Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of slain Gaza hostage Hersh, discussed the fight to bring the hostages home from Gaza with CBS's 60 Minutes broadcast on Sunday, telling Anderson Cooper that the activists largely failed.
"Sometimes, 100% is not enough," she said, adding that she "did more than anybody could possibly do" to bring back her son from Gaza.
"You know it's, like, these symbols of failure. What we were fighting for did happen. We got all these people home, not the way we wanted. We wanted them home, alive, but they had come home," she said.
Goldberg-Polin also spoke with Cooper about several topics, ranging from what she experienced on October 7, the fight to bring Hersh back home, learning about a hostage who was with Hersh while in Gaza, and how she deals with the grief of losing a child.
"I think my understanding of grief has changed," she said, and added, "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."
Or Levy, Hersh, and a mantra to survive
One of the high points in the interview has both Goldberg-Polin and Or Levy, a former Gaza hostage who met Hersh during the first days of captivity. "It broke me," said Levy about learning of Hersh's assassination in one of the Gaza tunnels.
"He laughed about everything. And he smiled the entire time," recalled Levy when asked about the three days he spent with Hersh, adding: "Hersh kept repeating this mantra. 'He who has a why can bear any how.'"
The mantra, originally adopted by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl and used in his book "Man's Search For Meaning," was Hersh's way of keeping going even during captivity, Levy recalled.
Levy then explained that his "why" was his three-year-old son, while Goldberg-Polin detailed that Hersh's "why" was her: "I asked Or that [What was Hersh's why]. And he said - he went like this. You. It was this shocking, life-affirming CPR from beyond, to have Hersh, through Or, telling us, 'What's your why gonna be, 'cause you can bear this, even this, even losing me, you can do it. And so part of what I'm trying so hard to do now is to figure out what my why is."
Reaching Hersh in Gaza
Goldberg-Polin also recalled that Levy told him how proud Hersh was that his mother managed to speak with the US secretary of state. "He heard you on the news," Levy told her.
"And it was like, all of a sudden, thank God. First of all, that he heard my voice, and that he knew. We are nobodies. We are absolute nobodies. I even say, the equivalent of John Doe in the Jewish world is Rachel Goldberg. But we tried so hard. And he knew," she added.
That was a main concern for Goldberg-Polin, who had gone to the outskirts of Gaza 328 days after October 7 to shout Hersh's name for the first time. She later learned that Hersh was killed that day, with soldiers finding his body along with five other hostages killed.
Previously, the last message she got from Hersh was at 8:11 a.m. on October 7: "One said 'I love you,' the other said 'I'm sorry.' And that was it. Everything that had ever happened in my life, from the day I was born until that second, was over."