Bearing Witness [E07]-"They shot inside the house again and again and again."
Oren Zvada Bears Witness Of What Happened To His Family on Kibbutz Holit As They Were Hiding In A Safe Room In Their Home As At Least 11 People Were Massacred In The Kibbutz On October 7th, 2023
Bearing Witness: The Profiles In Horror & Courage Series is a witness-by-witness rendition of what happened on October 7 and afterward.
I will be releasing these, one at a time, mixed in with the other posts from The View From Israel Newsletter.
Why?
Many have forgotten or chosen to ignore what occurred on October 7 and afterward. And history demands these be recorded and put in the annals of the war. Additionally, many do not have the patience to go through YouTube videos and listen to the inane advertisements every 5 minutes. Or we turn our brains off. Perhaps, in writing, it will help.
These are the rules for what you will read in the series:
The English is far from perfect. Remember, these are people who, for the most part, are not native English speakers.
In editing the transcripts, there is a limit to how much one wants to remove from the person’s original voice. It is a balance that takes time. So you will notice that though some sentences and paragraphs could read much better, the wording was left as is, with some minor corrections so that the reader will feel the original voice, horror, and fear.
There is no natural order to which witness I place first, second, and so on.
I have eyeballed the text and run it through Grammarly to catch the blatant mistakes and problems.
The paragraph structure may be off as well. It is difficult to put a transcription into an entirely correct English structure. Dividing paragraphs correctly is nearly impossible, even with Grammarly AI and other tools.
I have, in no way, shape, manner, or form, add any comments or remarks to these testimonies. In a place where a Hebrew word is used, you will see: (ex. by the editor: “and here will be the explanation”) or [explanation in the brackets]. That is the extent of any remarks.
I left some spoken delays, such as “um” and “uh” in. This is to show that the document is a transcript of someone speaking and bearing witness.
You will catch misspellings, wrong sentences and word usage, no capitalization, run-on sentences, misplaced periods, etc. This is not meant to be an edited piece for the NYT or a Newsletter. It is raw. It is as real as life gets. It is bearing witness.
There is usually an interviewer as well who sometimes asks questions. I have tried to put those questions into separate paragraphs to the best of my ability.
I have also included the accompanying Video of the person bearing witness at the bottom of the piece.
None of this is made up. None of this is AI. You decide.
One final point. We all put the share, comment, and subscribe buttons in our Newsletter. In this case, I am, without shame and with “chutzpah,” asking you to at least share the posts from this series on all your social networks, with all your friends, and anywhere you think it may be read. And please hit that heart at the bottom of this email to “like” it. Sharing & Likes are extremely important, and they help a great deal.
Before beginning with the “Bearing Witness” Interview, “The View From Israel” wishes to pay tribute to the following soldiers who fell in Gaza yesterday. This, too, is “Bearing Witness.”
The IDF released the names of three IDF soldiers killed in action in Gaza on Tuesday morning.
Major (Maj.) (res.) Netzer Simchi, 30 years old, from Masad, a combat officer in the 87th Battalion, the 14th Strike Brigade, was killed in battle in the north of the Gaza Strip on Monday.
Captain (Capt.) (res.) Gavriel Shani, 28 years old, from Ma'ali, a team commander in the 6646 patrol battalion, Shu'ali Marom formation (646), was killed in battle in the southern Gaza Strip on Monday.
Sergeant-Major (Sgt.-Maj.) Yuval Nir, 43 years old, from Kfar Etzion, a fighter in the 6646th Patrol Battalion, Shu'ali Marom formation (646), was killed in battle in the south of the Gaza Strip on Monday.
The three fallen soldiers bring the total IDF losses since the outbreak of war to 560.
Oren Zvada, his wife, Dana, and his two children, Tamari, 8, and Beri, 5, were in their home on Kibbutz Holit when the terrorists attacked their Kibbutz. They waited for the army for 12 hours, withstood Hamas terrorists shooting up their home, and somehow escaped.
