Hostage Families and Bereaved Relatives Shatter Illusion of Return to Routine
Three years after October 7, families of returning hostages and bereaved relatives challenge the illusion of normalcy in a poignant podcast, discussing daily trauma and political divisions.
Three years have passed since the black Saturday of October 7, but for the families of returning hostages and those who lost their loved ones, the trauma remains vivid and breathing anew every single day. In a special episode of the podcast "Let's Open This Up" by All in in partnership with the Fourth Quarter, Shir Segal and Orit Mark Ettinger shattered the illusion of a "return to routine" and presented a painful picture of a complex daily reality.
The Hidden Reality of Captivity Survivors
"There is a lot of talk now that the hostages look from the outside as if everything has returned to routine," said Segal, whose mother Aviva returned from Hamas captivity. Shir addressed the criticism sometimes leveled at the media profile of the returned hostages: "I quite often hear that they supposedly became celebs and are exploiting it a bit. This is an opportunity to say that no one, at least not those watching from the outside, knows what the returned hostages go through on a daily basis." Segal emphasized that contrary to the media glamour attempted to be pinned on them, the hostages cope with nightmares at night and require long rehabilitation and privacy.
For Aviva, captivity not only left new scars but created a distorted psychological reality where the survivors blame themselves. Segal revealed her mother's feelings of guilt, according to which she is to blame for what happened to the family because she chose the center of their lives in the Gaza envelope: "One of the things she deals with the most now is the guilt... What guilt this is over the fact that they ultimately chose to live in Kfar Aza. (Mom's thought) is that we ultimately went through October 7 because they chose to live there, because terrorists murdered."
The Rift Shaking Bereaved Families
Orit Mark Ettinger, whose family marks the fall of her loved ones - her father Michael, her brother Pedia, and her cousin Elchanan Kalmanson, expressed deep pain and frustration over the division among the people surrounding the observance of memorial days for October 7.
"How the hell does it make sense that an event like this... became such a thing that is used as a political weapon?" Ettinger wondered, comparing the situation to the public attitude toward Holocaust remembrance, which is accepted as an unquestionable national consensus.
Instead of national unity, October 7 and the memorial days surrounding it have become, in her words, a political weapon, a reality that makes it even harder for bereaved families and hostages to find comfort. She called upon the public to take responsibility for the discourse and live together in harmony.
