Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son Hersh was taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and who was executed in captivity in August 2024 along with five other hostages, spoke with Anderson Cooper on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday.

The conversation focused on coping with grief and loss.

Goldberg-Polin is an American who moved to Jerusalem 18 years ago with her husband, Jon, and three children. Hersh, her only son, was at the Nova Music Festival with his best friend, Aner Shapira, when he was kidnapped.

Shapira and Hersh hid in a bomb shelter with other young festival goers. Hamas terrorists threw grenades into the shelter. Shapira threw back 10 before being killed. Hersh took his place, losing an arm while trying to toss back a grenade.

Hersh was held in a tunnel in brutal conditions until he was executed, shot at close range six times. His body was found by Israeli soldiers on Aug. 31, 2024. It is believed that his captors panicked when shelling came close to their hiding place, leading them to kill the hostages.

“To know that your child is being tortured, tormented, starved, abused. He’s maimed. And that’s an excruciating form of suffering. And then what’s so fascinating to me is that when they came to tell us that Hersh had been executed, then I realized that those 330 days had been the good part, because he was alive. And now I’m in this place and this is the rest of my life. How do I walk through this place without a piece of me here?” she asked.

From the start, Hersh’s parents became activists calling for the release of all the hostages. They wore pieces of tape each day with a number signifying the days Hersh had been in captivity.

In January, when the last hostage had returned 843 days after the Oct. 7 attack, Goldberg-Polin and her family took down the pieces of tape they had stuck to a wall in their apartment.

Cooper looked at the balled-up tape and said, “It’s extraordinary to see. All the pain and everything that is in that ball.”

Goldberg-Polin said, “You know It’s, like, these symbols of failure. What we were fighting for did happen. We got all of these people home, not as we wanted. We wanted them home, alive, but they had come home.”

In a book that comes out this week, “When We See You Again,” Goldberg-Polin talked about her experiences.

“You write in the book, ‘People want hope, resilience, recovery, strength, survival, healing. They want thriving and rising from the ashes, like the phoenix from the days of yore. But the pain is chronic, ever present, constant, gnawing, circular, not linear.’ That’s how it feels?” Cooper asked.

“I think my understanding of grief has changed. I was dreading, and uncomfortable with grief. And recently, I had this whole different thought of maybe, grief is actually just this precious badge of love that you wear because someone has died and your love is continuing to grow,” she said.

Cooper also spoke with Or Levy, another hostage, who spent three days with Hersh in captivity. Levy revealed that Hersh had inspired him to keep going through his personal conduct, and through something he said.

First, Hersh laughed about his arm. “He laughed about everything. And he smiled the entire time,” said Levy.

But it was Hersh’s mantra that had the biggest impact on Levy: “He who has a why can bear any how.”

He kept repeating it, said Levy.

It’s from a book, “Man’s Search For Meaning,” by Viktor Frankl, a 1946 concentration camp memoir. Frankl adapted the mantra from a similar saying by Friedrich Nietzsche.

“It became our mantra,” said Levy.

Levy had the saying tattooed to his arm shortly after his release from captivity. His son, who doesn’t speak English, asked what it meant. Levy answered his son, “Your name.”

“‘Your name.’ Because that’s your why,” said Cooper.

“This is my why. The only reason why I survived was him,” said Levy.

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