^{Damage to the Erez border crossing between southern Israel and the Gaza Strip after the attack by Hamas on October 7. (Image: Getty Images)}

By Ashley Perry

On October 7, 2023, families were torn apart, communities were devastated and the sense of safety that Israelis had built over generations was shattered in a single morning.

Three years later, there can be no telling of that day that softens its horror. However, if we remember only what was done to Israelis, we leave out something essential about who they were and how they responded.

Again and again, in places where help seemed impossibly far away, people moved towards the danger because someone else was still inside it.

Aner Shapira stood at the entrance to a roadside shelter crowded with people fleeing the Nova festival and threw back grenades hurled in by terrorists until he was killed. Captain Daniel Peretz and his tank crew fought to defend the Nahal Oz area. Captain Eden Nimri confronted attackers at the entrance to a shelter, giving other young women a chance to escape. Captain Shilo Rauchberger led his soldiers in battle at their overrun outpost. Their courage and that of many others deserve to be remembered alongside the terrible circumstances that demanded it.

Brothers Noam and Yishai Slotky drove south of their own accord to help fight the attackers and were killed near Kibbutz Alumim. Another set of brothers, Elchanan and Menachem Kalmanson, with their nephew Itiel Zohar, went into Kibbutz Be’eri again and again to bring residents out; Elchanan was killed during their rescue mission. Ben Shimoni escaped the Nova killing ground, then returned to collect strangers. He died on his third rescue trip.

Youssef Ziadna, a Bedouin minibus driver from Rahat, drove into the gunfire and brought around 30 festival goers to safety. Across the country, others heard what was happening, picked up their keys and went. Some wore uniforms; some had nothing to protect them.

All understood that every minute mattered to somebody waiting for help.

At Nahal Oz, the young women serving as lookouts raised the alarm and reported what they could see even as the attack reached their own base. Families elsewhere faced choices no parent should have to make: whether to run or hide, whether opening a door might save a neighbour or endanger a child.

Local defenders held their ground against overwhelming odds. Hostages fought back where they could and, facing a future none of us would wish to imagine, showed a dignity their captors could never take from them.

Among the fallen on that day was my nephew, Staff Sergeant Roey Weiser. He was 21, a Golani soldier serving at the Erez Crossing, ironically the place where Israel allowed annually tens of thousands of Palestinians into Israel for humanitarian purposes, such as life-saving medical treatment, and thousands of Palestinians to work daily in Israel.

When the attack began, he was in a relatively safe part of the base. He was asked for volunteers to help reach fellow soldiers trapped in an uneven gunfight elsewhere.

Rather than just send others, Roey led the small group who were walking into an impossible situation.

According to the men who survived, Roey’s decisions and actions helped save at least twelve of them. As others reached shelter, he stayed to make sure no one was left behind. He was killed while leading a final group towards safety.

It was later discovered that as a result of his and his fellow soldier’s steadfast resistance against waves of Hamas terrorists, they managed to halt their movement northward towards Ashkelon and Ashdod, thereby saving countless others in the wider area.

I think about the distance between those moments: the relative safety he had reached, and the decision to leave it. Roey was their commander, but also someone his soldiers trusted to look after them. He knew what he was asking of the volunteers because he was going with them.

To our family, that choice was profoundly Roey.

As a teenager, he volunteered as a firefighter. He had always been the person who stepped forward when someone needed help, and those around him knew they could count on him in all situations.

He was full of life, a constant smile on his face and a joke on his lips. It is hard to reconcile the kid I sat next to at a football match days before, laughing, catching up and cheering on our beloved Betar Jerusalem, with the man who when the moment came did not shirk his duty even at the ultimate cost.

My brother and sister-in-law, Yami and Naomi, raised a son whose courage was an essential part of his identity.

They, Roey’s siblings and all of us who loved him must live with the cost of what he did. Pride in him does not make his absence smaller.

The names we know represent only a fraction of the courage shown that day. Many who ran towards the gunfire were killed before anyone could record what they had done. Others survived and returned to families who are still learning the full story. Many acts of bravery happened behind locked doors, in frightened whispers, or in the simple decision to remain beside someone who could not flee.

We owe the dead more than an account of their final moments. We owe them the truth about the lives they lived and the people they saved.

October 7 must remain a day of mourning and of difficult questions. It must also be a day when we speak the names of those who answered terror with courage.

Three years on, I remember Roey as my nephew before I remember him as a hero. I wish he were here for us to tell him how proud we are. May his name, and the names of all those murdered that day, be a blessing, and may we never forget what so many Israelis of all backgrounds did for one another when it mattered most.

Ashley Perry is a former senior Israeli government adviser who has worked with eight cabinet ministers, was a former advisor to the Negev Forum, and has been involved in Israeli politics and every election campaign for the past two decades.

Source: The Jewish Chronicle