“I have one mission in life. To bring my brother back for his two-year old son," Michael said. "That's my goal."
It was 6:45pm on January 1st, 2024, and I was with Michael Levy in his home in a suburb of Tel Aviv, having asked that we meet face to face, as opposed to over Zoom.
“I want to get a real sense of who you are, as a family member of someone taken hostage by Hamas, and the toll this has taken on you and your family.”
I exited the elevator in a high rise and approached his door, which was covered in children’s drawings, with shoes of all sizes stacked outside it, just like any other home in any other country.
Michael opened the door in jeans, a blue shirt and bare feet, a perfectly normal guy even if he’s 6’5". He is a member of one of 136 remaining families supported by the "Family Forum," the volunteer organization that was created in the aftermath of the October 7th massacre, and the only place he can now be himself, as 'he doesn't have the saddest story in the room.'
His nine-year-old daughter and one of his six-year-old twins were both shy, curious and sweet to me, because you know – they are little girls. At least they look like little girls.
He led me to the balcony which had lots of comfortable seating and plants, and I sat down for my 'first family interview.'
The truth was I already knew most of his brother’s story, as his dad and uncles had shared it with me in what has become known as 'Hostage Square,' so I wasn’t concerned that his words would traumatize me.
Yet starting a night or two later, all I could picture was his brother Or – which means light in Hebrew – below the ground in a tunnel. I visualized his brother glowing – a light radiating from him and through the mazes of dungeons built by terrorists, a light that snakes its way through twists and turns, as if chasing a ghost in Pac-Man, all the way up to freedom.
I know this is what Michael is doing, not picturing Pac-Man exactly, but imagining his brother down there the way his brother is up here, as a bright light. “He talks to everyone. He becomes friends with everyone. He helps everyone. He fixes everything. That is what I imagine…that if he can find a way to be…useful – to his captors – to keep himself…”
Alive, he didn’t say. To keep himself alive.
And his brother must survive this, because otherwise his two-year-old son Almog will be an orphan.
“Send it to me when you’re done,” he said as I left his apartment.
“Of course,” I said, smiling. “Knowing me I’ll probably get it done tonight.”
That was on Day 86 of this nightmare. Today is Day 115.
--
Michael Levy awoke to what sounded like sirens at 6:34am on October 7th.
“At first, I thought it was part of my dream or something, because it didn’t sound real. Saturday morning? Sirens? What’s happening?”
But when he woke up his wife, she could hear them, too.
“We turned on the TV. You could see all the alarms and where they were. The screen was full of them, then another one and another one, and then I saw my parents’ area.”
He immediately called his mother to ask if they were okay.
“Yeah, we’re okay,” his mom said, “but I spoke to Or and Eynav. They went to a party in - near Gaza.”
Michael didn’t know anything about this party. He didn't even know there was a party, nor that his younger brother and sister-in-law were going to it, but his mother said they told her they were heading back north, so he wasn’t worried.
"I watched the news like everyone else."
Much like in the US during the early hours of September 11th, there was a lot of confusion.
“The news was showing trucks with terrorists driving around. My initial thought was that it must be 'Fake ISIS News,' but then I saw an Israeli police car."
Okay - so a few terrorists had somehow gotten into Israel, he thought.
But then the news started to show people calling in from their homes in the south near Gaza.
“We heard horrible calls from people, of people actually crying for help, saying that there are terrorists outside. There was one girl who said she saw a video of her father being kidnapped, and she was crying and saying that she’s afraid and that she’s in a bomb shelter in her house, but she can hear terrorists, and then she started whispering...because they were actually right outside.
It didn’t even seem real to anybody here. Nobody thought this could happen, so at first, I was worried because – something is happening in Israel – something crazy – but I wasn’t too worried about Or because I thought ‘Okay, they're heading back, they should be here soon'...
But then my mother called me around 8:30am crying and saying that she’s worried as she doesn’t know what happened to Or, that she’d spoken to him – and now she couldn’t reach him. I told her, ‘Mom. relax. He told us he’s heading back. There are probably issues with the lines or something. He’ll call us very soon because they’re on their way back.’
I kept watching the news, and only after like – almost two hours – 10:15 – my uncle called. I speak to him from time to time, but I wasn’t prepared for this call.
He asked ‘Did you hear something from Or? Did you talk to him?’
I told him, no, my mother had spoken to him and he'd said that they were heading back.
And my uncle said 'okay,' and…
I remember hanging up the phone, and feeling – like something happened. Something bad. Something didn’t add up here. Why should he call me and ask about Or? It’s so strange…
And then I…became worried.”
At that point Michael panicked.
“I started calling hospitals obsessively, 50 times an hour. All of them. 'Did you see someone who looks like Or and Eynav?' At one point, they actually knew who I was when I called and said ‘Oh, we didn’t see them yet, but there’s a lot of confusion, so try again in an hour, or 30 minutes,’ – so I did.”
He then started finding lists of people who had somehow survived the party, but Or and Eynav weren’t on them.
“Every hour you’d see a new list, and Facebook posts and stories on Instagram with people saying they’d seen this guy or that guy. They even gave the number for the party's producer, but there was no answer."
