By Esti DeAngelis, Managing Editor
If Eli Sharabi had decided upon his return from Hamas captivity to retreat into private life, everyone would have understood. After being kidnapped from his home in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, Sharabi survived 491 in Hamas captivity. Upon his release, he learned that his brother Yossi had also been kidnapped and was subsequently killed in captivity, and that his wife Lianne and teenage daughters Noiya and Yahel had been murdered on October 7. If anyone deserves privacy, it’s him.
But instead of retreating to grieve in solitude, Sharabi did the exact opposite. He gave interviews. He spoke at the UN Security Council. He looked out at the world and understood the power of his own voice. And less than four months after his return, Sharabi released a memoir that became the fastest-selling book in Israeli history.
Published in English on October 7, 2025, Hostage is triumph of the human spirit. “I wrote it to show it doesn’t matter what cards life deals you, it is in your hands,” Sharabi said during an online book ceremony in which he was presented with Israel’s Golden Book Award. “You can make the choice to live and how to live.”
Sharabi’s survival and resilience makes him a hero, no doubt. But his memoir doesn’t want you to think that. Sharabi’s goal isn’t to appear superhuman. Rather, he is completely, complicatedly human. This humanity is what makes Hostage so impactful.
In Hostage, Sharabi is honest about his experiences and his thought processes. He describes his captivity in detail. He brings his readers to his wife’s and daughters’ graves. It is an endeavor that can only be described as radically generous. Sharabi did not have to do this; he did not have to display the emotional vulnerability that he has. Though writing about his experiences no doubt provided immense healing to him, what he has given the world by sharing them with us is unquantifiable. It should be our job to allow him the space and privacy to heal. Instead, he gave so much of that up in his activism and wrote a memoir that can help heal a nation.
It has certainly helped me. I know the stories of the people Sharabi encountered in captivity; I’ve had two years to learn them. But in Hostage, Sharabi has captured their essences and has displayed their humanity and his own in technicolor. Pieces and fragments come together, and details I know and those I have just learned converge into a recounting of the last two years that, though only through one man’s eyes, feels so complete.
Sharabi was deprived of information. He did not know about the murder of the “Beautiful Six” hostages — three of whom he had met in captivity — until just before his release. He did not know about the elimination of Sinwar, Nasrallah or Haniyeh. And he did not know about the scale of the destruction on Kibbutz Be’eri — nor about the murder of his family. We learned all of this as it was happening, but in Hostage, we learn it anew with Sharabi.
His perspective tells the story of the last two years in a way it has never been told before. I cried when he first discovered that women and children were also kidnapped on October 7, and when he realized that could include his family. I cried when he learned of the murder of his friends Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino, and of his brother Yossi. Sharabi retells the tragedies we haven’t been able to process for two years. Reading them through his eyes, suddenly I understood their magnitude. He has put into words things that before seemed too large to verbalize. He learned about the Bibas family when a terrorist showed him the pictures of those set to be released in the second hostage deal. He was told Kfir Bibas was born in captivity. “I look at the young woman’s face, at the faces of the toddler and the baby,” he writes. “What are they doing in captivity? Who kidnaps a pregnant woman? Who kidnaps an infant? What the hell?”
Reading Hostage was like EMDR therapy, a reprocessing of traumatizing memories to sort out the pain and negative emotions associated with them. I rewatch October 7 through Sharabi’s eyes. I rewatch the hostage crisis. These are things that for two years I felt the constant impulse to truly process. I needed to look back and confront what has happened and decide what all of it means. Reading Hostage helped me begin to do that. Sharabi’s story is an objective tragedy, but his memoir is healing. “I want to live. I love life. I crave it,” he writes.
But it is not only this deep desire to live or the way he finds meaning in all places and things that makes Hostage transformational. It is the fact that telling stories is healing.
Sharabi knows this better than anyone. He writes about how for 491 days, he and those held with him told and retold every aspect of their lives. They spoke of family members whose survival they weren’t sure about, but always in the present tense because they had to. “[A]s a matter of statistics, I took this possibility into account. I guess it could be…” Sharabi writes about the murder of his wife and daughters. “But at the same time, I knew that I had to shove this thought to the corner of my mind. To survive, I would have to cling to the belief and the possibility that they were still alive. But part of me had already processed the grief, assuming this was their fate.”
I think about the stories of his family he told others in captivity, about how he met his wife and about Noiya’s deep maturity and Yahel’s boundless energy. He spoke of circumstances he wasn’t sure still existed, and I wonder if this storytelling can retroactively be seen as the beginning of a grieving process. I wonder if this book is the beginning of our own grieving process, arduous and incompletable as it is.
I’ve long believed that those who endured the most suffering on and since October 7 are the ones who demonstrate the clearest path forward. They are the ones who show us through their stories what it looks like to see profound darkness and to say to its face by the act of living, “I have defeated you.” Sharabi has done that. He calls his memoir Hostage, which one may think contradicts anything related to healing. Why define the book by a terrible past from which you’ve emerged? Because in order to emerge, Sharabi needs to face the horror head-on. He does not downplay it for a moment, and he teaches us not to either. Storytelling and honesty are central to his healing and to our own.
“This here is rock bottom. I’ve seen it. I’ve touched it,” writes Sharabi of visiting his family’s graves. “Now, life.”
Photo Credit: Esti DeAngelis