“We must tell the story of Holit, our small, beautiful community thriving before that. And... and the voice of, we need to talk about peace.”
Background:
Kibbutz Holit Massacre
Residents of the kibbutz say the attack on Holit started at around 8 AM. Hamas militants moved from house to house, killing at least 11 civilians and injuring many more.
On October 11th, four days after the attack, Hamas released a video alleging to show kibbutz member Avital Aladjem was freed that very day by Hamas at Gaza’s border along with her neighbor’s two small children.
Aladjem contradicted this claim and described how, on the day of the attack itself, the abductors left them unsupervised inside Gaza and how she managed to walk back to Holit, taking the two children with her.
[Interviewer]
Today is October 30th, 2023. I'm Natalie Mann, and I am interviewing Oren Zvada for the USC Shoah Foundation. We're in Kibbutz Ein Gedi, and the interview is in English.
Okay, first of all, thank you for interviewing with us. Anything you want to tell us, we are happy to hear. If you want to stop at any point, feel free. And now, we'll begin the interview. Oren, could you introduce yourself, please?
[Oren]
So I'm I. I'm married to Dana. I have two children. Beri is five years old, and Tamari is eight years old. A boy and a girl. And we live on Kibbutz Holit.
I've lived there for the last 22 years and built my family in Kibbutz Holit. And Kibbutz Holit is very, very special. That's why I chose to live there. There's a small community in Kibbutz Holit. It was always small, even smaller than it is today. Throughout the years, we struggled to enlarge the number of members of our community. And...
One interesting story I want to tell you about, and it represents the people that live there, is that Holit was first established in '78 in the Sinai area in Egypt. And as it was established over there, the government of Israel, throughout the peace process with Egypt, decided to evacuate the Gaza Strip, the Sinai area. One amazing thing about the community of Holit was that all the other communities over there (we weren't the only community there), so all the different communities were having a fight against the government. The community of Holit decided peace was much more important than the place itself. And they went to the government and told the government.
"We will evacuate willingly, but we want to do it ourselves.We want to tear apart our home that we established there, and we will rebuild it in the place that you ask us to."
This is a motive that escorts us throughout life in Holit. This is something that characterizes the community of Holit: a peace-seeking community. That's what we are. Peace-seeking people.
[Interviewer]
And what do you do as a job?
[Oren]
I'm a landscaper. I am a landscaper-architect. That's what I do. I used to be the gardener of Holit for many years, and I'm the manager of the botanical garden Greenpoint at a kibbutz near us. My wife is a social worker. And that's what we did in Holit throughout the years. We've built... We have private businesses. So we're, you know, we're working for ourselves. So...
[Interviewer]
Ah, you are self-employed?
[Oren]
Yeah, we're self-employed.
[Interviewer]
So, can you take this... So. Please take us back to October 7th and tell us your story.
[Oren]
I actually want to take you a day before, on Friday evening. We had a holiday in Israel, and both of our families, my wife and my family, were at the kibbutz. We were approximately 30 people sitting and having dinner together, Shabbat dinner and the holiday dinner, and some of them were supposed to sleep at our home, but eventually, it didn't work out. So they left except for my mother-in-law. She stayed at our home, and we went to sleep very late.
My mother-in-law slept in the bed with my wife, and I went to sleep on the couch. We had a massive window in the living room.
And at 06:25, something like that, my daughter came to me. Tamari came, and she woke up.
So she went to the living room and came to sit on the couch where I was sleeping.
Just a few minutes afterward, the alarm set, and as we know, we ran to the safe room inside the house. My wife and mother-in-law also went there, and my small child, Beri, was already in his room.
[Interviewer]
In his room?
[Oren]
Yeah, it's his room. In this room we have had a metal window in the safe room for the last few years. It is permanently closed. We never let the kids sleep in this room when the window is not closed. Fully closed. That's how we sleep there. That's how they sleep there. Because something inside of us knows that the dripping of missiles throughout the year is so dangerous. Because sometimes the alarm doesn't set, and the missiles... ...missiles drop, and rockets just fall around.
