“Are you here for the injured or the dead?”
This is what I was asked when I entered the hospital, two hours after I was informed that my husband, Pitzi, was severely injured in a firefight with terrorists on the Lebanon border.
“Are you here for the injured or the dead?”
As if I had entered the gate of a wedding venue and was asked if I was on the groom’s or bride’s side. “Where do I leave the gift?” passed through my mind.
“Are you here for the injured or the dead?”
Just a single millimeter was the difference between those two options.
On October 7th, I woke up to the sound of my cousin knocking on the door. When Pitzi opened it, I heard them whispering. I came out of the bedroom confused and saw Pitzi sitting on the couch with his phone in one hand and his head in the other. “What chaos!” he said. “Your mother called and said they can’t reach your brother.” I recalled that my younger brother, Yoav, a sniper in the Paratroopers Brigade, had been guarding the Nahal Oz military base during Simhat Torah.
Pitzi, who works for the Israeli government, was then called to his office. After he left, I stood on the balcony and viewed the main street of the yishuv where we lived. Instead of the sounds of Simhat Torah celebrations and children’s laughter coming from the synagogue, there was utter silence. Although I was not alive during the Yom Kippur War, the stories and descriptions I had heard my whole life seemed to come to life at that moment. Every few minutes, I saw a father, dressed in uniform, say goodbye to his family, get into a car, and drive off to defend our country.
Around 6 p.m., Pitzi returned home from work and told me he had been called up to the reserves in Northern Israel. After Pitzi said goodbye to our three children, my daughter Noam (age 8½) came to me crying hysterically: “Abba [dad] will die in the war!” I took a map and showed her that the war was in the South, that we live in the center, and that Abba was heading to the North. “He’s even safer than us,” I tried to comfort her.
He was safe. Until October 9th.
“Everything is okay,” Aryeh shouted at me as he and Netanel, Pitzi’s brothers, came to tell me that Pitzi was injured. “Everything is okay,” he said again.
“Of course everything is okay,” I replied. “I didn’t even ask you how you are doing!” Aryeh looked at me. My heart ached even before my brain understood. Like lightning preceding thunder. “Pitzi was severely injured in a firefight,” he said. “But he’s okay.”
“Why are you crying?” I snapped at Netanel. “Aryeh said he’s okay.”
We hugged and sat down on the front steps. I had pictured this scenario hundreds of times—every time Pitzi was called to his office. I had imagined a knock on our door while the kids joked around at breakfast. This time they joked around at dinner.
“PITZI WAS SHOT IN HIS FACE,” Aryeh said. “But he’s okay.”
From inside the house, our usual playlist played: “Ba’sof Yehiyeh Tov” (“In the end, it will be good”). “How ironic,” I thought to myself.
First, I called Noam. I brought her into our bedroom and told her that Pitzi was injured. “But he’s okay.”
“You promised me!” she scolded me. “You showed me on the map that Abba is in the North, and that the North is very far from Gaza.” I was dumbstruck.
Then I called our son David (age 6). I remember telling myself to lower the music. Because what did the song “White Balenciaga” have to do with anything? David smiled and hugged me.
I kissed our son Itai (age 2 1⁄2) and explained that I would be back soon.
We set out on the road: Aryeh, Netanel, and I
The drive progressed at a painfully slow pace, but my thoughts changed rapidly. “Now that Pitzi is injured in the face, we are reopening the candidacy of ‘the most beautiful person in the family,'” Netanel said. They were trying to put a smile on my face. “Too soon,” I smiled back.
My heart pounded. “Breathe, Roni. Everything is okay,” I told myself.
The pulling of the handbrake was the final chord for the ride. We arrived at the hospital.
“Are you here for the injured or the dead?”
“The bullet hit five millimeters from his eye, crushed his upper jaw, and broke the first vertebra in his neck. One millimeter from the brainstem,” the surgeon explained. “We had to wire his jaws; he will not be able to speak for a while.”
“Do you want to keep the bullet?” he asked.
The next day, Pitzi woke up. When he realized his jaws were wired, he signaled for a pen and paper. He wanted to know what happened, if anyone was hurt, and if he and his team had succeeded in their mission. Sadly, I had to tell him that his soldier Gilad was killed in the firefight. The pain and sadness in his eyes were unbearable. I wiped away the tears from both of our eyes.
Though Pitzi remained the most handsome in the family, in the first few weeks his face was swollen, adorned with a rainbow color hemorrhage. He was connected to a nasogastric tube, and a cannula decorated his neck. I wasn’t sure when the right time would be to reunite Pitzi with our children. A wise person once told me that children internalize any situation, including a crisis, the way they see their parents handle it, becoming more adept at handling crises on their own the more calmly and sensibly they see their parents handling it. I chose to face Pitzi’s injury with measured bravery. A week later, I decided to bring the children to the hospital, just in time to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. When the children entered Pitzi’s room, those same eyes that cried in silence when I told Pitzi that Gilad was killed, sparkled with happiness.
After a few weeks, Pitzi was discharged from the hospital. At first, he moved around in a wheelchair and drank and ate only liquid foods, but, as the weeks passed, he recovered and became stronger. After four months, Pitzi became completely independent, and my role as a caregiver ended.
“There’s no way that this family has no one serving in the reserves,” I announced. “I’m enlisting.”
In my mandatory service, I had served four years as a company commander at an army base. In February, I volunteered for reserve duty as an operations officer at the 646 Shualei Marom Brigade. After four months of fighting, the brigade left Gaza.
As an operations officer, I was responsible for planning, coordinating, and executing all operations of the brigade (comprised of approximately 2,000 soldiers). I ensured that the safety and well-being of the troops came first, and that the mission objectives were accomplished.
During one of my shifts in the command center, a call sign came over the radio: “The commander has fallen! The commander has fallen!” One of the troops had encountered an ambush, and the radio reported a mass casualty incident. At that moment, all my senses sharpened, and my attention focused solely on one goal—evacuating the bodies and rescuing the injured. We deployed an aerial force to neutralize the terrorists, sent a drone to monitor the firefight zone, and dispatched a medical unit to the scene. Meanwhile, we heard reports over the radio of many casualties and injuries. Three soldiers lost their lives in the incident, and ten soldiers were injured, three of whom were in critical condition.
At that moment, I witnessed the tragic process from the moment a soldier is killed until the moment the army knocks on his front door and informs his family of his death. For eight hours, we kept this terrible information to ourselves, until finally a knock on a door in my yishuv brought our neighbors the painful news. This event served as a sort of closure for me, in that it echoed the process that was likely followed for Pitzi on October 9th, only with an ending too painful to imagine.
These days I am an operations officer at the Paratroopers Brigade. I asked to join the unit in order to take part in an upcoming operation. This way, I can fulfill the promise I made to my mother to keep an eye on my little brother Yoav.
“It cannot be that this is how our story will end,” Pitzi thought in the moments after he was shot. This sentence is constantly with me—both on a personal and a national level. We are experiencing a difficult and complex moment in our story, with our hearts wounded and bleeding.
Despite the unbearable difficulty, we must remind ourselves that this is just a chapter in our journey and that our story continues. I am grateful to take part in writing this story, and I hope with all my heart that in the end, it will be good.
Praying for the safe return of all hostages, the safety and success of our soldiers, and for the refuah shleimah of all those injured.