Captivity survivor Ofer Calderon asks for help๐
Since I returned, I have hardly posted anything here, and I never imagined I would write a post like this.
But today I understand that I have no choice, some things must come out of me, it has already become stronger than me and no more.
484 days in Hamas captivity and I still have not truly returned to life.
The morning of October 7th is the moment when my life fell apart. Before my eyes, while I was wounded and bleeding, Hamas terrorists kidnapped my two children, Sahar, 16, and Erez, who was only 12 at the time.
Then I was dragged to Gaza, humiliated and helpless.
That moment, when Erez was torn from my hands and Sahar was led away on a motorcycle between two terrorists, is a nightmare that comes back every night and never lets me go.
Questions that I ask myself and I can't ignore.
How did I fail as a father? How did I fail to protect them?
484 days of torture, of hunger, of beatings and humiliation.
But nothing was as hard as the uncertainty that my children and family might no longer be alive, and that I would never be able to tell them how much I loved them.
To give me the opportunity to ask them for forgiveness for not being there for them.
There is one unimaginable moment that never leaves me for a second: meeting my daughter, Sahar, in captivity, two weeks before they released her after 52 days.
I was so happy to see her, but at the same time my heart broke into pieces. Imagine how I felt when they took her from me again, how her tears and our cries to stay together burned into my soul.
It was as if I was living inside a horror movie, like a nightmare I had only heard about from Holocaust stories, which separate children from parents.
Her gaze and the sound of her crying mixed with mine haunt me every night, as if I were experiencing the kidnapping all over again, only in a much more cruel and painful way.
When I returned, I had nothing left. My carpentry shop in Nir Oz, which I built with my own hands and was my source of income, will no longer be of use to me, there is no way I will return.
My home has become a place of painful and chilling memories. People ask me if I will return to live there, and I canโt even imagine it.
Every corner of the kibbutz is a memory of the nightmare that has become my life.
I thought that when I return, I would at least be able to compensate my children for all the suffering they went through. But the truth is that I can barely compensate myself.
I have no way of supporting myself and my family. Every evening I enter the horror movie again, waiting for the night to end and praying for dawn to come, just to fight again the next day.
To see the light.
When they see us smiling during the day, they donโt know that in the dark everything returns. The fears, the anxieties, the feeling of failure and abandonment. They abandoned me, and made me feel like I had abandoned my children too.
They abandoned me, they abandoned us, but I will not let this feeling control me. Not anymore.
I will put the shame aside and do everything to not abandon my family again, so that I feel like a father who can provide for and protect his children like any other father. I never dreamed that I would reach the day when I would have to ask for help, but I have no choice. I just want to go back to being a real father to my children, to support them, to give them a better life and to rehabilitate their souls and minds.
The members of my cycling group, "The Smurfs," with the assistance of the Reaching Out Association that accompanies me and my family, decided to help me embark on a new path and launch a crowdfunding campaign that will be the beginning of true rehabilitation, to give me the opportunity to return to life.
My dream is to feel like a father who can protect my children and my family again. Without thinking about how to even start. In one day, almost everything was gone. But I am here and I just need help.