The news kept showing people who were hiding in the bushes or somewhere else – coming out - but Or and Eynav were never there.
“I actually don’t remember sleeping too much that night. Maybe 30 minutes. I woke up the next morning and kept looking through lists, calling the police and reporting them missing.”
His parents were then asked to bring in something of Or’s – a toothbrush or something with DNA on it.
“By then, there’d been so many reports, that people had started volunteering.”
“Volunteering to go to the south?” I asked him.
“To go to the south, to organize the lists, the 'Family Forum' was created...I called all of them, at least the ones I could find, and kept calling hospitals until…Sunday evening I think?
When I suddenly saw a story – of one of the survivors, with Or! I saw Or in the bomb shelter that they were hiding in.”
I stared at him, horror-struck, but he continued rapidly.
“I pretty much watched every second of it, frame by frame, to try to figure out where it was. I saw cars outside, so somehow with the help of a good friend, we found a car license plate, and through that we found who was inside the bomb shelter, and it turned out that [the car] belonged to the father of one of the survivors, and this survivor was actually in a hospital, so we sent Or and Eynav’s picture, and the father said that once his son wakes up, (because he was shot or something and had surgery), he would ask him...
So we waited...
When his son woke up, he said he had seen them, but only prior to the attack. He remembered them as the couple who kept saying they didn’t want to worry their families."
I listened to Michael as he took me through the detective work he had done for days and nights on end, through this modern-day online labyrinth and "quest for clues."
"We then got another video of the terrorists coming into the shelter, and throwing grenades into it and spraying bullets into it, and we started hearing all the rumors and saw horrible videos…but I still couldn’t find out anything about them.”
Then Michael saw the outside of the shelter. There was a painting of a bird on it, and he learned that this shelter was a contribution from an American organization, and through google he managed to find the artist who’d painted the bird on the shelter.
“We needed to know where it was located, and if there was only one painting like this or a few, and now we’d finally figured out where it was and it was very close to Re’im.”
Re’im is where the Nova Music Festival was – the festival where more than 350 young people were savagely raped, murdered and taken hostage.
“But they were still missing. Eynav was last seen at 7:43am and Or was last seen at 7:39am, which was actually the last call with my mother, which ended with ‘Mom, you don’t want to know what’s going on here,’ – that was his last sentence.”
I stared at him.
“Yeah,” Michael said, agreeing with my expression.
“On the phone or in a text?” I asked, as if it mattered.
“On the phone. On the phone with my mother – completely terrified."
Michael and his family, along with Eynav’s family, had to wait four days - four days filled with news of the hundreds in Israel that had been slaughtered, burned alive, chased through the desert from a party, decapitated in their beds at 6:30 in the morning - until the authorities found Eynav’s body and notified them. “They told us that Eynav was murdered."
She was found in the shelter with the bird on it, dead at 32, for going to a party they didn't even make it to, because they'd spent the night with their child. Gone at 32, for seeking cover during the missile attack that began at 6:29 am - that we now know was to get people into "safe rooms" and "shelters" where they could be cornered, in person, by terrorists.
"They still didn’t know what happened to Or.”
Michael finally spoke to a family of another missing man, and they had a video.
“It was a Hamas video of the actual kidnapping of three of the four guys – that were taken from this specific shelter. A very graphic video, not easy to watch, but I watched it I think 50 times, trying to find any clue. I kept trying until the following Sunday, eight entire days after the attack, when I got a call from an officer, who told me that she’d tried calling my parents to pay them a visit.
She said something like: 'I want to tell you the news that you are waiting for,' and I said 'Wait - what news?'"
At first, she didn’t want to tell Michael over the phone, but he insisted, and that was when he learned that his younger brother had been kidnapped – had been taken hostage by Hamas.
It had not even occurred to Michael, during all of that searching for Or, that he could have been taken into Gaza by terrorists.
“I told her to wait, as I needed to be the one to tell my parents. I asked her to send a doctor and paramedic to their house, as my dad has had two heart attacks and isn’t a healthy man. The 25-minute drive to my parents’ house took me fifteen minutes.”
Michael tried very hard to get his parents into the same room, but his dad was outside in the garden and his mom kept asking him what was going on and saying he looked strange.
“So, I had to tell her. She was actually relieved, to my surprise,” he said, looking down.
“I’m almost ashamed of myself, but I felt relieved as well, because you know, it’s strange, as who could feel relief when their brother is kidnapped by monsters? But that was how I felt, because the other option was worse.”
--
I stood up quickly, telling him he needed a break.
But he was fine, as telling this story is all he has been doing since the day he learned of his brother’s fate.
He made me a cappuccino and his pretty wife in her red lipstick brought out a plate of yellow cake and placed it between us.
“Mmmm…is that lemon?” I asked.
He told me it was, and I told him lemon was my favorite.
“Especially lemon meringue pie,” I added, which he said was his ultimate favorite.
I laughed and told him my mom wouldn’t let anyone have one bite of her pie, and he pointed out the potted lemon tree behind him on the balcony and said he’d grown up with lemon trees and drank so much lemonade as a kid that he couldn’t touch it as an adult.
