I've been trying to imagine Elan Siegel today, waking up on her birthday, which happens to be the sixth morning since her nightmare has ended, when her first thought can finally be "Dad is back," instead of what had been agonizing thoughts for days and weeks and months of time that stretched absolutely nowhere for 482 days.
For 16 months, she couldn’t know anything other than what her mother Aviva had come out of Gaza saying - that it was the worst hell a human could endure, and that she had been forced to leave her Keith behind, all by himself - her life partner of forty years - who had been shot on October 7th, 2023, and had his ribs broken when he was pushed into his own car to be taken into Gaza. He received no treatment in captivity by his captors (or "the Red Cross") for any of this and had been left to sleep alone in the dark on a yoga mat.
This is what Elan knew of her father's condition as of November 2023 and these were the nightmares she was left to contend with, each and every day since, as a young Mom with plenty of other responsibilities, until his release last Saturday morning, February 1st, on Day 483 of this nightmare.
I imagine that since Saturday, there must be a moment each morning, a flicker of awareness when she realizes she is no longer in that hell of not knowing, and it must take a minute to digest this – that he is home – that after 16 months of horror and agony – that her father is back in Israel at long last, and that he came back to her family alive.
But her family’s journey is long from over. They may not be in the torturous agony that so many families across Israel are still in, but as the bracelets we all wear read, "Until all the taken are returned - we are all taken."
As I wrote this tonight, I anxiously awaited the list for tomorrow's releases, and I know it's okay for me to mention other hostages because that is the thing. Since my conversation with Elan, I have seen her posts, and like all of the hostage families, even when one family receives good news about their loved one, they are not selfishly elated for their own good fortune. These “hostage families” have become a family of their own during this epic communal trauma, and until every hostage in home, there is truly no rejoicing.
Within 48 hours of Keith’s return to Israel, his wife Aviva and daughter Shir did a press conference to keep up the pressure and the fight to continue the negotiations to get to Phase Two of this deal – to make sure every hostage returns home.
If anyone reading this thinks that sounds strange, then try this on. Keith Siegel himself came out of Gaza last Saturday white as a ghost and thin and frail. His first words were, “I’m back, I’m home,” and then he asked, “What can I do to get the rest of the hostages home?”
This says two things – that this is who we are in Israel – we are not only out for ourselves – and - the urgency of the situation in Gaza. I have read in recent days that Keith was forced to lie down at all times for his last two months there. I have also read that he had to write some sort of letter before getting out, something like a "thank you" to Hamas. I have not verified these things, but it gives a sense, a tiny sense of the torturous brutality this man endured.
The stories are going to come out slowly, and they are going to be excruciating, so though Elan may not be in the exact hell that she miraculously survived for 482 days, she is now embarking on a different phase of this journey of being a hostage family - of helping her 65-year-old father rehabilitate after his inhumane ordeal as a hostage in the tunnels of Gaza, and of continuing to fight for the remaining hostages to be brought home.
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At first, she’d had to fight for both her parents - Aviva and Keith - but Elan was sure they'd be returned in mere hours...and then she was sure it would only be a matter of days.
She never could have imagined that the fight to bring her mom back from Gaza would take 51 days and that this would be nothing compared to what lay ahead of her, to bring home her American father, her Chapel Hill, North Carolina-raised father named Keith, the youngest of four, and the darling of his mother Gladys - a mother who just passed away at the age of 97 - which turned out to be less than 90 days before her son would finally be set free.
Gladys was shielded by her surroundings and by her "not being all there" so was unaware of the reality that her darling Keith and daughter-in-law Aviva were being held hostage by Hamas terrorists. She did not know this was the case for the last year of her life.
October 7th in America
I heard about Keith just days after October 7th. I was alone in Charlotte, reeling from the news of the attack, and remembered how Israeli I was (and still am), having made Aliyah when I was younger, yet I was alone in North Carolina on October 7th, and the phone did not ring for days - and then weeks.
I saw Keith’s brother Lee on CNN and was floored to learn there was a hostage in Gaza, that was born in California and raised in North Carolina.
I only survived 37 days of this excruciating silence alone with my TV, watching the families of hostages begging for help, alternating with the global celebrations of what Hamas did to our people - and I had to get on a plane to Israel for the first time in eleven years.
This website was launched, and as I began to speak with the families of hostages, my quest to find a family member of "Keith Siegel from North Carolina" began.
As it turned out, this was quite a challenging mission.
