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Jul 23

The terrorists who dragged and injured them in the kidnapping because they refused to let go of the hug, the tooth she pulled out for herself with a pliers so the terrorists wouldn't do it, the torture in the cage and the heartbreaking separation in the tunnels from her husband Yagev, who was later murdered: Rimon Buchshtab-Kirscht, who became a symbol of courage when she shouted at her captor on the day of release, speaks for the first time after more than 1,000 days about the deal she made with Sinwar, and her and Yagev's brief hope in captivity [translated from]

tw: abuse, torture, medical torture, trauma/ptsd

It was one of the most unusual and memorable scenes from the first months of the war. A scene that made many Israelis hold their heads up for a moment in those dark days. One of the nine women released as part of the fifth wave of the first liberation deal, Rimon Buchshtab-Kirscht, stepped out of the van that had been transporting her on the way to the Red Cross team, and confronted her captor in front of the cameras.

For more than 1,000 days she stayed out of the limelight, but now she is ready to tell her story. Hers and her husband's, her beloved's, Yagev, who was killed in the tunnels in Gaza. Or as she calls it, "taking a deliberate flashback to Gaza."

The difficult exchange between her and the terrorist Mustafa began, she says, during the drive. "The whole way he teased me about Yagev. 'Here, Yagev is coming in two days.' 'Yagev is coming in four days.' And when he starts talking about Yagev, he pushes all of my buttons, and I don't like it. On the way, I also hear from the other hostages that there is no Kibbutz Magen, there are no [Kibbutz] Nirim and there is no [Kibbutz] Nir Oz to return to, and I catch myself thinking, 'Fuck, what about the dogs and cats, our children? And where is everyone?' And then the terrorists in the car give me a speech about going out smiling and waving. [In English] 'Smile and wave'. And when you go out into this crowd that is barking and screaming and going wild, they start telling you not to be afraid.

"At this point you're so hungry and exhausted, that nothing bugs you or scares you, and I curse at him in Arabic, so that everyone understands. It wasn't some super special confrontation. I just talked to him like they deserve to be talked to, like sons of a thousand whores. I yelled at him, 'Just because you're masked, [in English] 'doesn't mean I can't see you', and just because your eyes are hidden, doesn't mean I don't recognize your voice or that I don't remember what you did to me, and [in Arabic] every dog has its comeuppance, just you wait.'"

"And I also remember to put my hand behind Merav Tal, who was released with me, and tell her: 'All the screaming and whistling is because we're super hot and gorgeous, and we're going to give them one hell of a walk here. We're hold our heads up and walk like a couple of strong women, who do it together.' It wasn't until [arriving at] Ichilov [hospital in TLV] that I realized from my sister that the situation was unusual. Because until the moment my sister told me: 'Listen, the way you came out was like a show,' I didn't understand. Okay, I remember how I got out, it was a second ago, I was there. Then she shows me how other hostages came out."

Rimon, now 39, was born and raised on Kibbutz Magen in the Eshkol Regional Council. Yagev Buchshtab was born and raised a few minutes' drive away, in Kibbutz Nirim. They first met at Yuvalei HaBesor, the regional elementary school. She was a third-grade student, and he was a first-grade student. They were friends for a while, but the relationship faded and was only renewed years later, when Rimon was 16.

"There was an event at HaShomer HaTzair [youth movement]," she recalls, "and I see a huge mane of curls, sitting alone, far away in the corner. I had to find out who it was and that's how we reconnected, and for many years he remained 'the best friend.' In Nofei HaBesor [regional highschool], you grow up with the children of Nirim and Nir Oz, Nir Yitzhak and Kerem Shalom, Hulit, Be'eri and Re'im [all villages impacted on 7/10]. We all study together. On October 7, I also lost teachers who taught me there. Judy Weinstein, the English teacher, Ravid Katz, who was homeroom teacher, and Rotem Kalderon, the sports teacher. Johnny Siman Tov was a very close friend of mine in high school.

"When I go back to that time, I say: 'What carefree children we were.' Unlike my nephews who already know that Aunt Rimon was kidnapped and Uncle Yagev was murdered, and know that there is such a thing as Hamas, which can come at night and take you away, I think of me and Johnny lying in the grass, free of worry that something like that could ever happen."

