E01: Profiles In Horror & Courage - Tal Ben-Dor
Tal Ben-Dor 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.
There is no natural order to which witness I place first, second, and so on. It is simply a matter of pure random choice. (But we all know there is almost no such thing as “pure random” in mathematics, but that is a subject for AI and my papers on Chaos, Complexity and Emergence.)
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 sentence usage, wrong word usage, etc. This is not meant to be an edited piece for the NYT or a Newsletter. It is raw. It is real. 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. I know this is my POV, but I do not see why there is a question of why there should not be at the very least 100K subscribers just to read this series. Perhaps that is hubris or wishful thinking. I will accept that.
Tal Ben-Dor Bearing Witness:
Okay, hi, my name is Tal Ben-Dror. I'm 31 years old, and I'm going to share with you what happened at the party at the Nova Festival on October 7th.
From my eyes, there were around 15 people, and we came with a minibus from Azul. We arrived around 2 a.m., and we waited for other friends of us.
Eventually, we started dancing around 6:00 a.m. and saw it was a big festival.
I didn't know the number of people in the audience. It was, uh, there were thousands of people, but there were also policemen and security and paramedics, so I felt uh safe, and uh around 6:30 or 6:40, I think uh, we started to see rockets in the sky, and we knew there's the Iron Dome is doing a great job. We saw it, um, but we saw there were many, many Rockets.
I understood this level that the party was over, but I was still calm, and I was my service was around Gaza, so I was used to it. I wasn't panicked, and then I saw some security guys start shouting and waving with their hands, and they said on the mic, people, the party is over.
You have 15 seconds to go away from here, and uh, then we went to our place when where all our stuff was, and we started packing our things, and we waited for the minibus driver.
He arrived around 20 minutes later, but then we decided to wait for because we knew there was going to be a lot of traffic and people would drive like crazy because everyone panicked, so we decided to wait until after. It was a smart decision afterward because of what happened there with the cars.
And so, we waited, and then when we went up to the minibus and sat there, some guys started shouting. Terrorists are on the way. Run for your lives, and everything happened really, really fast. We ran so fast, and we split.
We were five people running with many, many other people, and then ER, we heard a lot of shooting close to us, and we saw someone get wounded in her leg. She got two shots in her leg, and then we started to hide, and we hid in the bushes, and after a few minutes, we started running again because they started shooting again. And I saw some guys helping them to the girl who got the shots, and um, we ran like this, I think, around 3 hours.
We hid in the bushes, we hid behind trees, we hid everywhere possible. but we kept on moving that was our smart decision also and our luck. as well because we heard we heard the shooting really close to us all the time we were so many people and so many people crying and shouting, um, at this time.
I was busy, um, making sure my family was not panicked because my father had a heart attack a week ago; I played like everything was cool. I acted like everything was okay; I was available while I was under fire, um, and when they called, I woke up immediately so that they wouldn’t hear any shooting, any crying, or any shouting, and I didn't look back.
I was afraid to look back. My friend who was behind me saw them. They were really close to us. We were running on the terrible road with the cars and with no one inside that they were destroyed by shooting and I saw I saw blood, but I tried not to look down so that I wouldn't see any dead bodies.
I just look at my friends, um, that this way and that's it, um, and uh, then we found another friend of ours. ER and I walked together. He had a shocker (ex. by the editor: “a water carrier – like a canteen”) in his bag, so we had some water because it was really, really hot. I think there were hundreds of people running together with one policeman who looked desperate, and we had no idea what we would do.
Someone told us to go to Patish, but we saw on Google Maps it's 15 km from here, and we already ran something like 7 kilometers, so we were afraid that we wouldn't make it, and after 3 hours, we saw some cars on the right side.
I was on the road just waiting, and my friend said, "Let's go there. Maybe we can get some help. We won't stay alive if we don't get out of here without a car.