It would take until November of 2024 to meet Lee, Keith's brother, in Hostage Square, but when I reached out a couple of weeks later, I sadly learned of the death of their dear mother.
I then finally had a lovely conversation with Keith's daughter Elan, after which I waited to speak with Aviva, who has been speaking out (or shall I say screaming out) since her release more than a year ago - both in Hebrew and in English - to anyone who will listen - about not only what she and Keith went through in Gaza - but about all of the horrors they witnessed and listened to, which included the near beating-to-death of one of the young female hostages.
Aviva has been one of the strongest voices in this fight to free the hostages and it was an honor to speak with her albeit briefly, but I continued to tell her we could wait until she had more time...and a day after I said this - a deal was finally signed!
And Keith was on it.
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Keith's Story
Keith came to visit Israel when he was 20 as his brother Lee had already made Aliyah. He was on Kibbutz Gezer when he met Aviva, who was “instantly in love with him.”
In this whirlwind romance, they got married, much to the dismay of Keith’s parents back in the US, who were so upset that he didn’t prioritize his studies, that they didn’t come to the wedding in Israel!
“Really?” I exclaimed, on the video chat with Elan.
She laughed for a second.
“Actually, when saying that, I think about myself. I kind of had the same story. I met my husband at the army. I got married after five months and my Dad really didn’t like it because he wanted me to wait and study first...I haven't thought about that in awhile..."
I was happy to see her smile and to have a happy memory, as she told me this sad story.
But following their wedding, they did a 10-month trip to the US and things got patched up quickly with his parents, as Aviva and his mom got on very well.
Keith and Aviva were looking for a “young Kibbutz” and ultimately found and fell in love with Kfar Aza in the south of Israel.
“We had an amazing childhood there. It was a peaceful and quiet place, until I was about 14…and then it was not so peaceful – and not so quiet.
My sister Shir and I would beg to move somewhere else, but my Dad would say that if we leave, everyone would leave, and that keeping the community was important, and that the statistics of something happening to us by a missile were so incredibly low – lower than a car accident - which was true – but then our neighbor got killed by a missile."
Elan's Story - October 7th
Elan was on a kibbutz near Eilat on October 7th and woke up from a call from somebody concerned about the sirens in Tel Aviv. She turned on the news and saw “the mess in the south.”
She contacted her Dad who said they were fine and locked in their safe room. She let him know there were terrorists in Israel, which he didn’t know – though she hadn’t yet seen that they were in Kfar Aza.
He said their phone batteries were low, so if they stopped responding not to worry.
She started to hear enough things from friends that she figured out something bad was happening – that parents weren’t answering phones and that a husband went out and never came back.
“I knew in my mind that if they’re in the safe room locked in, that nothing would happen. I wasn’t worried – at all.”
Elan continued to use the word “locked,” so I finally said, “Wait – does their saferoom lock?”
She took a breath and said, “Until that day, we all thought they locked – because when you closed the door, you turned the handle to lock it - but it turned out they didn’t. So, my parents were just sitting inside not worrying about anything. Even when they heard Arabic right outside the house, they didn’t worry. But no – it wasn’t locked.”
9:45am was the last message exchanged with her parents – and she assumed their phone batteries had simply died.
She switched to communicating with her brother Shay, who was also on the Kibbutz, and answering, but he had no idea what was going on, and was actually joking around about the soldiers in his place eating his favorite chocolate.
“After that we were just waiting, and waiting, and crying and screaming and waiting…we tried to think positive thoughts. We avoided the news, thinking that we needed to know they were out first.”
That was a good idea, I thought - wow.
Her brother Shay was rescued the morning of October 8th, so she thought this was the beginning of the rescues and that her parents would be rescued soon – but she was wrong – the army couldn’t get close.
The terrorists were all over the place.
She then reached an officer she knew who was in the Kibbutz and gave him her parents’ house’s location. He asked her to tell her parents to open the window.
“I have no connection. You have to shout. Say ‘Elan and Shir are calling.' Please – if they’re not alive – please let me know.’ I…didn’t think that they were dead, but I thought that the feeling of not knowing anything was so big – that I was prepared to hear the worst news.”
He got back to me: “Your parents are not in the house. The house is empty.”
I told him that was impossible, and to check under the beds and in the closets – to check again, but…
“Our next-door neighbors saw my parents being taken from their house to the parking lot. Then we understood. But – we were really optimistic about the army returning them really quickly. We thought that it would be the same day. We thought, ‘Gaza is so close, Hamas is so weak, all the things we were told all those years – and the army is so strong and smart – it will take them like a few hours – and they will get everyone home.’
