Yair Agmon ’04

Posted on July 28, 2024

We are not like our grandparents in the Holocaust.

My name is Yair. I’m 37 years old. Married to Shira, father of Chaya, Noah and Roni. Son of Rachel Agmon. I now live in Tel Aviv but I’m still a Yerushalmi (Jerusalemite). My work is mostly in film and literature and I also write for a newspaper.

Last April, my book One Day in October, which I co-wrote with Oriya Mevorach, was published. The book was well received and has become somewhat of a phenomenon. It was a response I wasn’t prepared for.

It’s a book composed of forty stories, very diverse both in terms of the people – the heroes – and in terms of the locations where the events took place. It contains many stories of heroism that, in my opinion, offer a very significant understanding of what actually happened on that day, and what it looked like.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m the last person who would write a book about heroism. That’s really not me. I love small, gossipy, sweet stories. My previous book was about ‘exes,’ a book about break-ups. I’m not the kind of person who would write this type of book. So how did it happen?

At the beginning of the war, I fell into extreme depression. Emotionally, I crashed. I think my breakdown was very much an Israeli breakdown. As an Israeli father, I was ashamed to be a father in this country. They didn’t call me up for reserve duty because my unit had discharged me about three years ago, so I also felt that the world had no need for me as a man. I was really ashamed of who I was. During this crisis, I received all sorts of phone calls from people who wanted me to direct and produce, and I brushed them all off because I wasn’t even physically capable of leaving the house. One of the calls was from a woman named Oriya, who suggested I write a book about stories of heroism. Of course, I brushed her off as well because it had nothing to do with me and I wasn’t interested. But unlike the others, Oriya persisted and approached me again and again. She convinced me to give it a try and do just one story before I said no. So we did one story. It was a story about a guy called Ofek Livni, who rescued people he’d never met from the Nova music festival. He saved nine people – packed them in his 5-seater car and drove off. I remember working on that story. It was the end of October. And I remember how I felt as soon as I read the transcript of the interview with Ofek. For the first time since the war began, I felt that I was able to breathe. It was a moment I will never forget. That same night, I sent Oriya the edited story, and in the email I wrote to her, “Madam, take me with you on this journey.” I realized that instead of spending all day on Telegram and following the news, I could be filling my day with people – “heroes” isn’t the right word – people with a kind of greatness, who saved others, who showed kindness towards others. I understood it would be good for my soul. And it was.

Working on the book was truly healing for me. It allowed me to revisit this day, which we live on ‘repeat’ anyway, but to revisit it while focusing on the right things. It’s about light and not violence, compassion and not evil. In writing the book, we devoted a tremendous amount of time, pages and resources in getting to know its heroes. I had a realization when we started working on the book
that the magnitude of history could overshadow the heroes. The historical event is so immense that it can cause us to forget who was actually there. My goal in writing the book was to clear away the dust, to let the individuals emerge from their stories of heroism.

For example, there’s a story about a guy named Netta Epstein who jumped on a grenade and saved his fiancée’s life. We dedicated two and a half pages in the book to telling their love story, about their first date in Gan Yavne where they ate ice cream, and about Netta himself – how he was a great joker, poking fun at people in the dining hall and starting conversations with people on the train. We wrote about their funny relationship, how Netta brewed beers and his partner, Irene, doesn’t even like beer. Today the whole Israeli beer community brews beer in his memory and sends it to her. And she still hates beer. All this energy that we “spent,” so to speak, on the characters and not on the event itself – that’s the essence of the book for me. It’s a book that seeks the individual in the heart of the great historical event.

I remember, as a senior, going with a high school delegation to the death camps in Poland. I remember how I cried and also how I said to myself, with a sense of relief, ‘at least this nightmare is behind us.’ There was something about October 7th, where I saw before my eyes – I saw on Telegram – the fate of the Jews. It broke my heart to think that I am raising children into this reality. But somehow through my work on the book I suddenly saw… how should I put it… the Israeli gene. When you grasp the number of stories and the number of people who fought that day without being obligated to. For example, in the book, there’s a story of three ultra-Orthodox guys in an ambulance who drove to the Gaza border. The guy told us that every time they reached a red light and passed through as an ambulance, dozens of cars with civilians, with ordinary people, bypassed them, going to fight.

I think that day, when the Zionist project collapsed, was also the day we received proof that it did indeed change something in reality. For me, it provides some “answer.” It may not convince others, but for me it brought peace, to understand that even this terrible and hurting country is a good place for Jews. We are not like our grandparents in the Holocaust. Our story is different.