The stories behind the sirens

For the people of Israel, and for Jews around the world, the date has become synonymous with unimaginable loss, with communities destroyed, families torn apart, and the beginning of a war that continues to shape our lives.

They were paramedics, EMTs, ambulance drivers, dispatchers, volunteers and medical teams. They came from cities and communities across Israel. Jews and Arabs. Religious and secular. Men and women. Veterans and young volunteers.

They did not all know what was happening. They did not have the full picture. They simply knew that people were injured, many of them critically, and that they were needed.

Three years later, Magen David Adom has created a special online testimony, “MDA Heroes of October 7,” to preserve their stories and honour those who were killed. It is much more than a collection of photographs or statistics. It is a map of that terrible day, told through the people who experienced it from inside ambulances, from emergency call centres, from makeshift treatment sites and, in some cases, from inside their own homes.

More than 21,700 calls were received by MDA’s 101 Emergency Call Centers that day. Within hours, more than 1,400 ambulances and mobile intensive care units were operational across Israel, with more than 300 MDA ambulances operating just in the south. Makeshift medical treatment sites were established at stations, junctions and along roads. Bulletproof ambulances entered communities under attack to evacuate the wounded.

These numbers are extraordinary. But numbers cannot express feelings. For that, we need the stories. We need to hear from the people who drove south knowing that they might not come home.

Paramedic Anastasia Stelmachov and ambulance driver Nashet Nasser were finishing a 24-hour shift in central Israel, when they were told to remain on duty. Anastasia had been thinking about the orange soup she would make when she got home. Instead, they headed south.

On the way, they heard that MDA personnel had been killed. They wondered what would happen if they were kidnapped. They thought about their families. Yet they did not turn around.

In Sderot, they treated a police officer who had been critically wounded in the fighting at the police station. They transported him to a treatment site at Kochav Michael, where another paramedic, Alissa Krant, helped save his life. He survived. A young soldier with a severe head injury did not.

For Anastasia, that soldier remains the face of the tragedy of that day. And even today, orange soup reminds her of October 7.

That is what the minisite does so well. It gives the statistics a face. It shows how one MDA team handed a patient to another. How a wounded soldier was carried from Sderot to Kochav Michael and then onwards to hospital. How one person could see only a small part of what was happening, while hundreds of others were doing the same thing at the same time.

Together, those fragments become a story.

At the MDA station in Sderot, the kitchen became a treatment area for walking wounded, while the more seriously injured patients were cared for in the bomb shelter. Outside, terrorists were moving through the streets.

At a synagogue in the community of Naveh, benches that had been arranged for the festival of Simchat Torah were moved aside to create an improvised clinic, which remained under siege for more than 24 hours. Inside the communities of the Gaza border region, MDA personnel did not always go looking for the emergency. Sometimes the emergency came to them.

In Mefalsim, Oren and Meirav Benita treated two wounded soldiers in the living room of their home while their three children remained alone in the safe room. In Sufa, volunteer Zohar Hubara ran under fire towards his son Ido, a member of the community security team who had been critically wounded. In Kibbutz Alumim, EMT Gilad Honwald treated and coordinated the evacuation of ten wounded people while under fire. And in Nir Oz, ambulance driver Arie Itzik fought to save wounded people inside his own community.

These are not stories that belong only to MDA. They belong to all of us.

Later, another paramedic from Rahat, Dvir Ben Ze'ev, travelled from the north after Shabbat to relieve Anis after almost 24 hours of work. This is the Israel that must also be remembered. Not only the horror. Not only the murder. But the people who responded to it.

Each has a story, and a family. Each had dreams, friendships, memories and a life beyond the uniform. The memorial pages allow us to remember them not only by the circumstances of their deaths, but by the lives they lived.

Because remembrance is not simply about looking backwards. It is about deciding what we refuse to forget.

MDA's October 7 minisite is called “MDA Heroes of October 7.” At its heart is a map of southern Israel, with stories placed at the locations where MDA teams worked that day. Alongside the map is a chronological timeline, videos and personal stories of those who were killed.

It allows us to listen to the people who were there. To see their faces. To hear their voices. And to understand what it means to continue working when everything around you has changed.

Many of the MDA personnel featured on the site do not describe themselves as heroes. They simply say they did what had to be done.

Perhaps that is the greatest lesson of all. Heroism is not always a dramatic moment. Sometimes it is an ambulance driver who keeps driving south. Sometimes it is a paramedic who continues treating a patient while worrying about a sister trapped inside an attacked community. Sometimes it is a volunteer who runs from his home to bring medical equipment to an injured grandson, is shot in the hand, quickly bandages himself and carries on treating others.

And sometimes it is a voice at the other end of the telephone, telling two frightened children whose parents have been shot to hide in a cupboard and stay there until help arrives.

October 7 showed us the worst that human beings can do. It also showed us the extraordinary lengths to which human beings will go to save one another. The MDA minisite cannot tell every story. No site could. But it gives us a way to remember. It gives names to the numbers, faces to the statistics and voices to the memories.

Most importantly, it ensures that the stories of those who ran towards the danger are not lost. Three years on, we owe it to those who were murdered, to those who survived, to those who were wounded, and to the thousands who stood between life and death that day to remember what happened.

We owe it to the families of the fallen. And we owe it to the next generation.