. 

 In horror, we watched the spread of the rocket  attacks coming from Gaza, fanning out into our little land covering a vast area, north of Tel Aviv to far south of us. 

Immediately we understood that this wasn’t like anything we had ever experienced before. The rate of fire, the messages on our phones, the instructions to lock ourselves in saferooms built to protect us from rockets, not infiltration, so they don’t even lock.  

I remember saying on Facebook Live, trying to calm myself and those watching: “They won’t get this far. We’re two kilometres from the border.”  

Then the messages started coming.   People on the kibbutz sending frantic calls for help, saying they heard gunfire, Arabic outside their windows. At first I thought they were just panicking.  But then the blood-curdling messages: “They’re in my house.” “They’re burning my home.”  

Where was the army? The police? Anyone? Crickets. Only the desperate messages begging for help. 

I sat in that room looking at my son,  trying unsuccessfully to communicate with my daughter, thinking: none of us will ever see another sunrise. This is the day my grandchildren’s laughter will stop. Israel will stop.  

On my phone, I could trace the attacks moving from house to house, closer to my daughter, closer to my son-in-law, and those three small children.  

She was alone in her house, hiding under the bed, trying to make herself invisible, covering herself with pillows and stuffed animals.

As a girl, I watched Hogan’s Heroes, a comedy about American POWs fooling clumsy Nazis. I used to play pretend: where would I hide if the Nazis came? Never did I imagine my family and I would be hiding in our own homes, in our kibbutz, in our country, from the Nazis of 2023. But that’s exactly what we were doing.

Then they arrived to our house. Gunshots outside. Voices screaming in Arabic. Noises of objects being broken.. 

Adam whispered, “They’re saying ‘arja’a – come back.’ ”

We didn’t understand what the sinister intentions behind those words were, but we looked at each other, said “I love you,” and quietly said goodbye.  

After around an hour, when it seemed to have quieted down outside, I opened the door, needing the bathroom desperately.

Edging out as quietly as I could, in case they were in the house, I saw that the slats on the window had been shattered. They had been on our front porch, trying to open the door, then when they found it locked, they started breaking in through the window – called away at the last second. Whether it was dumb luck, divine intervention, or my late husband’s hands between us and them… we’ll never know.

Meanwhile, in another house, my son-in-law, Alon, was with those three little girls. 

He had a weapon because he was a first responder. But how could he leave three children alone? 

He told them: “Hide under the covers. Whatever you hear, don’t move.” 

He raised his gun, waited until he saw the door handle start to move, kicked open the door and shot.  The terrorist on the other side of the handle dropped. He started to go after the other two terrorists in the house, but realized that there were many, highly armed jihadists with blood in their eyes and advanced weapons in their hands. If something happened to him, who would protect his girls? 

He returned to the saferoom, stepping over the body of the fallen terrorist, pulled the door to, got down on one knee, raised his gun and waited. Aiming at the door, the next person to enter would get a bullet.

Weeks later, when I tried to count how many people I lost that day — neighbors, students, friends — the list filled pages. 

They weren’t soldiers. They were people on sunrise walks, like my friend Judih and her husband Gadi. People stolen from their beds, or from a music festival.  

The people in this area, we always held out our hands in peace. We drove sick Gazans to hospitals. We believed in coexistence in this area and the importance of collaborating with like-minded people on the other side, to teach our children not to fear each other. Together we organiזed projects for our children to do simultaneous bike marathons, to develop the option to believe that the people beyond the fence didn’t want to kill them. 

These people – peace activists – these were the people who the Jihadists slaughtered proudly, documenting on their GoPros, boasting with glee, handing out sweets in the streets of Gaza, where my friends’ bodies were being dragged on display. 

It took the army seven hours to arrive, and the soldiers started slowly, carefully,  going door to door under fire, rescuing whomever they could.

My son and I remained hiding in that saferoom for eleven hours – no air conditioning so the monsters outside wouldn’t hear us, no food, no water. Only fear and uncertainty. 

The next day, we were evacuated through an active war zone to Eilat. We drove through an active war zone, past cars that were still on fire, charred bodies on the ground, rocket fire overhead, tanks driving in the fields parallel to road 232, now renamed “the road of blood.”

Three and a half months in hotel rooms. Then apartments in Beer Sheva to be closer to home so we could milk our cows, pick our fruit, keep the soul of the kibbutz alive.

I was a refugee in my own land for 627 days. 

At the end of June 2025, we finally came home. The 32 houses that were burnt to a crisp are being rebuilt. The grass has been replanted. Looks are deceiving, and nothing can ever really be the same again. 

Five people were kidnapped from Nirim, five were murdered.  

The three women hostages came home in November 2023. The two men were executed in Gaza’s tunnels.

We still have 48 precious human beings, stolen from Israel, rotting in the hellholes of Gaza. Some of them are your citizens, too.  

Most of our community came home. Some cannot. Some never will.

And those three little stars in my sky? They are alive, thank God, but highly traumatized. Terror continues to haunt them through their senses: Memories pop up at the sound of explosion or the smell of smoke, instantly transporting them back to when they were hiding under the blanket. 

Even today, my daughter Lilach has not set foot back on the kibbutz since that morning when she almost lost her babies. Oct. 7th was her worst nightmare. On steroids.

I used to pretend I was hiding from the Nazis of WWII. 

The difference then was that the world knew who they were and fought them. 

My “Nazis” just got a prize for their crimes. 

I don’t know how to process that — or how to feel secure enough to convince Raz, Ziv and Yuval that they can play in my garden safely. How can I ever regain the sense of security to photograph wildflowers at dawn, knowing that the Islamic Resistance Movement still wants me dead, and sees diplomatic victories as the fruits of October 7th?

Thank you.