Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin will do whatever it takes to get their son back alive
Pesach came, and with it the first sign of life from Hersh Goldberg-Polin in six long months of captivity. Hamas’s psychological warfare department released a short video of the 23-year-old Israeli-American hostage who was snatched from the Nova festival on Simchas Torah morning. The Arabic and English-subtitled clip showed that the once-smiling, happy-go-lucky young man who never raised his voice to anyone was now a gaunt, pale hostage with a Muslim-style haircut and deadened eyes.
Reading from a script prepared by his Hamas captors, edited to emphasize his agitation, he raged. “Binyamin Netanyahu and government — you should be ashamed of yourselves for torpedoing every hostage deal. While you sit having lunch with your families, we sit here without water, food, or sun and the treatment that I so badly need,” said Hersh gesturing with his half-healed stump of an arm.
That was what viewers worldwide saw. But in their home just a few dozen miles from the Gaza tunnel hiding their son, Hersh’s mother Rachel Goldberg-Polin detected something else. “I still felt whispers of Hersh, in the way that he turned to us and said the names of his sisters and said, ‘I love you — stay strong.’ ”
Call that intuitive reading what you will — desperate hope, a mother’s love — but if you meet Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, you’ll see that it’s 100 percent authentic. There’s a certainty born of some sense of spiritual connection flowing between Jerusalem and that dreadful bunker in Gaza that tells them that Hersh will come home. Rachel in particular talks about his well-being with a startling confidence: “I imagine that he’s bored because he always needs to be reading, and wonder whether he’s learned Arabic from his captors — he has a photographic memory.”
Create a free account to keep reading.