Upon graduating from high school, she enlisted and was discharged after a short period. Two years after her, Yagev enlisted in the armored forces, becoming a gunner in the last tank crew to leave Gaza in Operation Cast Lead [2008-2009 Gaza War]. The sights of battle never left him, and he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. "Yagev didn't leave the house much," Rimon says. "He suffered from depression and anxiety attacks, and was recognized [for his disability] by the National Insurance Institute, but not by the Ministry of Defense, because he didn't have the strength to attend all of the committees."

The romantic chapter in their lives began in 2020. "Yagev came to visit me with a small bag, which had room for a cell phone, keys, and two days' worth of meds. The second he arrived and gave me his hug, everything fell into place. For the first time ever, I felt like I had come home, even though the house had come to me. After two weeks, I got a tattoo with his name, proposed to him, and called a jeweler who gave me ideas for rings."

The wedding took place on March 12, 2021 (“a date that will be easy for us to remember”) on the lawn in Nirim, behind Yagev’s parents’ house. “To our relief,” she smiles, “it was the Covid period and there was a limit on the number of guests.”

Their relationship was completely symbiotic: "Yagev and I never slept or showered separately. The most we were apart was when I went to Sderot for groceries. Yagev studied sound engineering, taught music, built musical instruments and set up his own recording studio. I worked as a massage therapist. Swedish, medical, hot stone. We had five dogs and four cats, who we called our children, we grew hot peppers in the yard, and we had ridiculous and very cumbersome tandem bicycle. While we were being kidnapped, we saw someone pushing it in a sand field on the way to Gaza. Honestly, I felt sorry for him."

On October 6, 2023, Kibbutz Nirim managed to celebrate the Farm Holiday [a holiday celebrated in the Kibbutzim]. "We skipped a meal at his grandmother's," she smiles, "and did what we loved: staying home, just the two of us, preparing something delicious. Yagev was an amazing chef and that evening he cooked goose breast with root puree on the side. A quiet and romantic meal with the movie 'Braveheart' in the background. At some point, Yagev fell asleep, and I retired to bed.

"At 6:29 I woke up to the sounds of rocket sirens, and just before that all our dogs charged into the bedroom. If you ask anyone in the kibbutz, they'd say, 'Rimon and Yagev are a crazy couple with five dogs who are always barking and never stop making noise,' but not on October 7th. They're scared, and I put them under the bed, pull Yagev off the couch into the room, and take a knife from the kitchen."

The handle in the shelter room was not working properly, and the dogs hid in the bedroom, so the two stay with them. "In the lulls between one siren and next, we lie to everyone that we are in the shelter room, and I make conversations of, 'I love you, I'm being shot at.'"

At a certain moment they decided to open the door of the house, and found a terrorist in front of them, who had picked up a guitar belonging to Yagev that he had found outside in a defensive move. "I cut his hand with the knife, and we push him out. Yagev locks the door, and we both lean against it. Outside, the sounds of commotion grow louder and we feel the door moving off its hinges and realize that no matter what we do, it will break inside.

"Then I tell Yagev: 'Baby, leave it. Lock your arms around me, and don't let go.' The last thing he managed to do before they finally broke down the door was to look me in the eyes and say: 'I'm sorry,' and I immediately burst into a speech: 'Don't you dare be sorry, it's not your fault, everything is fine, the main thing is to stay together.' Afterwards he told me that he was sure they were coming to kill us, and that as far as he was concerned, if they reach me, then he had failed. At that moment, I didn't think they were coming to kill me, or even to kidnap me.

"At 8:40 they break into the house and try to separate us. Our shirts are torn, but we don't let go, and they can't lift us, so they drag us along the sidewalk and beat us badly. From that I got burns, my teeth were broken, my jaw was damaged and my hand was broken too. They put us in a golf cart, while I'm sitting on the dead body of a terrorist, we drive to the kibbutz gate, and 'start walking'. We walk for quite a while in the fields, in pajamas, barefoot. Yagev told me later that he was waiting for the Hannibal Directive, because he was thinking like a soldier. But as far as I'm concerned, if someone is dragging me somewhere right now, and I'm expressing a lot of vocal resistance, and no one is shooting me in the head, that means they want me alive."

