Freed hostage Or Levy posts new tattoo of Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s inspirational quote

Freed hostage Or Levy posts a photo of his arm with the quote on Instagram. The quote reads, “He who has a why can bear with any how,” a statement told to him by fellow hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin on their 52nd day of captivity. Hersh was later murdered by his terrorist captors at the end of August 2024.

“This sentence accompanied me ever since and to this day, and perhaps thanks to it, I was able to survive this terrible inferno,” writes Levy, who was taken hostage with Goldberg-Polin on October 7, 2023. “My ‘why’ is [my son] Almog and I knew that I would survive anything — no matter how difficult it was — for him.”

Levy was released home in February, only finding out then that his wife, Eynav, was killed on October 7.

He writes that he knew in captivity that when he returned home, he wanted to get a tattoo with that quote so that he would never forget it.

Levy adds that when he told the story to Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin, “Hersh’s amazing parents,” he found out from them that the quote is from Nietzsche and was quoted in Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

He writes that he learned that Frankl used the sentence to describe the mental strength required of him to survive the Holocaust.

“I have tried to avoid comparisons to the Holocaust until now,” writes Levy, “but the parallels are clear.”

He says that since Israel ended the ceasefire, returning to strikes on Gaza, he cannot help but remember that time in captivity — the fears, the mental and physical abuses, the constant danger to life that hovered over the hostages and still hovers over the heads of the remaining hostages.

It is impossible to describe how difficult the situation is, says Levy, how much the hostages suffer in Gaza, how much their families suffer, and he appeals to the Israeli government to put an end to the suffering.