And in the beginning, no one wanted to go. They were afraid. The second time, I told him I thought it was a logical statement, let's do it, and then our friends agreed also, and we walked and ran to them for 10 minutes. ER the IDF told them to go away, but my friend waved with his hands, and this way, they saved us; um, they were producers of the Midburn festival who came to prepare the area, and they just came to save people. They drove with a car to protect people, and they saved us, um, we went to a farm in Tal, and we hid there for six hours.
It was a miracle because other Farms were destroyed. The terrorists came there really quickly and slaughtered people, and we just had luck; we sat there with the Ducks and the horses and just hearing the bombs exploding, but no shooting anymore at this level. They gave us a charger, water, food, mental support, everything. We were really confused at this time. We didn't know what was going on with our other friends.
We had friends that came independently by car, not with the minibus. Um, my sister called the police so many times, and the police told her we were desperate, and that was the answer. we waited and waited, and they didn't eventually.
What we did our decision was to go away independently with the cars of The Producers because the only guy there who had an arm decided to leave. I told them to stay alone on that farm between PTI and Reim in the evening. It's a suicide. We won't do that, so uh, we drove. It worked, and we got home to the center of Israel around 700 p.m. um, and then we heard more and more about our friends.
One got injured from an RPG in his back, and we still didn't have any answers about one of our friends, Shona, one of our friends who came with the car and also our driver.
Only a week after that, we understood that our friend had and our driver also. I thought it was going to be a collective Miracle follow our group, but I didn't, and we have so many other stories about our friends.
We had two friends who couldn't run, so we put them in the car of some people, um, but we still don't understand how it happened since the IDF and the police authorized the party. If so if not, I wouldn't go and uh, we still can't even understand this genocide that happened.
All that time you've been with your family, uh, on the phone, yeah. Still, via WhatsApp messages, yeah, and when they called me, I told them not to bye and hung up, and if they started crying, I all got angry. I couldn't, um, I couldn't control my emotions, um, I was like a machine at that point.
Um, we had friends who were crying. I was the one that needed to stay strong and even have black humor. I started saying what an experience with like partisans. I had the experience of telling our grandchildren, but I wouldn't. I would prefer to give up on that experience, that's for sure.
Um, yes, I was really available because I knew how scared they were. They wrote to me messages we heard terrorists were there and they knew I was at the Music party. I couldn't not I couldn't.
Did you see it or not at all?
I didn’t see the friend behind me see them it was like Amora. I didn't want to look back. I was afraid that if I looked, he would put his eyes on me, and that's it. That's how I felt, but they were just behind my back.
Tell me, what was the hardest moment for you at the time?
Yeah, I think, uh, the second we ran through the cars, even more than the injured girl screaming, and everything was really hard, but running through those cars, it felt like an illusion like I was in some horror movie to see all those cars with no people inside with the doors open, smell bleeding blood of people and all I said, don't look right, don't look left, just straight, just straight forward, and I felt like I felt the dead bodies. Even though I didn't see them, I felt it.
I felt an environment of death for so many young people who just wanted to celebrate life. When you go to that kind of party, you know how to love how people spread love to each other; everyone is a friend to everyone, and, ironically, it happened at a party like this.
Ironically, the hatred is like the total opposite, but I look at our story as a miracle. I look at it as a miracle we survived to tell me what was going on when you came home.
What was going on there? How did you feel about your family and your friends?
I think I was awake for 30 hours, and I could sleep only three. I felt the adrenaline and the cortisol; I felt I was prepared for the terrorists even when I was already safe. My family was really excited to see [me]. My sister cried. My nephew started asking me questions I didn't know how to answer.
They were really worried about me, but I've got so much love from people, and so many people cared, and I feel really lucky about it.
It took time, and it still takes time to move on. I don't think it's really possible at the moment. We're still at war, and we hear horror stories here every day. Each one has a friend who lost someone or a family member who lost someone. It's not only that they did it in a sadistic way, in a cruel way, and people compare it to a second Holocaust.
