I Can’t Remember 1200 Names

Should I be here? I’m not sure. Yet I follow our guide, Rita, from burned house to burned house in Kibbutz Nir Oz. The kibbutz where one out of every four residents was either murdered or kidnapped to Gaza on Oct. 7. Like the Bibas family. And like Oded Lifschitz, Rita’s father-in-law. 

 I am stepping into houses where people were slaughtered. What in the world am I doing here, trespassing, however respectfully, on their horrors? 

I’m here because I need to remember them, as individuals. I used to remember every terrorist attack, read about every victim. How can we do that when 1,200 were murdered in one day? 

I’m with a tour of Otef Yisrael (I don’t use “Gaza Envelope”) run by the nonprofit Israel Defense and Security Forum. Although Otef settlements are closed to the public, as they should be, we have permission to spend over an hour walking the grounds of Kibbutz Nir Oz. Once the security team opens their yellow steel gates, you are a guest in their home. 

We step over the door frame, careful not to trip over broken steel frames and electrical wires. We duck here and there to avoid metal infrastructure rods hanging from the ceiling or a broken chair, a sofa or the remains of Oded’s piano. Rita holds up pre-Hamas pictures of the house. “Over there is the piano Oded loved to play,” she says. I look behind me. I see an odd-shaped metal skeletal something. That was a piano?

Steel support beams are twisted sculptures, rusted or blackened. A maze to be navigated. I want to touch them and the ashes on the windowsills. Pieces of cement walls are strewn around like an artist’s final touch. But I don’t. They are sacred. 

I take a here and now moment in front of the Bibas family home. A white rocking horse rests against a tree. Overturned flowerpots, the familiar posters of the once-anonymous, normal family that lived there. Their pergola is untouched. A large poster of Shiri and Kfir is placed on a lounge chair. Children’s plastic chairs are stacked up. 

Rita brings the victims to life with their stories, their hobbies, their loves. Then they are gone: 

“He was murdered in the safe room.” 

And we see his spattered blood on the floor and walls. 

“This one was kidnapped to Gaza and murdered there.” 

She repeats these phrases. She is living her trauma as the words pour out, steady and powerful. A recording, yet live. Her face tightens, muscles scrunching with the weight of her words that reverberate around blackened, cracked walls.

“Kidnapped on Oct. 7.”

“Murdered on Oct. 7.” 

Her soul is screaming: 

“Do you get it? They are dead! We lost 25% of our kibbutz.” 

But she isn’t screaming. The tone is dead level.  And I’m trying to get it. I’ve been trying to get it for 18 months. 

And I’ve also been trying to get the enormity of the loss suffered at the Nova festival, our next stop. I stand on the spot where a family friend and 17 others were burned alive when Nukhba terrorists fired an RPG at the ambulance where they had taken refuge. I find her poster. Then I weave my way among the posts displaying more pictures and stories of the victims. Some posts are encircled by a low perimeter fence, creating a space for personal items like flowers, memorial candles and Israeli flags. I can’t read, comprehend and internalize over 370 stories of these individuals who must be remembered. As a people, we are trying. The site has over 7,000 visitors daily. We need to feel their lives, not the loss.

Soon it will be Memorial Day. We have ceremonies for fallen soldiers and, since 1998, a separate one for civilian victims of terror. Now, do we add one for the victims of Oct. 7? Does it matter? I just need to connect.

I won’t remember all the names. But I have touched the earth where they lived, danced and died. The dust and ashes have touched my skin. Sometimes this is the best we can do to keep memories alive.

Galia Miller Sprung moved to Israel from Southern California in 1970 to become a pioneer farmer and today she is a writer and editor.