Rachel Goldberg-Polin on Losing a Son in Gaza

Rachel Goldberg-Polin, a former Chicago resident who made Aliyah to Israel in 2008, has transformed from a private mother into one of the most powerful public voices in the aftermath of her son Hirsch’s abduction and execution by Hamas on October 7, 2023. In her raw, unflinching memoir *When We See You Again*, she recounts not just the agony of losing a child but the relentless moral imperative that drove her to advocate for all hostages—even after Hirsch’s death—arguing that the world’s capacity for empathy must not be reduced to a zero-sum game of blame. Her most profound revelation comes not in grief, but in purpose: after the trauma of losing her son, she found a new 'why' in Viktor Frankl’s idea that 'when you have a why, you can bear any how.' This framework, which Hirsch lived by in captivity, now guides her mission to rebuild meaning in a shattered world. She remains in Israel not out of blind loyalty, but because she believes the very act of bearing witness—and refusing to let the world forget—can be a form of resistance and redemption. The emotional core of her story lies in the ordinary: a Shabbat dinner, a casual 'love you, see you tomorrow,' the smell of her son’s armpits. These details, rendered with poetic precision, become sacred relics of a life now gone. Yet she refuses to let that life be erased.