The Nova Festival Exhibition is irrefutable proof of what Hamas did on 7 October
Scorched cars and bullet-riddled bathroom stalls; Jewish News' Michelle Rosenberg returned from Berlin with the graphic images of a massacre seared on her soul
It could have been any music festival. It could have been Glastonbury. The Manchester Arena bombing was just eight years ago; last week marked a decade since the massacre at Paris’s Bataclan. But Nova, in southern Israel, now has the appalling, unwanted record of the deadliest terror attack on a music festival in history.
It took seven decades for Holocaust denial and revisionism to break into the mainstream. It took mere weeks after the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust for a concerted campaign of denial regarding what Hamas and its associated terror organisations did on 7 October 2023.
The Yiddish word ‘beshert‘ seems apt to explain how, on the day I came to Berlin as it hosted the Nova Festival exhibition, my brother and youngest nephew were paying respects at the actual Nova site in Re’im, Israel.
Sifting through the many, many pictures I took of the extraordinary in-depth, immersive remembrance which has been created to commemorate that massacre, I am hit, again and again, by the full force of the tribute it pays to the estimated 378 innocent party-goers murdered by Hamas, and efforts it makes for the thousands who, while they physically survived, continue to struggle with PTSD, anxiety and depression.
Let me now take you with me on the one-day journey I made to Germany’s capital city in late October.
In short: there is no escaping it. There is no looking away. The impact it leaves is searing. Words aren’t even needed. But I shall try.
For several weeks, the Nova Festival Exhibition, irony of ironies, was hosted at the site of the former Nazi-era Tempelhof Airport.
The last plane landed here in 2008 before its transformation to a public space but once inside, a surreptitious look behind a grey curtain revealed a yellow sign saying ‘Ausland/Zollgepack’, translating to ‘Customs Baggage Claim’.
Set out as a campsite, the exhibition is designed as if you have arrived just as the last party-goer has left. You’ve just missed them. There is sand on the ground. Trees. Deck chairs. Tinsel, laying there so casually that, for a second, my instinct was to pick it up and put it in the bin. And that’s the point.
The exhibition is a moment, frozen in time, the effect exacerbated by the dim, blue lighting.
Burnt out cars from Nova have been transported in their entirety, their twisted metal set between the camp sites. The yellow portable toilets, layered with festival stickers and riddled with bullet holes.
The bar area, filled with bottles and behind it, the fridge storage containers where many hid, and some survived.
Hauntingly, interspersed between the installations are videos playing testimony, footage from the massacre, of the terrorists themselves, euphoric in their rampage, of gunshots and screams. Camping tents, empty yoghurt pots, clothes, a headband, books, CD’s, shoes, soft drink cans. These are all precious exhibits, meticulously preserved, catalogued and laid out at every new city the Nova commemoration visits.
They are real. They are all that remains of a beautiful group of people who came to dance and were brutally murdered for it.
And at the back, pulsating with intensity, is a white beam of light at the centre of a circle, silk curtains weaving to the sound of trance music, like a heart beat, transmitting from a DJ booth. The combination of that light feels like an altar – the place where the souls of Nova left a place of unspeakable horror.
Leaving the room, you enter another and come face to face with a ‘lost and found’ exhibit, eerily reminiscent of those at Holocaust museums.
Clothes, shoes, baseball caps and personal effects, including CD collections, handbags and scarves – all that were all left behind – all that remain – and with no survivors left to claim them.
Nova survivors have taken on roles as witnesses and exhibition guides, their doing so forming an integral, urgent part of their ongoing recovery from the trauma of experiencing, and surviving, the massacre.
A commemoration room features hundreds of candles and messages from visitors, often written as a memorial to friends and family who were lost. There is also a healing room, where survivors talk to visitors about what they endured.
I met Caitlin Ariel Gaddie, whose extraordinary story almost defies belief. Against the odds, she survived terrorists accosting her with throat-slitting motions, a desperate race in her small car, driving over dead bodies, the sound of which has never left her, hiding in the open for hours, desperate for water, shelter and safety.
The room, stunned into momentary silence, erupted into applause, after which I walked to the exit, passing through a concession offering sweatshirts and commemorative jewellery, with all proceeds going to The Tribe of Nova Foundation.
With mental health at horrific levels in Israel post 7 October, the charity works to prevent suicides, provides financial aid, social integration and occupational therapies for the survivors and their families.
Having emerged from the dimmed lights of the exhibition into the overcast skies of Berlin and sinking, heavy-headed, into a seat on an EasyJet flight back to Luton, after what I saw and felt that day, I feel qualified to state how imperative it is for the Nova Festival Exhibition to come to London.
Not just for the the haters to see it, and then, dare to deny it. There is a wider moral implication. Schools and university students need to see it. Educators need to see it in order to teach about the dangers of hate and ignorance.
The exhibition is our flag in the sand. It is irrefutable proof, not just of the dangers of ignorance and hatred, but of our continued existence, our defiance, our resilience, our endurance, our neshama.
- The Nova Festival Exhibition initially premiered in Tel Aviv for 10 weeks in January 2024. To date, it’s toured New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC and Buenos Aires. Around half a million people have seen the Nova Festival Exhibition; forty percent of those have not been Jewish.
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