Between pain and faith: Rachel Goldberg-Polin says goodbye to Hersh

On the eve of Israel’s Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism (Monday), CBS’s “60 Minutes” is broadcasting a full and emotional interview with Rachel Goldberg-Polin. Speaking with Anderson Cooper, she recounts the 330-day effort she and her husband, John, made to try to save their son, Hersh, who was abducted from a bomb shelter in Re’im during the October 7 attack.

Goldberg-Polin describes an exhausting global campaign to meet leaders and officials, saying they were “running like mad” around the world in an attempt to secure his release. She says she believed there were officials who “could do stuff, and for whatever reason they were not doing it,” and reflects painfully on the sense that they also failed their son, saying they were unable to “convince the right people that it was urgent.”

She recalls the daily protest symbol that became associated with the family, the stickers worn on their shirts marking each passing day since October 7. In the interview, she describes first seeing footage of her son’s abduction, including what she calls a “shocking abduction video in which his arm appears severed,” and later a video of Hersh speaking directly to his family, followed by a Hamas propaganda video. She says the second video, despite its cruelty, “gave me another bolt of adrenaline to keep going,” because it confirmed that Hersh was still alive and speaking “directly to us, his parents.”

At one of the most intense moments of her campaign, Goldberg-Polin went to the Gaza border and shouted toward her son through loudspeakers, hoping he might hear her. She later learned that Hersh had in fact been killed that same day. She received the news on the morning of the 330th day, after waking from what she described as a chilling dream. “John's phone rang, and the IDF officer who accompanied the family said ‘We’re downstairs,’” she recalls. “And I knew.” Hersh was later found in a tunnel in Rafah alongside five other hostages, with the family informed he had been killed by gunfire after months of captivity.

After his death, Goldberg-Polin met former hostage Or Levi, who told her that Hersh had heard her voice in the media and knew about her efforts. She says this brought her some comfort in grief. Despite warnings from other bereaved parents that she would “never be okay,” she says she chose to believe she could grow stronger, and reflects on coexistence, saying, “We either figure out how to live near each other, or we will all die here together.”

At the end of the interview, she reveals a passage from Hersh’s ninth-grade diary that she now sees as deeply symbolic: “Life is like the world; in order to exist, you have to move and work hard. Every so often you will reach a tunnel, enter the unknown, and you don’t know when you’ll come out.” She says, “The second that they came to tell us Hirsh was killed was the closest I had ever felt to God in my life,” adding that she does not see it as punishment but as part of an incomprehensible divine plan.

Today, she says she continues to cope with his absence by speaking to him daily and even answering in his voice. She describes the removal of thousands of protest stickers from their home as feeling “like tearing skin off our house,” adding that she still sometimes reaches for a sticker before remembering it is no longer needed, as she tries to navigate life without “a part of me that is supposed to be here.”