Nobody taught them how to do this. There is no manual for writing a letter you hope will never be read, no tradition passed from one generation to the next on how to say goodbye to people you love before entering a battle you might not survive.
Yaron Chitiz, 23, a captain in the Givati Brigade, wrote from Gaza in Nov. 2023: “Who’s supposed to teach 23-year-old kids how to write a letter like this?” He wasn’t asking rhetorically. He genuinely didn’t know. He wrote it, anyway. Seven weeks later, he was killed.
That question, and the 48 others collected alongside it, make up If You’re Reading These Words: Last Letters from Heroes of the October 7th War, edited by Shlomo Kavas and Racheli Palant-Rozen, published by The Toby Press, an imprint of Koren Publishers Jerusalem. The book has been a bestseller in Hebrew since its publication in Israel, and this is its first English translation, by Sara Daniel. The small Star of David on the cover was drawn by Adi Leon, 20, at the bottom of his last letter, written the night before he entered Gaza. He ended it with the words “I hope you’ll remember me.”
It’s not like other books about Oct. 7. It does not explain, analyze, or argue. It simply holds open what these people wrote, in the minutes and hours before they went in, and asks you to be present for it.
Shlomo Kavas is a copywriter and Racheli Palant-Rozen is a journalist, and neither of them was an outside observer. On Oct. 7, Kavas’s uncle was murdered in Sderot on his way to synagogue. Palant-Rozen husband, Nitai, was a reservist fighting in Gaza.
They were inside it not as journalists at a remove but as people who had already lost someone, and out of that they made an Excel sheet of every soldier who fell in the first year of the war and began calling the families, one by one. The question they were asking parents was always the same: Did your child leave any words behind?
The answer, almost always, was no. “The overwhelming majority of soldiers did not leave a last letter,” they write in their introduction. “There is no formal IDF guideline encouraging soldiers to write letters before going out to battle; soldiers who write do so on their own initiative.” Writing was not the norm. It was a choice, made alone, against the grain of what most soldiers did.
The last words they chose to leave behind
OMRI SHWARTZ wrote in his war journal in Oct. 2023 that he was stopping: “I started writing because I wanted to leave behind a freshly written memory of me, but letters aren’t for me; that brings the end closer.” He wrote again in December, hours before a complex raid. He was killed 18 days later.
What they chose to say runs from the devastating to the startling. Eden Provisor, 21, called his father from a borrowed phone inside Gaza and said: “Dad, now I’m dictating my last words to you.” Three days later, Eden fell in combat.
Yair Roitman wrote that he hadn’t wanted to write, that it felt like bad luck, but decided “for the sake of one more memory and maybe even a smile,” asked his family not to be sad, and signed off: “Here with you always, Yair.”
Then there is Gilad Nitzan, who recorded a voice note for a friend with instructions to send it to his family only if something happened. His friend honored the request and never downloaded it. After Gilad was killed, the recording was automatically deleted. His family found his phone and tried every password they could imagine. Then they tried 2580, the middle row of the keypad. The simplest code possible. It worked.
Ephraim Jackman titled his letter “Mom” and addressed her by name at least four times in fewer than 100 words. His final three: “Humility, humility, humility.” His mother says working on that trait was his life’s mission. He died humble. Those were the last three words he chose.
The editors made one decision and held it absolutely: Not a single word was changed, misspellings included, half-finished sentences included. Eitan Koplovich’s letter, found unsaved and open on his laptop three weeks after he was killed, runs for several careful pages and then stops mid-sentence on the word “Let.” His wife, Yael, pressed “Undo” again and again, looking for what was deleted. Nothing had been. “I think it’s a prayer,” she says. The editors included it exactly as he left it.
A deliberate choice that leaves an open question
There is one question the book doesn’t resolve, and the editors are honest about it. They received hundreds of texts and narrowed the collection to letters written explicitly in the “if you’re reading this” mindset, excluding journals or correspondence that became last words only in retrospect.
That criterion gives the book coherence, though not completeness. It is a portrait of those who looked directly at the possibility of dying and wrote about it, not necessarily a portrait of everyone who went in. Whether that distinction matters is a question the book raises by its very existence and doesn’t pretend to settle.
The last entry belongs to Roee Negri, who didn’t write. On the morning of Oct. 7, as he and his friend Oron geared up to deploy, Oron asked him what he would say if he were going to write. Roee went quiet. “I have nothing to say,” he told him. “What am I supposed to say here? Do I sum up my life? Do I give instructions for what’s next? Do I tell the ones I love that I love them? That’s all clear from before.” Roee fell in Be’eri that day. His friend fought on and, 39 days after Roee’s death, delivered a transcript of their final conversation to the family. Nobody taught him to do that, either.■
If You’re Reading These Words: Last Letters from Heroes of the October 7th WarEdited by Shlomo Kavas & Racheli Palant-RozenThe Toby Press228 pages; NIS 78
Source:
www.jpost.com
