Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s Powerful Story of a Mother’s Fight to Bring Her Son Home
On the morning of October 7th, 2023, Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s beloved twenty-three-year-old son, Hersh, was stolen from a music festival billed as a celebration of unity and love and, in that moment, her life was forever separated into The Before and The After.
Over the next eleven months, she and her husband, Jon, would work tirelessly, in public and behind the scenes, to secure the hostages’ release, to breathe some humanity into the situation while they were experiencing relentless emotional and psychological torment. The power of her raw and fervent pleas soon made her the face of the hostage crisis. And when Hersh and five other captives were executed after surviving 328 days of violence and cruelty, she would also become the face of its ultimate cost.
Goldberg-Polin pours her pain, love, and longing onto paper. WHEN WE SEE YOU AGAIN is a vital historical document and an unflinching chronicle of maternal heartbreak. “Now my prayer, my pursuit and quest, more than any other, is still Hope,” says Goldberg-Polin. “Hope to succeed on the protracted, forever-road ahead.” WHEN WE SEE YOU AGAIN offers the most complete account to date of Goldberg-Polin’s saga, as she worked to secure the release of her son and all of the hostages. Most powerfully, Goldberg-Polin brings readers alongside her as she processes her own grief. Reading it is an act of bearing witness. It gives voice to the broken among us, and reminds us that even when the world feels choked with darkness, light exists in a different way. How do we find it?
“There are days when I break completely,” she writes. “I have cried for an entire day straight. I didn’t think it was physically possible, but the weeping never let up. That is a very long time to cry. I kept hoping I would run out of tears. And then there are days when there is a whisper of sun. Not out there in the sky. In me. In us.”