I have since pictured Michael and Or and the middle brother Tal playing outside in a big yard, and playing soccer in the living room where they 'broke lots of things.'
-- Michael was like so many of us prior to this attack, working at an international company, where he managed a large team.
“Lots of hours, very little time. Between work and three girls at home, I didn’t have time for anything else," he said. "Now I do only this.”
'Only this' has been multiple international trips, to New York City for television interviews and meetings with politicians, (where he and Thomas Hand encountered anti-Israel protestors who took down posters of Or and little Emily Hand right in front of them).
He has been to Macedonia where he met with a number of foreign diplomats, who he felt really listened to him and the other families. He has been to Portugal and to The Hague in the Netherlands. Michael has even been to Rome to meet the Pope, who looks at the kidnapped poster of Or in this incredible photograph.
“I went from hating public speaking to doing 17 interviews a day,” he told me, and explained that the aim of these delegations abroad is to apply pressure on powerful people and make clear to those who may feel one way politically, that we are families - and that the people taken are civilians.
In my opinion, you never know who will read something – and how they might be able to help.”
I asked him how long he could...sustain this...and regretted it.
“I have to get my brother back," he said as he looked at the floor. "I can’t ‘break' until he is back. Once he is back – I will break."
I watched him with awe, this soft-spoken 41-year-old man, who told me that all of the trauma he has survived in his life, including his wife's recent bout with cancer, had prepared him for this ultimate disaster, to help save his ‘little brother’ from the horrors of Hamas.
‘Little,’ because Or is only 6’3”.
--
Michael’s third daughter, the second six-year-old twin I hadn’t met on my way in, ran out onto the balcony and jumped into his lap, excited to meet me. I smiled at her, trying to conceal my sadness.
After she left, I asked him how his girls were doing and what they knew.
“They know everything,” he answered matter-of-factly. “I’m constantly away. I’m always on TV. Or's poster is all over the place. People like you are coming over.”
I held his gaze, understanding him.
“You see, the world needs to get that this isn’t about politics. I hate politics. This isn’t about land. Or religion. This is about families.”
I asked how his daughters had reacted to all of this, and he explained that it kept evolving. At first, they cried, and kept asking about Almog, their two-year-old cousin. What would happen to him?
“But yesterday my daughter said she doesn’t like to think about it because it makes her sad - and that she doesn’t want to go to school.
They understand now that something can happen to me or their mother. That something could happen where we just wouldn’t come home.”
And little Almog? What about him?
Or and Eynav's two-year-old son hasn’t been to his house once since October 7th. None of the family has, but if I walked into their home, the first thing I would notice would be the perfectly organized ‘tech stuff’ and Or's many plants.
But this hasn’t stopped Almog from asking to go home, and calling out for his parents, and crying when his nursery school classmates mention the words ‘mom’ or ‘dad.’
“We don’t know what to tell him.”
According to one psychologist, they should tell him that his mother isn’t coming back, and that they are ‘looking for’ his father.
At the time of our meeting, they had not done this.
“He is also acting out interactions with his parents,” Michael said, and described a recent family get-together where Almog kept climbing onto a dangerous part of the couch and scolding himself.
“That's dangerous! Get down from there!” the two-year old yelled at himself.
He got down, but climbed right back up again, and repeated this ‘discipline.’
Because he misses them. He misses his parents – and how can anyone help him understand what happened and what is still happening?
“I don’t understand it,” Michael said. “I don’t understand any of this. How am I supposed to explain it to a little boy?”
--
Or and Eynav had been best friends for over a decade, until one day Or’s mom said, “Why don’t you ask Eynav out on a date?”
“Because that would be like dating my sister,” Or had replied.
I could almost envision his eye roll and “duh” to his mother.
But a few weeks later, he and Eynav started dating, and five years ago, they got married.
“He was always by her side, so I know that her murder happened right in front of him, and right before he was taken away by terrorists.”
I asked him how he thinks about his brother now, if he always catastrophizes like I do.
But he doesn’t imagine the worst about his self-taught-engineer-genius of a brother, who started breaking things in order to fix them as a child. He can’t think about how much he is eating or sleeping, or…anything like that.
“But I do keep catching myself thinking that when he gets out, it is going to be this big celebration – like a big party – and that everything will go back to normal.”
I watched him quietly.
“But of course, that won’t be the case. There will be no celebration, because he watched his wife get murdered, and has to learn how to be a mom and a dad to his child...
I don’t even know how I will go back to 'normal' after this.”
There was eventually nothing left to ask or to say, so I managed to stand up and murmur my thanks, as I wandered back through their home after this two-hour conversation.
And the girls played and giggled their goodbyes as his wife washed basil which smelled heavenly. She was making pesto sauce for one of their daughters.
Just like any other mother in any other country.
And I left the apartment and stared at the door after it closed, and at the drawings by his three daughters I had noticed before I knocked, until the light in his hallway turned off, because I'd been standing still for too long.
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
Michael's Interview: The effect on children and family
Michael's Interview: What He Wants the World to Know:
Great reporting for such a sad subject. Free the hostages!