At a certain moment, Rimon says, a white Toyota arrives. The two are pushed into it, and it begins a wild ride. "First, we take a show off tour in Gaza. I cover Yagev's eyes, so he won't see the bloodbath outside. Among other things, I see a girl on a motorcycle, held by the upper part of her naked body, and with her lower part being dragged along the sidewalk. I look at each dead body along the way, to remember everything I can, even if that person is clearly no longer alive, because it will be useful to someone."

When the Toyota has an accident, the two are transferred to another car, then to a tunnel, where they meet other hostages. "The first person I met in Gaza was Edan Alexander," she recalls. "Then elderly people and children who were coughing from smoke inhalation and covered in soot also started pouring into that alcove in the tunnel. They kept mixing us up and separating us, taking us here and taking us there, and suddenly, out of a group of 14 hostages, it was just me and Yagev, in a strange house."

Rimon soon realizes that she is in Khan Yunis, in the house of a Hamas operative named Osama, a man in his 60s who previously worked in Israel and was also in prison there. In order to maintain the hostages in his custody, he enlists his two sons, Ahmed and Hamoudi. On the other side of the wall, she also hears a girl named Laila talking to her mother.

"His sons," she says, "were in middle school and high school, one a Barça fan and the other [a fan of] something else. They brought me a pair of kittens, Tamtam and Koko, because they realized that I really loved animals." In those first days of the kidnapping, she was very injured. "Because I was beaten, half of my mouth was broken, with a tooth that had to be extracted. I was moaning in pain and they didn't have much to give me besides paracetamol.

"A few days later, two terrorists come to me, one of them has pliers and the other a gun, and it's clear they're coming to pull my tooth out. And I, shuddering with thought, tell them in Arabic: 'No, bring me the pliers.' And the terrorist doesn't get it, and asks me, [in English] 'you crazy?' And I tell him: 'Ana majnuna. Jibel plier,' [Arabic: I'm crazy, give the pliers] and then I tell Yagev: 'Go into the bathroom, close the door and put your fingers in your ears,' and pull my tooth out.

"I have a kind of memory, like a flash of light, like a blow to the face. And I scream out, which is something you're not allowed to do, because you're not allowed to make noise when you're above the ground. But I scream like hell, because when you pull a tooth out, you scream whether you want to or not. And I also spat on the floor, it's to show as if you're strong. I straightened my back, spat on the floor again, and only then did I sit down."

And you were relieved? "I was relieved that I did it to myself and it wasn't them who did it. At some point we'll get some Dipyrone, but I also have burns from the drag and injuries on the soles of my feet, and Vagev suffers from shortness of breath and needs Ventolin. There were days when Osama sent his son out to look for medicine according to a list I made and came back with some of them."

What happened to him in the end? "Osama is no longer with us, and so is the house which inside of, there was a shaft that went into a Hamas facility, from which hostages were constantly coming in and out. I knew the directions to this house, because I saw the zipcode on a pile of old mail. They were prepared for us to stay for a few days, not months. In the first few days, every woman received brand new pajamas and a hair clip. They had first aid that was intended to treat the initial wounds, not long-term medications. They had lots of Klonopin to calm people down. But certainly no mood stabilizers, anti-anxiety and anti-depressants, or Ventolin."

Have you thought about escaping? "There's nowhere to go, and you know it's dangerous. Because the IDF demolished the house next to you. At first, there's a part of you that still feels sorry for Osama who's crying, because the children of the neighbors he knows are dead, and that's sad. In the first few days, Yagev and I watched Al-Jazeera, and there you don't see anyone who was kidnapped or murdered. When they told us, 'We kidnapped 250 or so of you,' Yagev and I laughed. It was clear to us that they were exaggerating. At some point I understand that it's possible. Because I'm being transferred between facilities and see different faces, and every face like that tells me about the faces they've met, and you realize that it's no longer as small as you thought, and that we're not as big as we thought.

