The last WhatsApp messages that Hersh Goldberg-Polin sent his mother, Rachel, and father, Jon, before Hamas gunmen took him hostage are searing in their brevity. “I love you,” read the first one as he hid in a roadside bomb shelter near the Supernova festival, and his best friend Aner Shapira caught and threw back hand grenade after hand grenade before he was killed.
“I’m sorry,” read the second one, just before Hersh, then 23, was severely wounded and taken captive.
Similar messages came from Eden Yerushalmi.
“They caught me,” she wrote, followed soon afterwards by “Find me, OK?”
Hersh and Eden were held captive in Hamas tunnels for 11 months before their Hamas captors brutally murdered them. Their last WhatsApp messages are part of the Bearing Witness project at the National Library of Israel, which has become the repository for many of the physical and digital artifacts of Oct. 7, 2023.
Maya Gan Tzvi, the director of the Bearing Witness Project at the National Library in Jerusalem, says the library is working with partners—in this case Memorial 7/10—to collect all of the messages. She said that so far they have 8,375 chats from people who survived Oct. 7 and many who were killed on Oct. 7. It is the first time in Israel’s history that WhatsApp has played such an important role.
“From an archival perspective you can compare it to letters written during past wars,” she said. “The big difference is that because this correspondence is digital it captures the events while they are still unfolding and documented it in real time. People who wrote these messages didn’t think about them becoming a historical document.”
She said that even if the messages had been previously published in news reports, they are hesitant to publish personal details because of privacy issue.
In a separate project, the library has also received hundreds of GoPro cameras worn by Hamas gunmen who were captured or killed on Oct. 7. Staff are still trying to process the huge amount of information they have recovered, which Gan Tzvi says holds more than 16 million files.
Another project you can actually see at the library is an exhibit called Bound in Memory, a display of books, booklets, pamphlets and e-books written by family members of those killed on or after Oct. 7.
Nachum Zitter, the head of Reference Services at the National Library of Israel, says they have already received 250 books, most of them in Hebrew.
“This adds to the general understanding that each person has an entire life story,” he said. “In some cases, they even tried to look at what the future of this person’s life would have looked like. This display is hands-on. You can go into the reading room and flip through the books themselves.”
Quite a few of them are children’s books.
“In the past memorial children’s memorial books were very rare,” he said. “But this war was very much in the public eye and every child knows about it. In addition, many of those killed were married soldier with children, and these books were written for them.”
Some of the authors were people later killed who had left drafts of a book or collections of letters.
Zitter said that reading the books and curating the exhibition took a personal toll on him, and that he got sick just after the exhibit opened. Other staffers at the library say they have needed psychological help after working on the project.
Yet they say they believe the library is playing a crucial role in preserving the history of the events of Oct. 7.