Kibbutz Holit is located one and a half kilometers from the border with Gaza. Approximately. Yeah. So we went inside the bomb shelter. As we are used to doing, we get inside, close the door, and wait a few minutes for the alarm to stop setting. We will hear the "boom" of the missile, of the rocket, falling on the ground, and then we will wait a few minutes, and then we can go out.
But at that particular moment, in that specific moment, the alarm didn't stop. It was alarm after alarm after alarm after alarm. It was a massive attack, a vast amount of... of missiles going toward us. The children were afraid, and I was holding the door. So it won't get open by itself because we don't have locks on these doors, so we need to hold the handle. And it didn't stop.
After it stopped, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Gunshots were so close to our bomb shelter, so close that we actually heard them. And we thought to ourselves, okay, something huge is happening. Still, we don't know what because messages from the kibbutz or the security person haven't arrived yet.
And we hear the gunshots, and I understand that they are standing next to our house. So I tried calling our security guy or somebody from the security team, but nobody answered. I wanted to tell them: "Listen, I hear the gunshots. I hear gunshots next to our home. We have people getting inside. We have terrorists inside the kibbutz. You need to come to our area and, you know, maybe try to eliminate them."
And as we were trying to do that, we were starting to hear people screaming in Arabic. And then the glass, our window glass, was broken. And then we hear the gunshots inside our home. And they were shooting all over for a few minutes. We were in shock. We were totally in shock. The only thing I could do, because I didn't have a weapon, was to hold the handle of my door, and that's it. And the door is not bulletproof.
So I was holding the door, putting the children under the bed, closing the light, closing everything in the room, and everybody was quiet. I'm telling my wife I'm, you know, I'm talking to her with my eyes and telling her: "Put the children under the bed and be quiet. Everybody quiet." And as I'm saying, the house is like a bomb fell on it. We are feeling it shaking.
At that point, the neighbor sent a message on WhatsApp that somebody had thrown a grenade inside her home. And I was thinking, this couldn't be. We have close homes. Yeah. Next to us. And we thought, "She's she's new at Holit." They lived in Holit only for the past few months. So maybe she doesn't understand the situation. It can't be that somebody will throw a grenade inside your home or the shootings and everything. Maybe it's, you know, we thought the worst case.
We thought it's four people that got inside, four terrorists got inside, and... and, you know, the army will be there in a few minutes, and we will be okay. And then we get more messages from people from other places on the kibbutz that people are shooting next to their homes. People are shooting inside their homes. People are throwing grenades.
The alarms are continuing all the time. And we're feeling that a colossal chaos is going around us. We were... after they were in our home, they left our home and went and continued to other houses.
Then we started to hear that they were burning houses in our neighborhood. Three houses from us. They began to burn the houses over there.
While we were in the safe room, my wife took my phone, and she was with the phones. My phone and her phone because she didn't want me to see all the messages. I needed to be very sharp, and I needed to be very focused on the door and on holding the door. So she took it, and she did everything with the messages.
And after I... after the situation, I read these horrible messages. And my neighbor said very quickly, she said, "I'm choking, I'm going to die. I'm in my bomb shelter. Please, somebody, help me!"
And you hear the gunshots outside. And you understand that you can't go out because once you get out, you will get killed. A young group of people was there, very brave ones with no weapons. Their houses were also getting burned.
They went outside of their house, went to her house, through all the shooting, broke the window, and managed to pull her out.
And the whole thing took a few minutes. Yeah, but it was crazy. And then they went to another house to hide in the bomb shelter over there. Throughout the time, it was shooting all the time. The shooting stops and starts. Stops and starts.
We have a few minutes' break, and then it continues, and a few minutes' breaks, and it continues. I thought to myself, we should run to the car and run away from here. And my brilliant wife told me: "No, we're not going out."