"I meet elderly people from Nirim, and Channa Peri, a friend of our grandmother's, and Alex Dancyg and Chaim Peri. Every person you meet, you want to take their story with you to pass it on, because you very quickly realize that people are something that comes and goes, that they [the captors] are constantly separating and creating kind of a jungle."

You and Yagav were not separated. "At first it didn't bother them that we come as a set. They realized that together we were calmer, but you quickly find out that Hamasniks are not great romantics. They don't care that it's my husband and that he's sick and that there's no way I'm going to sleep on the mattress in the other corner of the room. It gets to a point of negotiation, how we're allowed to touch each other or not, and whether I'm allowed to hold his hand during the day or hug at night. From the get go I make sure I have something in my hand to protect myself, and one night a motion wakes me up and I discover that they want to beat Yagev because he's snoring, which automatically made me pick up a fork and stick it in the hand of the terrorist, the same Mustafa I argued with at the release."

You have some courage. "In captivity, there are things you don't remember and there are things you can't forget. When you're trying to stop an elderly person's bleeding or fighting for a shower for a young girl or for medication for a hostage who can't speak or is shy. So holding your head up and being the majnuna where you need to be - sometimes it helps, sometimes it gets you into trouble and sometimes it prevents them from messing with you in advance. But I discovered that I can't fake it too much. If you're cursed at, you curse back, and if you're hit, you defend yourself and hit back. Because when you're a girl named Rimon and she wears glasses and reads during breaks instead of playing, then you get hit a lot and you need to know how to defend yourself."

At some point, when Rimon is with five other hostages, including her husband, an important person arrives at the space where they are being held. "Later," she says, "I find out it's Sinwar. At the time, as far as I'm concerned, it was a very senior person who came with a notebook and wanted me to write down the details of the hostages for him in Hebrew in block letters, because that's what he can read, and also in English. He says we'll all be filmed on video and say our name, age, where we're from and what our ID number is. Sinwar speaks to me in English, and says I seem to have a good head on my shoulders and 'let's talk.'

"He wants to know what our conditions are like, how we are treated, and I tell him: 'It's great that you asked, I have a lot to tell you, but before that, I want to ask something. Promise me that after I finish, you will take me and Yagev down to the tunnels and put us with different kidnappers, because these ones treat us very cruelly.' And he shakes my hand and later actually keeps his promise and takes us down to the tunnels after we were given a cup of hot tea and Yagev got an inhaler. I hid this inhaler in my bra. I quickly learned that underwear and a bra are the place to hide things in Gaza, and that the cap of the Ventolin inhaler is a good place to hide small folded notes with drawings that I got from children."

And what about telling Sinwar to release Yagev? "It was clear that it wasn't on the menu. And it was also clear that if they were creating political propaganda, we probably weren't about to be released. Otherwise he wouldn't have worked on it. It was a punch in the gut. You realize that it's at a stage of political games and filming mean videos to each other. In the first days, you look at every window as if in any moment someone will come in undercover and pull you into a helicopter, like an episode of Fauda. When they start with lists and manifestos and ask for details and foreign citizenships, and long-term organizing begins, you realize that nothing is happening the way we thought it would."

The close relationship between Yagev and Rimon gives the terrorists a headache. Control struggles begin that end with the two being imprisoned in a cage inside a tunnel in Khan Yunis and also with severe torture, especially for Rimon. "I think we came across very badly to them. We're holding hands all the time, hugging, talking to each other. We have a notebook, we're busy with it, playing Scattergories, we don't adapt ourselves to the situation. And if we fall asleep, Yagev starts snoring, and it makes noise for them at night, and they don't like it. That's when I realized that I had to sleep in shifts. That's why I wanted Sinwar to take me down to the tunnels, because that's where you can talk.

"We talk about everything - what and who we miss, what scares us. On the first or second page of the notebook, we wrote the list of things we would do when we get out of Gaza. Number 1 - change our last names. Yagev wanted it to be Buchshtab-Kirscht, and I wanted Buchshtab-Kirscht, and because I left first and also alive, I won."

