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They just danced. Her laughing faces, her rowing arms, were to see her hands sliding through the air. Music was still.
But on the morning of October 7th, at 6:29 a.m., the music suddenly stands still. In a video you can see how two of the organizers of the Nova Festival in Israel step onto the DJ and call him to make up the music.
Then you see people who run for their lives. We see Kalashnikov armed men, they call “God is big” and shoot the refugees. We see a car that is shot until it stops. We see hooded men who shoot on toilet houses where people hide, men who throw hand grenades into tiny air -raid shell bunkers where people crouch.
The punched cabins are in the “Nova Exhibition” In addition to a video screen on which the terrible cell phone videos run into endless loop. The small bunkers also stand as replicas in the former entrance hall of Tempelhof Airport. We can enter them. They are part of an exhibition on the massacre that Hamas terrorists committed two years ago among the 3500 visitors of a trance festival in the Negev Desert, not far from the Gaza Strip.
We hear shots, screams
The exhibition, which can still be seen in Berlin until November 16, bears the motto “We Will Dance Again” in its entrance banner. And Omri Sassi, who speaks with Rolling Stone the day before the official opening, says: “I still think that music is a healing force. Even after everything that happened.”
Omri Sassi is a DJ and co -founder of the Nova Festival. And a survivor of the terrorist attack on October 7, 2023. He was able to save himself and still suffers from the trauma. 411 festival goers were murdered at the time, hundreds injured, 43 violently kidnapped from Hamas to Gaza.
“I believe in the healing power of music,” says a DJ who survived
The exhibition, which was previously seen in Tel Aviv, New York and Buenos Aires, is depressing. Who knows what happened on October 7, who has read about the murders, mutilation, rapes of the Hamas terrorists, is overwhelmed by the presence of these monstrous crimes. And it is not just the videos in which you can see how the 22-year-old festival visitor Shani Louk on the loading area of a pickup by Hamas men (all men) is driven through the streets and spit on spectators in a kind of triumphal procession. Or the Hamas men who show how many people killed them. Or Noa Kalesh, who hides from the Hamas men, who crouches on the floor under a bush and films. We hear shots, screams, we hear them say: “I want it to be preserved.”
Dozens of shoes, dozens of backpacks, dozens of jeans
It is also the tents, camping chairs, shoes, laundry, cooking harnesses, tarot cards, cell phone cases, baseball caps, sun hats, the burned -out cars that are lying around all over the ghost landscape of the exhibition, as if they were only left behind. All exhibits actually come from the festival site, explains curator Reut Feingold.
The photos of all visitors murdered and kidnapped at the Nova Festival hang along the walls in the back of the hall. Candles stand in front of it. In the middle of the room long tables on which dozens of shoes lie, dozens of backpacks, dozens of jeans. Readers of the massacre. The most impressive picture in the Tempelhofer exhibition. Nobody has to explicitly mention what this picture is reminiscent of.
But a video sequence also remains particularly in the memory: in this sequence you can see Hamas terrorists who have caught a man and confront him. He is obviously not a Jew. You want to know what he is doing here. He is a Palestinian and only the bus driver, he says. And with it probably saves his life.
The brutal absurdity of this scene is stunned.
Gaza is omnipresent: “We all want this war to finally end”
On the day before the opening of the exhibition, when media representatives are invited to visit the press, Tempelhof Airport looks like leaving. No free pale demonstrators, no banner, no rippling and hostility, no hatred, no transparent. Only one thing: “We will dance again”. Even if the devastating, cruel war in Gaza is indispensable, this defiant motto promises a little bit of hope. This place is about the victims of the terrorist attack on October 7th. And yet it is also about tomorrow.
Omri Samir is in the half -darkness of the hall. “I hope for peace, I hope to go home returned,” he says. “You see no flags in this exhibition, because it’s all about people.” And then he says: “We all want this war to finally end.”