I thought I might go out and try to see what's happening. And I just couldn't.
I knew I had my mother-in-law and my two small children inside the bomb shelter. They can't run as fast as we do. We can't just hold them and run.
Everything will delay us, and we won't get to the car. And also, we don't know what they did to the car, if it will start or not. We didn't want to get stuck outside. So, I remember all the time at the bomb shelter, the safe room. I was looking forward to life to see if we're going to get outside of this situation, if we will be able to see the daylight.
So for 12 hours, we were at the bomb shelter with no weapons, no food, no water, nothing. My children were fantastic. They were under the bed, quiet, not making a sound. And it was amazing that they played along with the situation. My wife and I thought that we must keep it cool so we wouldn't burn their minds about the trauma that we were going through. And the thing is that we didn't actually understand what was going on. There was a huge chaos. We didn't know that we had dozens of terrorists, approximately 40 or 50 terrorists, inside the kibbutz, shooting everywhere. They had RPGs, and they had weapons. They had grenades. Anything to do a massive massacre.
Around noon, I heard them getting inside again. And that was the time that I thought that that's it. They are inside, and they are coming towards the safe room. So I told my wife, "Get the kids under the bed. Be prepared. Once I tell you, you open the window and jump outside with the kids and... and my mother-in-law. And if they kill you outside, they kill you outside. And I will try to open the door on them, close it behind me, and try to fight with them to give you some time to run away to someplace."
And... as they were coming towards the room, they were shooting. They shot inside the house again and again and again. And I don't know what happened. But eventually, they went outside again and didn't come to the safe room. A miracle saved us. It was unbelievable.
Then we hear on the WhatsApp groups of the kibbutz that a few people are dead already, and we know that they are dead. Then, more houses have been burnt. And then came the message. I think it was a horrible message to send that the army is on its way.
And I thought: "We are here for six hours now."
[Interviewer]
What do you mean "That the army is on the way"?"
[Oren]
We thought that it was there, that the army was fighting for us now. To understand, we are all alone; it was horrible. And the army came only after ten hours.
After ten hours, we started to hear......a soldier got inside the house, and he said, "Tsahal! Tsahal!" [Tsahal = IDF] And he wanted us to open the door. We didn't allow him to open the door because we didn't know if it was him or a terrorist trying to get inside our safe room.
So he went inside, and then he went back outside, and we didn't hear from the army for a few more, a few more minutes, 10 minutes, 20, I don't know. And then they... they went... then I heard that... I heard voices in Hebrew talking from our front porch. So I told my wife: "Listen, I hear Hebrew talking. I'm sure it's... I'm sure it's the army." And she told me: "No, don't go outside." We had an argument. I should go outside and check it up or stay inside the safe room. So I told her eventually that I'm 100% sure that Hebrew and I think it's the IDF. So I went outside... I went outside the safe room and then through the corridor and the window. I have a small window there and saw that it's the army.
But the thing is, I thought to myself suddenly: "How am I going to tell them that... you know, so they won't shoot me when I'm calling them?" So I don't even remember what I said. And I said something, and then I opened the front door of my house, and they were shocked to see me coming to them. Then, I asked them if they needed anything. So they asked... ...apparently they were starting the fight a few, I don't know...
They were already in a fight, and they were hungry. They needed water. So I pulled some things from the fridge.
Then I saw that my house was totally broken, and I gave them what I could. Went back to the bomb shelter, to the safe room with my boy, with my wife. And at that point, we took a bag. We have a closet for my children. It's inside the safe room. So we took a bag and put some clothes inside because we thought: "If they manage if the army manages to let us out of here, we want to have some clothes with us." And we took a tiny bag with some clothes.
And they brought another person from the kibbutz to be with us at the safe room, from another place on the kibbutz, to be with us. So he sat with us for a few more hours. It was around two hours before the evacuation started.