"I remember that day. I told my sister that I’m not going to sleep because I’m waiting for my parents to come home.”
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I then asked her how she had survived all of this time, and also…how she had been when it was both of her parents for close to two months, to this much longer time…this endless amount of time…fighting for her father.
“That’s a good question,” she said. “Day by day reality.”
“At the beginning, it’s a matter of hours. Then – it’s a matter of days. Like – I couldn’t imagine it would take 51 days until my mother was home but the urgency of this topic…it felt like all of Israel was with us and it felt like everyone was not going back to their lives – like there were kids inside, and…it was a different period of time.
The waiting then was different from the waiting now, like I’d wake up in the middle of the night and check the news and think all the time it could happen tomorrow, but after my mom was released and weeks passed, it shifted to a different way of coping...
Sometimes, I would say to myself, ‘Just know that maybe he is not alive anymore,’ and I’d say to myself. ‘Don’t be surprised if someone comes from the army and says he’s not alive anymore,’ or ‘know that you would have to raise your kids – or MIGHT – without ever knowing – what happened to him.’
It sounds weird, but it was my way protecting myself from the big surprise that might happen, from the big ‘knocking on the door from the army.’”
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She told me that her parents were moved constantly in Gaza, that most of the time they were in houses, but that they were also in tunnels for a few days, where neither of them could breathe, and so they were moved. She said they could feel something different was happening when Aviva’s release was about to happen – they could feel that there was some kind of ceasefire.
The Hamas terrorists didn’t let them show any kind of emotion during their time in captivity. They weren’t allowed to cry or laugh.
They were told that Israel didn’t exist anymore, and that Kfar Aza was theirs, so when Aviva was told she was going back to Israel and that Keith wasn’t, she had no idea where they were taking her – but she knew she had to leave him behind.
She and Keith had just been separated for the first time at this house, and the terrorists didn’t want to let her say goodbye to him, but she pushed past them in order to tell him goodbye.
“They told me that I’m going to Israel,” she told her husband. “I don’t believe them, but please be strong for me, and I will be strong for you.”
Aviva repeated this statement on every news channel since and said that she’s sure this was a mantra on repeat in her husband’s head as he lay in Gaza suffering, helping him to survive.
And now Keith is out – and as time goes on – we may one day know how he survived an additional year and two months without his wife in that hell, lying on a yoga mat with broken ribs and an untreated gunshot wound, at the age of 64 and turning 65.
But he did survive.
“I have moments of hope and imagining me seeing my Dad and hugging him and making him something to eat…
And then back to reality.
But I am – I feel – like something good will happen – something good will happen this time…”
Oh Elan – HAPPY BIRTHDAY. He's HOME.
“Thank you for doing your important job,” was the last thing Elan said to me on our January call, so let me respond to that, with:
“Thank you for talking to me - and thank you for being my first family story with a happy ending."
However...
At the start of this article, I mentioned that we were awaiting a list here in Israel. Well - I am happy to announce that should tomorrow go smoothly, I will have my second happy ending with the family of hostage Or Levy, whose brother Michael I interviewed one year ago, as Or will be coming home to his three-year-old son Almog tomorrow, along with Ohad Ben Ami and Eli Sharabi of Kibbutz Be'eri. You can read Or's story here.
To more happy endings for these families across Israel until every hostage is home.
To the Siegel family – may the light of Shabbat bring you all healing through the next phase of this journey. I know you will continue to fight to bring the rest of the hostages home, but also heal your souls and your hearts as best you can - this has been a grueling time.
And Keith – you are a survivor and an inspiration. My deepest condolences about your dear mother. I can't wait to meet you one day. Rest - breathe - heal. WELCOME HOME.
This post is dedicated to the memory of Gladys Siegel – may her memory be a blessing.
In case you want to help:
This is a labor of love and I feel called to do it, but admit it has started to cost a small fortune, between flights, rent in the US, accommodation in Israel and the building of this website. I have therefore started a GoFundMe in the hopes of getting a little bit of help to stay here another month or two to conduct these interviews with families of hostages and cover the war from the ground. Any donation, no matter how small, will go toward accommodation and bare bone travel expenses. Anything at all will be tremendously helpful and very much appreciated. With gratitude, Melanie
What a beautiful birthday gift. May they all come safely home. 🙏