"Number 2 - Finish working on our girl Dalia Gaza Buchshtab-Kirscht. For the entire second month of captivity, I didn't shower. My period also stopped coming, and even though in the back of my mind I knew it was because I had lost a lot of weight because I could see my bones starting to show, we choose to believe it was because I was pregnant, and that if we were getting out with a baby girl then honestly, it would be worth it. We imagined it was a girl and we had already drafted messages for her.

"Number 3 - move to a moshav, we talked about that even before the kidnapping. And we also said that this time we would not give in to the state. I already understood that I was in the midst of a very traumatic experience, and was going to come out of it even more wounded than I went in, and we said that we would not let the state evade responsibility."

In those days, the first waves of hostage release begin. Buchshtab-Kirscht knows that she is not on the immediate list, because she is in her thirties, neither a mother nor a minor. Her parents even received a message, "Don't expect it". But then something happened that changed everything: the hostages who were released began to talk about the torture the couple was going through, and the state understands that it is urgent to get out whoever it can, even at the cost of leaving the other one behind.

"On the days of the releases, because of the moving of the hostages from place to place, other hostages pass in front of me on the way out, and to all of them I say: 'Tell them. Tell them what's being done to us,' and I also mean that we are in a cage, in isolation from the other hostages. At the same time, it was clear to me that they do not separate husband and wife. But one day a hostage passes in front of the cage, announcing that he has just been separated from his wife, shattering our illusion.

"I remember Yagev saying 'shit', and we both fold up, start crying and collapse, and Yarden Bibas gets permission to try and calm us down. He tells me, 'Rimon, believe me, if anyone knows how hard it is, and what it's like to be torn from someone you love in this terrible hell called Gaza, it's me.' And he holds my hand. Because yeah, we would hold each other's hands there sometimes. Just to remember that there's someone else on the other end. And I tell them: 'Take Chaim, take Alex, take Yoram, get Yardan out, and Nadav,' and 'Here, I'm not asking for much, no medicine, no toilet paper, I'm willing to stay here, with all the fleas, with the broken tooth and the broken face.' But they insist that it has to be me."

The farewell scene was heartbreaking. "I say to Yagev: 'Baby, I love you,' and he says to me, 'I love you.' And we kiss, and I ask Yardan to look after him. Make sure he eats, pees. I tell them: 'Take care of each other,' and I get to see Yagev outside the cage, standing on two legs, with the other men, telling me how much he loves me and that as long as I'm okay, he's okay too. Then I take a right turn in the tunnels, still shouting to him, 'Baby, I love you.'"

Rimon returns to the world above the tunnels on November 28, 2023. "The Red Cross lady ran to me all smiles, and I say to her: 'Where the hell have you been?' We waited so long for them on October 7, 8, and 9, and every time you lose a nail they pulled out or a burn peels off, and when you need to re-straighten the arm they broke. And [the Red Cross] never come at any stage. And then at the meeting at the President's House, this lady still tries to talk to you about noncombatants. Then you show her the scar and explain that it came from a four-year-old boy who threw a brick at your head on the way there, because parents there take their four-year-old children to events where they throw bricks at hostages."

Do you believe in peace, in normalization? "I was privileged to get to know the human capital that is on the other side of the fence, and I wouldn't count on any peace with them in the near future. I saw how they behave with people and how they behave with children and the elderly and just behave on the street, just because you are a hostage. I wouldn't count on a coalition of peace-loving people waiting on the other side of the fence to live shoulder to shoulder with me."

When you returned, you were seen as a hero, someone who looked straight at the terrorists. "First of all, I don't feel like a hero at any point. I mostly feel guilt and anxiety. I live with constant flashbacks, never-ending anxiety attacks, triggers that peek out from every corner. I'm always looking for escape routes or how to escape outside, which wasn't the case before. And if there's someone I love with me, then I'm constantly planning how to protect them and how I'll end the situation in a different way this time."

"There were mornings when I couldn't lift my head off the pillow without bursting into tears or having a panic attack, or waking up to my own screams. I can wake up in a wet bed with no bedding on it, because I replayed some kind of fight scene in my head, and threw everything out. There was a box of cat food in the cage in Gaza, so every morning when I feed my cats, I get triggered."

