"You Can Choose Light and Choose Life"

"Then they shot at us. The car lost control, flipped over and  stopped. The doors were locked. We realized we couldn't get out, so we got out from the windows. The moment I landed on the ground, I was shot at point blank range."

"What good are your [United Nations] resolutions, your debates, your empty promises, if the sick, elderly, mothers and their children are left to rot in the terror tunnels?"

Israeli Hamas hostage Mia Schem

Chaim Otmazgin, one of the first ZAKA volunteers to arrive at the scene of the Nova massacre, forces himself to share the horrific stories because he ‘promised the bodies’ he would be their mouthpiece. Lisa Hostein; Photos of those who were murdered or abducted dot the landscape of the Nova music festival site. Yael Ilan

 

At the Nova Music Festival in Southern Israel on October 7, 2023, then-21-year-old Mia Schem, along with her friend Elia Toledano fled when "red alert" sirens sounded, with rockets from Gaza flying overhead. Twenty minutes driving away from the festival location failed to bring them to safety. When Mia Schem was shot as she emerged from the toppled car, she realized that pieces of her right hand were "flying into the air". She was was in the presence of burning cars, scattered bodies of the young festival-goers.

 

She made a split-second decision, her survival instinct directing her to "walk toward the terrorists", reasoning that to do so, might be her only chance of survival. "I was dragged by my hair into a truck with seven Hamas monsters", she recalled. Held captive initially in a private home in Gaza, she was later transferred to the Hamas' infamous tunnel system. There, she was placed in a small cage: "They treated me like an animal. They didn't give me any medicine, any treatment, nothing".

 

 A grab from a UGC video posted on Telegram on October 9, 2023, shows an armed Palestinian terrorist walking around the Supernova music festival, with a body behind him, near Kibbutz Re’im in the Negev desert in southern Israel (ANONYMOUS / AFP)

 

Held in this manner for 55 days, she was eventually released on November 30, 2023. The body of her friend, Elia Toledano, was returned to Israel several months later. A year afterward, while around a hundred hostages remained in captivity in Gaza, she addressed the United Nations Security Council, where she informed them that the Nova Festival was "a bloodbath". There, "hundreds of young men and women were shot, dismembered, raped and kidnapped".   

"I choose gratitude. Gratitude for the simple things. For waking up every morning. For breathing."

"For being able to hug my family. To be with my family."

"The most important thing I want people to understand is captivity didn't end the day I came home. My body came back, but part of my heart and soul is still there."
"Every day I make the choice to get  up and keep going, to live. I don't want people to remember me only as a hostage."

"I want them to remember me as a woman who chose life after everything I went through."

Mia Schem 

Screen capture from video of Hamas terrorist Muhammad Abu Aseed celebrates as he abducts IDF soldier Naama Levy on October 7, 2023.

 

During the time of her seemingly endless loss of normalcy, hope never left her tormented mind. She strove to be herself, to believe in herself, and to believe in others, and that some day she would be released, she would be reunited with her family, and she would go on to live her life, forever altered as it would be. In her dank, airless captivity, caged and incapable of normal movement, she turned to daily singing of Shir Lamaalot (A Song of Ascents), for comfort and to remind herself that she would surmount the trauma of what she had borne and witnessed.   

"I hope people understand what my story is. That my story is not only an Israeli story or Jewish story. It is a human story."

"Terrorism doesn't choose a religion and nationality, or skin colour. When we stay silent in the face of hatred and violence, everyone loses."

"I hope people will choose the trust, choose compassion, and the courage to stand with innocent people, and most of all, I want them to remember that there is always hope, even in the  darkest place."

"You can choose light and choose life." 

Mia Schem  

Screams Before Silence, October 7