Niki’s family live in the UK. Before her own son was born, she and her Israeli husband would visit Liel and Yannai in Kibbutz Be'eri, where their great aunt looked after them. She remembers games of hide and seek, picking flowers in the fields, and getting messy in the sandpit. The children also came to visit their aunt, uncle and grandparents. “We had such a gorgeous time together in the park, and doing Friday nights. They loved my mum's chicken soup. I have such fond memories of Lieli giggling all the time.”
Niki can’t help but look towards the future with sadness as she thinks of the simchas that will never take place within her family. “It's beyond comprehension what an immense tragedy this is. They were young children with their whole lives ahead of them, filled with promise and potential. Their bar and bat mitzvahs were just around the corner and we all looked forward to celebrating with them, watching them grow up. Instead, they had their lives cruelly stolen from them in the worst way imaginable simply for being Jewish.
“Even to this day, I can't believe this happened. I don't know how to come to terms with something of this magnitude.”
Amid her family’s suffering, Niki says the Jewish community has been “incredible”. She has been touched by the many families who have had their children's bar and bat mitzvahs in the name of Liel and Yannai, keeping their memory alive. “We will never forget them,” says Niki. “May their memories be a blessing.”
London-based filmmaker and academic Sharone Lifschitz, whose parents were taken hostage from Kibbutz Nir Oz to Gaza – her mother Yocheved was released after two weeks in captivity, but her father Oded died there – describes the “many layers” to their loss.
The kibbutz community where Sharone was born in 1971 is a fragment of its vibrant former self. Seventy-eight members of their community were taken hostage on October 7, around 63 of whom were murdered, including her own father in captivity. Some remain in Gaza. Of the kibbutz structure itself, just six houses were not burned to the ground or raided by terrorists.
Inspiring hope: Sharone and Yocheved Lifshitz[Missing Credit]
“We are trying to, in some ways, rebuild the kibbutz, but also to deal with the enormous trauma and the fact that our loved ones are still in Gaza,” says Sharone, her voice weak. “So, it's quite hard to understand the loss, because we haven't stopped losing yet. We're still on a slippery path of being able to lose more of our people.”
She compares the situation to having “a huge void underneath you, but you keep looking up, because you have people that can still be saved”.
There is incongruity in the vast loss of the kibbutz’s community and its houses, and its unscathed gardens, the paths intact with their towering trees and blue flowers that come out in spring. Yet it's when the community comes together that they realise how many people have been lost. “My family went to the first Rosh Hashanah that they held back in the dining room of the kibbutz, and for my mum it was very difficult,” says Sharone. “It's like sitting in an extended family, and half of the family is just gone.”
The trauma, she says, affects the members in different ways. Some people find it hard to be together among their now-shrunken cohort, whereas others find it hard to be separated.
“There's no right and wrong,” she says. “But when I describe my family or my community, I say it’s like a tree that is still a tree, but the earth that holds the roots together is gone, so there's exposure to the elements that wasn't there before.”
On October 7 the family house was razed to cinders after the terrorists inserted a gas pipe. Nothing remains. Yocheved has been a photographer all her life, and both she and Oded kept an archive that they had built over the decades. “Both of them were very analogue,” says Sharone. “It all disappeared. What we have is some echoes – things I had here in London from my mum's photography, photographs of my father…”
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Her mother was left with no possessions. “She had nothing after 85 years of living a very intense, beautiful and creative life. She had had these special shoes made because she had a foot injury, and she’d say, ‘but Sharone, I don't need these shoes made again.’ And I would say, ‘Mum, no, they all burned down.’”
Life has irrevocably changed for the Lifschitz family. Sharone was never expecting, for example, to be meeting with the Prime Minister which she and her son did earlier this month after Sir Keir Starmer and Ambassador Simon Walters invited hostage families with British ties to meet and hear their reasons for recognising a Palestinian state.
“Often people tell you that hostage families speak so eloquently, and it's just because you face something that is so immense,” she says. “My mum is fearless.” As for herself, Sharone feels she has lost so much – her father, her birth home, her friends, the career she built – yet has not processed it. “I haven't come to term with any of it,” she says.
Steve Brisley, from Bridgend in south Wales, describes a “double” loss: the deaths of his big sister, Lianne Sharabi, and nieces Yahel,13, and Noiya, 16 – and his brother-in-law Eli Sharabi being taken hostage to Gaza.
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Brisley’s sister was just 18 months older than him, and his best friend. “We shared bunk beds until we were seven years old, and used to play together… And when we got to 16 and 18, we became the best of friends again.”
Even after Lianne had moved to Israel aged 19 and created a family there, the siblings remained close. “I would speak to her on a Friday. She'd often walk around the kibbutz with the dog, her phone in one hand and a cup of Typhoo tea that we'd have sent over, and we'd catch up on the week. I miss all of that.”
The presidents of Israel and Poland, as well as ten former Hamas hostages including Eli Sharabi (centre), were among the crowds (Image: Getty)AFP via Getty Images
His own teenage girls, who are almost the same age as Yahel and Noiya, miss the tight relationship they had with their cousins. Meanwhile his parents, aged 80 and 81, have lost their only daughter.
“Mum says she has bad days and worse days; she's deeply affected by it. We all are in our own ways. It's incredibly difficult.”
Brisley quickly became his family’s British representative, telling Lianne and the girls’ stories, and advocating for his brother-in-law Eli’s release from Gaza, as well as the other hostages, which he continues to this day. Did the advocacy help him cope with the trauma? He sees it as a double-edged sword.
“It gave me something to focus on, and it gave me a mission,” he says. “On the flip side, it was a distraction from properly engaging with my grief. And that was always going to come home to roost.”
In February 2024, unable to hold back his grief any longer, Steve finally began “extensive” trauma counselling. But the pain is “always there”.
It is only since Eli was released from Gaza on February 8, that he could begin to properly grieve.
“But it's not something that any of us will ever recover from,” Steve says. “All three of them were such big characters and leave a yawning chasm in our lives. We all feel robbed of what they, particularly the girls, might have become, because they just turned 13 and 16 the week of the attacks. You were really getting an idea of what they might do in the future.”
Their stories, he says, must live on. “I want to keep their memories alive, and to make sure that people remember what happened on October 7.”