"I have three refrigerators full of food at home, every room in the house has food or some kind of weapon. Instead of the one case of sleeping pills I take, I have a spare, like sixty. The first thing I did when I got to the moshav was to erect a fence, with a meter of concrete in the ground. I explained out loud that my dogs dig, so it's a good idea, but to myself I know that this is my way so that no one will come in uninvited. Today, steel security doors and cameras are a must for me."

When she returned, as she had promised herself, she delivered messages from people she met in the tunnels. And she also had one message that didn't reach its destination. "I had a message in mind from Yardan, our good friend, to Shiri, thinking she was alive," she says in pain.

And there was also one message, which she didn't get to hear herself. "When I returned, I discovered the beautiful face of the people of Israel, and how they are mobilizing for you, and pledged fpr the return of your friends and family. On the other hand, honestly, I thought that in my room at the hospital, the prime minister would come to apologize to me for the fact that we were kidnapped, and for the fact that my husband is still there. And then he would apologize to me when my husband was murdered in captivity, because of things that this country had done. You think that we will return to a country after a radical change, an extreme change, but we returned to the same country, with the same leaders, people who stand for some illusory reason with their hands on the reins, the same people and nothing had changed."

She spent a week in the Ichilov hostage complex, then moved to the hospital's motel, to be with her father, who was receiving treatment in the oncology department at the time, and also to keep being close to the doctors and other parties treating her. From the hospital, she went to an evacuee apartment in Tel Aviv, alongside her parents and sister, and then began looking for a house in a moshav, as she had promised Yagev.

In the house she found in Moshav Tidhar, the dogs, the cats, and whiskey and champagne awaited him. But July 2024 brought with it ominous signs. "Things started to reach us that we knew people would say before the last news. We knew that a video was a bad sign, that 'contact was lost' and 'heavy concern' were 99% bad. But it didn't change anything for me, because every time they came and told me something like that, I felt like I had to hold on tighter to the belief that Yagev would return. I spoke to him: 'Hold on, I know it's shit, I know your stomach hurts and your whole body itches and your soul burns, and time doesn't move, but I'm waiting at the end of it, and you've already been through hell once and come out of it.'

"When the Hamas video came out announcing that the hostage Yagev died due to a lack of food and medicine, the majority of people already believed that he was gone. But I said: 'I left Yagev at a normal weight, so he couldn't have died from a lack of food, and he really needs medicine, but not life-saving ones. Keep believing, he will come home.'"

According to the details provided later, Yagev Buchshtab was murdered on February 14, 2024, alongside five elderly hostages. His wife received the definitive news of his death in July, and his body was returned to Israel in August. "At his funeral and afterwards too," she says, "I gave the performance of a rational person who understands the news they received and the consequences, and understands that the entire future they imagined for themself has not come. But inside there was a little Rimon that simply held on and said: 'You didn't open the coffin, you didn't see the remains of the body with your own eyes. Maybe it's someone else, who looks like Yagev, with the same blood type, and they made a mistake and there was confusion.' We had loved shows like this, one-in-a-million stories. When we were there, we said: 'Wow, what stories we have to tell our children and grandchildren.' Like the one where you wash your partner's head in the toilet, because there's no shower and your head is full of bedbugs, and Yardan smuggles us a cap with some liquid soap and brings it to me through the bars."

What do you know about the way Yagev died? "I know he was shot, I know where he was shot. Judging by the position he's in, curled like a fetus, I understand that he knew he was going to take a bullet. And if there are five elderly people lying next to him, then do the math on what he must have seen, probably. There are moments that I feel lucky. And there are moments that I want to be there in Khan Yunis underground, in a fetal position, cuddled with Yagev. With me being the big spoon, and the bullet goes through both of us, and there are days that I'm glad I came back alive."

Rimon never asked for anything from the public. From her previous life, she had the pets left, some of which have since died, and one pepper bush that survived, "basically a child of our pepper bush from Nirim." But four weeks ago, she felt that life was closing in on her, and asked for help, for the first time in her life. In a candid post on Facebook, she wrote that in addition to financial help, she is looking to rehome two of her and Yagev's four dogs, since she is no longer capable of supporting a pack.

