"There is no time to think there is no time for trauma'

It’s nearly a year since a festival filled with people dancing became the site of a bloody massacre. Nicole Lampert talks to survivors about the loved ones who were taken from them

- Nicole Lampert

Ziv Abud’s hands shake as she speaks. As a marketing executive who loved to go to trance parties at weekends, she never wanted or expected to be in the public eye. But as a Nova festival survivor and also the girlfriend of Eliya Cohen, now a hostage, she has found herself thrust into the limelight to remind people about what happened on 7 October.

She is so fragile. She never thought she would be travelling the world, retelling the story of the moment last year when her life, and the lives of so many others, changed beyond recognition. Tears spring to her eyes frequently as we speak in a London hotel, shortly before the British premiere of a BBC documentary that recounts those events in blood-curdling detail.

Among those killed on 7 October, in the same shelter where Ziv and her boyfriend were hiding, were her beloved nephew Amit and his girlfriend Karin. Ziv tells me that she counted around 60 of the 364 killed at the Nova festival as friends.

Nearly 12 months have passed, but the pain from that day still feels as raw as ever, like it happened yesterday. Ziv goes to bed crying, wakes up crying, and spends the rest of her day talking about Eliya, her boyfriend of seven years, whom she refers to as her fiance after learning through friends that he was about to propose on a planned trip to Thailand.

“I try to keep busy all the time, so there is no time to think, no time for trauma,” says the 27-year-old. “I am like a robot. Sometimes, when I sleep, I dream about what happened – the nightmare. But I have to put that to one side, because I am focused on doing everything I can to bring Eliya home. I have a mission, and only when that mission is finished will I take care of myself.”