When We See You Again cover art

When We See You Again

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

$8.99/mo after trial ends. Cancel anytime
Try for $0.00
More purchase options

When We See You Again

By: Rachel Goldberg-Polin
Narrated by: Jon Polin, Rachel Goldberg-Polin
Try for $0.00

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $28.09

Buy Now for $28.09

Once upon a time, I was meandering down the road of life with my husband, Jon. It was a regular and beige life, and it worked. It was a warm beige. We felt, and were, blessed and lucky. Normal.

On the morning of October 7th, 2023, Rachel Goldberg-Polin's beloved twenty-three-year-old son, Hersh, was stolen from a music festival billed as a celebration of unity and love-and, in that moment, her life was forever separated into The Before and The After. Over the next eleven months, she and her husband, Jon, would work tirelessly-in public and behind the scenes-to secure the hostages' release, to breathe some humanity into the situation while they were experiencing relentless emotional and psychological torment. The power of her raw and fervent pleas soon made her the face of the hostage crisis. And when Hersh and five other captives were executed after surviving 328 days of violence and cruelty, she would also become the face of its ultimate cost.

In When We See You Again, Rachel pours her pain, love, and longing onto paper, giving voice to the broken among us, and reminding us that even when the world feels choked with darkness, light exists in a different way. How do we find it? Her own experience has been extreme, but at its essence, this is a universal story of trying to live with grief. It is a story of how we remember and how we persevere, of how we suffer and how we love.

'There are days when I break completely,' she writes. 'I have cried for an entire day straight. I didn't think it was physically possible, but the weeping never let up. That is a very long time to cry. I kept hoping I would run out of tears. And then there are days when there is a whisper of sun. Not out there in the sky. In me. In us.' Israel & Palestine Middle East
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
All stars
Most relevant
I am about to listen for the second time and there’s something so intimate about hearing Rachel (and Jon, at the end) tell her story. She explains grief and loss and the strength of mother-love in ways that I’ve never heard described. And there is so much beauty, too. This book reaches into your heart and demands that we meet trauma with purpose, and that we never let Hersh Goldberg-Polin become just another story. Rachel demands he be remembered, and for good reason: he is truly inspirational. But I don’t want to say this as if this is the only thing the book offers. It’s not a feel-good book. It’s a feel-feel book. She exposes herself - the raw, achy, difficult, beautiful, damaged parts of herself and hands them out, piece by piece. It’s up to each reader to decide what to do with them. I know I will hold my portion carefully, and return to it when I need light, wisdom, guidance, love, recognition.

Moving, inspirational, unique

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.