"People are mistaken in thinking that once you're out of the tunnel, you're out of the tunnel," she says. "They're mistaken in thinking that the hostages who returned are sitting on millions, settled, fixed, and don't need anything. There's still a lot of healing to do. You're not an ordinary person, and it doesn't matter if a thousand days have passed, or your captor was killed, or you had a beautiful rehabilitation plan that was built for you when you returned. Because since then you've been through phases and you have to get up and fall again, fight for every day, every breath, and every step."

The state didn't help? "At first we were given crazy support, but it quickly started to fall a[art. First of all, because the system is built to forget trauma. To erase us from consciousness as quickly as possible and return to images of victory, rehabilitation and new beginnings. But honestly, I'm not ashamed to say, so and so much time has passed since I came back, with so and so many psychologists, psychiatrists, medications and treatments, and I'm still under attack every day, with anxiety and flashbacks and nightmares, sometimes struggling just to open the door in the morning, not to mention going out the gate and throwing out the garbage.

"At first, I was a little lazy in my rehabilitation, I skipped steps, because I didn't care about what was happening to me. When I saw, for example, couples who had reunited, it hurt, and there's also a part of you that's angry, because Yagev is the best person on earth. How can it be that other people come back alive, and Yagev doesn't? Now I care. About myself, about my life, that I survived, and if I'm alive, I have to take advantage of every moment. But I still have a long way to go."

Rimon's post brought good people into her life who just want to help. One of them is Reut Tzuk, an animal activist from the Krayot, who was shocked by the lack of government support for the hostages in general and Buchshtab-Kirscht in particular. Since they met, she has devoted all her time to her, making sure to connect her with the GiveBack [fundraising] website, finding her dentist Dr. Netanel Yusupov, who decided that his "life mission" today is to give Rimon the smile she so badly needs, at no cost, and also an art therapist who volunteered to help, in contrast to the Ministry of Health, which decided to cut the resources directed to her.

Packers are also expected to arrive in a few days to help her move to Moshav Avshalom, which is closer to her Kibbutz Magen. As in every house she moves to, there will be a room with the drums that Yagev bought her as a wedding gift, and the guitars he built, and the colorful, optimistic posters that Zeev Engelmayer created for her both during her captivity and after she returned.

Contrary to what one might think, she would not erase the difficult days of her life from her memory. "To erase the kidnapping," she explains, "is to erase Yagev from my life. The last adventure we had together. Just as there is not a single scar on my body that I want to erase."

You call this an adventure? That's a positive term. "This is who we are, with black jokes that started 30 meters underground, in the parking lot. We had a lot of optimistic things there too. We kept our love, celebrated our anniversary, and when they weren't looking, we found little moments in which we loved each other."

Despite the difficulty, she also has a new relationship. Like Yagev in his time, he is also a good friend from the past, and is dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. Only this time, so is she. "Being with me is work," she says. "Very hard work. I keep going because that is what Yagev would have wanted for me, and it's in my DNA. I am a third-generation Holocaust survivor, and my grandfather Moshe z"l lost everything and everyone in the Holocaust, and then he met my grandmother. My partner understands that Yagev is something sacred, and our memory is sacred. And he sanctifies it. I got lucky."

Are there moments when you are happy? "There are moments when I'm happy, but it's with limited certainty. I still haven't smiled like I did before Gaza, and I probably won't smile like that anymore. And even if I smile, there's automatically a knot in my stomach, because you've gotten used to not being allowed to be happy. And if you're happy for a moment, your body goes into anxiety. Why are you happy? Even in the most tightly held day, a breakdown comes, and the night comes and nightmares come, and in the nightmares you have no control. And there everything is present and recreated. Sometimes different, sometimes the same.

"I am very different from who I was before October 7th. I learned things that cannot be erased. I learned that there is no happy ending. I learned that not all of our wishes come true in the end, and not everything works out for the best, and not everyone always comes home alive, waving hellow and capable of being reassembled. I am a different person today, for better or worse. Tougher in some places, and weaker in others. And that even when you reach the peaks, and think 'hooray, I'm playing right, I'm just making progress,' then you can fall and take a few months' reverse in your progress. I was never easy, I was never a walk in the park, but now I am definitely hard work."

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