Sapir Cohen and Sasha Troufanov were two of the Israelis seized on October 7, 2023, and taken to Gaza. Sapir was released after 55 days, and Sasha was released after 498 days. Sapir spent almost all her imprisonment in the tunnels, while Sasha spent half of his imprisonment above ground and half below, almost entirely in solitary confinement. Yesterday, they spoke at our local Chabad synagogue, and what they said is worth sharing.

Sapir and Sasha are both tech people (he actually worked for Amazon). They met on a dating app, although Sapir had decided on October 6, as they were driving to visit his parents at Kibbutz Nir Oz for the weekend, that she wanted to break up with him.

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Sapir describes herself as on October 6 as apolitical, ignorant about the world around her, and mostly secular, although she believed in God. A looming sense of existential anxiety had sent her looking for God, and, for 30 days—ending on October 6—she had done a daily prayer asking God to deliver her from her enemies.

Meanwhile, Sasha, the son of Russian immigrants who had arrived in Israel when he was a small child, was totally secular. Sapir felt that Sasha’s constant complaining about his bad “luck”—a worldview without meaning or purpose—was so at odds with her growing search for meaning that their relationship could not continue.

And then, October 7 happened. The two were isolated from the rest of the Kibbutz in a small guest room when they heard sirens, followed by a barrage of rockets. They sheltered in a corner of the room under a bed. The rockets were soon followed by shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” screams, and the smell of smoke. (Of Nir Oz’s 400 residents, one quarter were killed, including Sasha’s father, or abducted. Sasha’s mother and grandmother were among those abducted.)

Both Sapir and Sasha described in bare terms the mechanics of their ordeal. Sapir, clad in a small pajama, was put on the back of a motorcycle, squeezed between two terrorists. They headed into Gaza. When the younger one, who was seated behind her, showed signs of wanting to rape (and probably kill) her along the way, she clung to the older one, hoping he’d feel at least some fatherly feeling. She doesn’t know what motivated him, but he insisted that they continue into Gaza.

Once there, she was shocked by the thousands of Gazans cheering the returning terrorists. Like the other hostages, Sapir was first taken to an apartment, although she and two other women soon found themselves in a tunnel. In calm tones, she described the darkness, dampness, smells, filth, hunger, and bugs.

Meanwhile, Sasha tried to make a break for it, only to be stabbed in the back and shot in both legs. One bullet pierced the muscle; the other went right through the bone, completely breaking his leg. Despite his injuries, he was taken to Gaza, where he was given minimal, rudimentary medical care. Even now, eight months after his return, he is still on crutches. He was kept in isolation most of the time, seeing only his captors—and one Gaza child.

It was so painful to listen to this. I was in a standing-room-only hall with at least 350 other people, but you could have heard a pin drop as Sapir and Sasha described their ordeal. Given what these young people went through, you would have thought that the room would have been in tears, but it wasn’t. That was partly because of the matter-of-fact way they related their ordeal, and partly because of the uplifting message they shared about their survival.

Before I get to that, let me interject here with a little Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a Viennese-born psychotherapist who was interned in Theresienstadt, where his father died of starvation and pneumonia; Auschwitz, where his mother and brother were gassed; Dachau, and Turkheim, a subdivision of Dachau. Meanwhile, his wife died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen (just as Anne Frank did).

Yet Frankl survived, and in 1946, he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, explaining how he came out of the camps alive. According to Frankl, assuming people weren’t murdered, their survival depended on finding a purpose in life: completing a task, caring for another, or simply finding meaning in the suffering. As he wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” and “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

What Sapir and Sasha both described was that they found that meaning—and it was a conscious choice on their parts—as the only way to survive. First, both found consolation in God. They prayed to God. More than that, they talked to God (especially Sasha in his solitude). Atheism offered no consolation, but God did.

Both also struggled to find meaning. For Sapir, her mission was to be there for the other women imprisoned with her, especially a frightened 16-year-old girl. Even as they were being led to the tunnels, she made dry jokes about finally getting to see Gaza, confounding her captors. When she returned from her ordeal, she found new meaning in keeping Sasha’s suicidally depressed mother alive. (She was successful.)

Meanwhile, Sasha decided that meaning lay in giving value to each minute and experience. Every scrap of food, every moment of daylight, every breath he took suddenly had value.

When he was still above ground and one of his captors brought the latter’s three-year-old daughter along on several visits, he played with the child. On her first visit, she had hit Sasha because her father had told her Israeli Jews were evil. On one of the last visits, she hugged and kissed him, something he found indescribably moving because he had been so long without any sign of affection. He also found it terribly sad because she was still being raised to hate.

At the end of their talk, Sasha and Sapir said that they were engaged. Sapir explained that, while she was ready to break up with a man who believed in nothing but dumb luck and complained about everything, she wants to spend her life with a man who finds joy and meaning in the smallest things.

They also explained that the world’s Jews must unite, for they’re not imagining that the world hates them. Sapir said that one of her captors had shown her a video of the regular gatherings in Tel Aviv’s “Hostage Square.” He said, “United, the Jews are very powerful.” Of course, this is not about the power of the antisemites’ fever dreams that Jews “control the world.” This is about the power of life and the strength to beat back genocidal evil wherever it appears.

I thought I’d come home from the talk a sobbing wreck. Instead, I emerged energized and uplifted, determined to make every minute count —not in pursuit of vapid pleasure (not actually my style, except for the chocolate and hot baths), but in pursuit of the happiness our Founders envisioned: the elevation of myself for the betterment of the world.

Am Yisroel Chai (the Nation of Israel lives)!