A dog’s longing for a wolf in the woods

I spent the morning of 7 October in Bethesda, near Washington, at the home of Polish Jews Basia and Marek, March ’68 émigrés whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Our breakfast was interrupted by the telephone, and a string of updates on the fate of my hosts’ Israeli family and friends. At that time, people were just getting to know the names of the kibbutzim that had been attacked, as well as the faces of the hostages who would later appear repeatedly in the news: Naama Levy, the young women in bloody pajama bottoms, their hands tied behind their backs, Shani Louk trussed up on the back of a pickup truck like a sacrificial animal, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose forearm had been blown off by a grenade, or Eden Yerushalmi, a bartender at the Nova Music Festival, the scene of one of the largest massacres. Today we know that none of them are alive.