The evacuation was also... ...it was crazy to be at the evacuation because they... an officer came into our house. He brought my neighbor, who almost got burned in her bomb shelter. And he said: "You want to... you want to evacuate?" So I said: "Yes, of course." And I thought they would take us with a bulletproof car or something like that. And he said, "Bring your car keys and bring everyone and go to your car."
And I went, and we took the kids, we ran to the car, we brought with us the other member of the kibbutz and the one that almost got burned. And we went inside the car. The car was all with... the glass was shattered, and everybody got inside, you know, at the back. We put the children on the ground on the glasses because we didn't want them to see, and we wanted them to be as safe as we could because we understood that there were still terrorists on the kibbutz. They are still shooting outside and inside the kibbutz. They were waiting in... we have plantations outside of the kibbutz.
So they were waiting there, and they were shooting all over the road. We have one road to go. So I was driving ...like crazy outside with shattered glass all over us.
And they told us where to go. We went to another kibbutz that was 20 minutes drive away from us. And the thing is that on the road to the other kibbutz, we see bodies on the road. We see cows burnt, totally burnt. We even saw a tank of the army going in flames.
And it was... ...it was crazy to see. You don't believe that you're in Israel. You think you're in Hollywood in a movie or something like that. It was unbelievable to see this part of the land was being conquered by a terror organization. Which is crazy.
When we got to the evacuation point and people from our kibbutz started to come, we couldn't believe the stories. Everybody burst into tears. We couldn't believe it... we began to understand who died and who got injured. And it was crazy. It was unbelievable. We... we still don't believe it. We still don't understand what happened there. It's... just crazy.
Our community is now trying to maintain its strength, but it's... it's not easy. We have 14 orphanage kids in the kibbutz. "Orphan"... "orphans". 14 orphans we have in the kibbutz. We have 16 people who got murdered, including two Thai workers and a worker from Moldova. They died. They killed a Holocaust survivor who was 92 years old. They tried to kidnap kids. And it was a—
[Interviewer]
What was his name?
[Oren]
Of who?
[Interviewer]
Tell me later.
[Oren]
I'll tell you later.
I'm so sorry. Sorry. Moishe Riedler. Sorry.
[Interviewer]
No, that's a lot of..
[Oren]
Yeah. I want to say some stuff about... about this war. The people that got murdered were peace-seeking people. We are a peace-seeking community.
Most of the communities along the border with Gaza are peace-seeking communities. We used to have friends from Gaza. We used to work with them on our plantations, in our cow sheds, and inside the kibbutz. We used to do... we used to have relationships with them. After every operation, after everything, something like that, we called each other. We asked what was going on and if everybody was safe and okay. And I want to say that the Palestinians lost this war twice because they lost people that tried to do the best for them.
I will take, for example, Dr. Haim Katzman, who was murdered protecting another girl on the kibbutz. He was in a group of people who brought people from the border with Gaza with health issues to hospitals inside Israel. He used to do it twice, three times a week.
[Interviewer]
And voluntarily
[Oren]
Voluntarily, obviously. He used to wait with them over there and take them back. These are the kind of people that we... we have and... so they lost twice. They lost the people who were trying to think of their benefits, who were trying to find a solution, that was trying to say, "Let's have peace and not war."
That's once. And the second thing is that Hamas knows that they are not going to conquer Israel on that day. They knew that the retaliation of Israel would be double and triple what they did. So they put death on the Palestinians on that day.
So we lost peace, and we lost more Palestinians also. This is bad for both sides. And I'm afraid about what's going to happen to this war. A few days after this day, we... we had people invasion... invading our homes and stealing stuff from our homes when we were not there. And the thing is, on that day, the terrorists came first. But after them came the Palestinians to rob our homes.
But a few days later, they found more of them stealing and robbing our homes, which is crazy, also. Also, we're not allowed to get to our home in Holit. Some of the bodies... It took time. It took us time to bury all of our dead because, on some of the bodies, they put grenades. They put bombs on them, and they put bombs inside the houses that once you open the door or once you try to lift something above the body, a grenade will be blown.
