October 7 will never go away.
That was my first thought as I left the Saban Theater Monday night after watching a harrowing documentary on Oct. 7 superhero Oz Davidian.
You may remember Davidian as the Israeli father who drove his pickup truck 15 times into the Nova Festival inferno on Oct. 7, 2023. By some combination of radical courage and miracle, he managed to rescue 120 terrified young revelers as crazed Hamas terrorists were hunting them down.
I’ve seen everything I could since that darkest of days—films, art exhibits, essays, poems, plays, heroic stories, the outpouring of volunteers, you name it. We’ve reported on hundreds of these stories.
And yet, there’s something about this film, “Oz’s List,” that got to me like nothing else. It grabbed my heart from the first minute and never let go. What is it about this particular story that so shook me up?
I’m not sure, but one thing may be the staggering contrasts. Above all, you see the contrast between a man desperate to save human lives and men desperate to kill them– a courageous life-saver next to cowardly life-killers.
Then you see the contrast between actual footage of the carnage in the fields (which was gathered from Hamas cameras and dash cams), and the way those same fields look today, peaceful and serene. You see a beautiful tree and learn that is where a group of kids perished. The film is full of such jarring contrasts, like a lazy country road that looks quiet now, but where Davidian drove in a frenzy to avoid the flying bullets of terror.
There’s also the contrast between Israeli security and terrorism. At one point, Davidian sees an Israeli patrol car nestled on the side of the road. Feeling hopeful, he approaches the vehicle only to discover a Hamas terrorist overlooking a dead Israeli policeman, forcing him to flee for his life. Here is a symbol of Israeli security next to the reality of a calamity.
Perhaps the most heart-wrenching contrast lies in our imagination. As we see the terrified faces of Israeli festivalgoers being rescued in Davidian’s pickup, it’s impossible not to imagine those same faces a few hours earlier, radiant with the joy of dancing in the morning desert.
We live in a time of hype. To compete for people’s attention, stories are routinely exaggerated and made more dramatic. There is none of that hype in this film. The dry facts alone are shattering enough.
There is a scene where Davidian visits the mother of someone he could not save. It’s a tender scene, made even more tender when Davidian starts to tear up, and it is the grieving mother who consoles him.
Davidian tears up a lot. On stage after the screening, his answers often slowed down as he choked up. He’s easily overwhelmed by his memory. How could he not be? The ordeal is bigger than him, bigger than us.
“The mind can’t grasp it,” he says in the film.
Indeed, that line may capture why it is so hard for so many of us to shake Oct. 7: Our minds can’t grasp it.
No matter how hard we try, our minds can’t grasp the horror of 380 beautiful souls murdered at a music festival. Our minds can’t grasp the full extent of a massacre where so many more souls perished– families, children, grandparents, murdered in cold blood, with hundreds taken hostage.
A year later, despite the continuing devastation of wars that seem never-ending, our minds still can’t grasp the level of pain, the level of grief that has emanated from that one singular day.
Maybe that is why Oct. 7 will never go away– because while our minds can’t grasp the horror of that day, the horror can’t stop grasping us.
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