And all my life, I've been educated about it that we will remember and won't forget and won't let it happen again, so we really felt abandoned. We really felt abandoned by our government. How come you approve a festival of 3,000 or 4,000 people? Where is the IDF? Where is the police?
It wasn't enough, and we go a lot to the Farms of the people that were saved from the party that was, and it helps; yes, it helps. I think it's really helpful, and it shows a lot about the solidarity of our people with the Israeli people who eventually saved us as resident civilians. It means a lot. I think our country is beautiful, and now people are lovely. I didn't see how we help each other in any other country, and I've lived in another country, and I can't compare anything to that.
And where do you live?
I lived in Brazil for two months, 3 months okay, but every time I hear stories, it's not the same as in Israel. We help each other with all our hearts. Also, my friends saved people there when they took the head of a girl so that she wouldn't fall, or my friend who brought that car found that car that could take our two friends who couldn't run, and he saved them.
It's really ironic because before the party, um, my friends sent the map of the festival. I told them I had disorientation I would get lost, and my friend told me not to worry; we'll put our eyes on you. I said, okay, now I feel safe, and they really did, yeah they really did, and you felt safe with them more than ever in this kind of situation if I were alone. I didn't know what would have happened.
How many friends were with you?
Five, we were altogether five people at the beginning of seven. Still, two of them went with that car, and the other friends had a different story; yeah, each one has a different story. My friends are heroes. I really look at them as heroes, and you, yes, but I still sometimes don't know how to explain, maybe like de-personalization, that I don't believe this person was me. Do you know what I'm saying? I still can't believe it was me all along I felt.
Sometimes, I was disconnected because I couldn't contain everything happening.
Everything happened so fast just a few minutes ago, we danced the stage, celebrating life no one could ever imagine a terror attack like this
So how do you feel these days?
Um, it's getting better from week to week. It's improving, but still, it's still all the time in my mind, and I still didn't get back to work, I still focus on interviewing and telling share my story with the world because people from outside usually don't understand, and I think it's really important that the world will know and won't keep quiet, and I also go to volunteer. Yes, I went twice to prepare some food for soldiers and uh, I really think everyone needs support at the moment.
It's like a collective trauma for Israel for all the Israelis, of course, and also people who weren't there from the videos that Hamas sent. Even at the farm, I got some video with the three hostages hostage. The people kidnapped people. I was so afraid to find out about my friends there.
I was still in danger when I saw it was by accident, I didn't understand that how I don’t think we understood the level of danger because we didn't know there were 2,000 terrorists, we didn't understand the number or the
numbers only when we got back home did, we understand how big and terrible it was and each story of my friend is really shocking in a bad way.
So, you have a message for the people who watch you now all over the world? um that I really, really want to say, please, I really, really need your support because that thing is a crime against humanity.
It's not about politics at the moment. It's a crime against humanity. What happens is genocide, and uh, unfortunately, I had the story that if my friends from aboard, um, sent me messages that were anti-Israeli, and she talked about the Palestinians who died. I told her I'm not sad, and I'm not happy about the Palestinians who died, but you can't ignore the Jewish blood, you can't ignore the people here that got murdered because it's anti-Semitism and what happened in the Holocaust can't happen again.
We need to avoid that because if not, you're next, sorry. That's the truth. They will kill Christians as well they killed the Chinese people, Thailand people, Arabic people; our driver of the minibus was Arab they didn't care about it. Wow they slaughtered him.
So, your friend Chona and the driver?
Yes, she was a good friend for you, she was a part of our group. I have known her for 6 months already. She came to celebrate her 40th birthday. She has a husband and two children, and we felt so bad about it because she loved celebrating life she loved dancing, she went to festivals all the time, she loved Music, and she was such a good person we won't forget her.
This series is also available on The View From Israel Website.
Thank you for doing this Ted. I know it can't be easy. It's not easy to read.