And... I went to Holit yesterday. I went up to Holit yesterday for the first time. After the army cleared some of the houses, we tried to... and... and I went there and the damages they did to our means of production, infrastructure,
and homes. The damage is... The psychological damage that this community has to go through now is enormous, and most of us are trying to think that we will go back to it. We will go and establish Holit again. But we need more answers before we will be able to do it. We have a lot of questions to ask before we do it.
[Interviewer]
Do you have any pictures? If you went back now, did you take some pictures or anything?
[Oren]
I was overwhelmed, so I didn't take pictures. And actually, the people told me, "Did you-- Do you have pictures and everything?"
So I didn't take pictures. I tried to deal with the mess that we have in our infrastructure. So I tried to fix some pipes and stuff like that. And I went inside my home, and I saw my home. It was... unbelievable. We tried when we got outside; it was essential to my wife and me when we were evacuated; it was necessary to my wife and me that the children wouldn't see the mess we had inside the house. So we tried to cover their eyes, but we couldn't, and they saw it and were totally shocked by it.
After a few... they started to talk, and they began to say: "But what happened to our home? How are we going to fix it? How are we going to do it? How? Why did they do it?" And two amazing things happened with my children. My children are very connected to Holit. So when I went-- What?
[Interviewer]
How old are they again?
[Oren]
Eight years old, Tamari, who is the girl, and Beri, who is six years old.
We just celebrated last Saturday. We celebrated, he's six years old and two amazing things with these children... ...because yesterday my daughter told me she understood that I'm going to Holit. So she said, "Dad, can you bring us a... in a jar, some sand of Holit, please? And some leaves from some trees? I want to feel it. I want to touch it. I miss Holit."
On the other hand, my son says we talk very carefully about Holit every time. We try not to say too many things, but He says: "I don't want to talk about Holit. Don't talk to me about Holit." And then he starts to burst into tears because it's his home, and it's painful for him that we had to go through this.
And my daughter asked my wife yesterday, "Is father is going to get shot? Is he going to come safe? Is everything going to be okay when... when he will be there?"
And when I was there, I had to be as cold with a soldier with me; a soldier was coming with me and protecting me while I was going... trying to fix the things on the kibbutz.
It was tough to see that they shot the cows. ... every day now, we have 2 or 3 cows dying at the cow sheds because of the trauma because they are not getting the treatment that they need. We are trying to milk them with some volunteers because we need to take the milk from them. Otherwise, they suffer, and we pour the milk into the sewer. And this is our livelihood. So... they went to the chicken pens, released the chickens, and put a grenade on the gate so that he would be blown when someone tried to open the gate to put them back.
So they thought about almost everything. They knew that they were going to do mass destruction to people who were seeking peace in their lives. As I was saying, I believe that peace could have happened if this terror organization hadn't been established; if world leaders, also Israeli leaders, would have wanted, we would have been able to do so much with the money that poured on Israel and on Gaza throughout this time.
Israel is a crazy country. Building in billions of dollars bomb shelters for buildings, for houses along the border with Gaza. Building the colossal fence that it made. Building a psychological center so people like us could have resilience throughout the time, throughout these 20 years, that rockets are being sent at our kibbutzim, at our moshavim, at our homes, it built everything to make us live up for it. But it didn't create the peace.
And also, on the other side, there are world leaders who could have done something. The Jewish people are people who are seeking peace throughout all of his history, thousands of years. We have songs about it. We are being grown on that knowledge of peace. And, sadly, this is what it had to come to. Thousands of lives were dead, missing, and tortured by both sides.
[Interviewer]
Thank you for doing that.
[Oren]
We must tell the story of Holit, our small, beautiful community thriving before that. And... and the voice of, we need to talk about peace. Thank you.
The video of the interview:
This series is also available on The View From Israel Website.