The film playing as you enter the Nova exhibition – which commemorates the 7 October attack – was painfully familiar to me.
06:29AM – The Moment Music Stood Still, shows smiling, carefree youngsters in festival clothes, dancing on the dry broad plains of southern Israel around the Gaza Strip. Nothing could indicate that with sunrise, some 6,000 Hamas terrorists and their collaborators would invade Israel.
This Nova exhibition is perhaps the rawest, most direct and yet most respectful attempt to confront that day without abandoning Israel’s core values
I also danced at parties there with friends, after which we camped in the woods and were woken by the call to prayer of the Gazan muezzin behind the border. Like at Nova, I couldn’t hear the sirens while dancing, until the DJ stopped the music and announced a ‘red alert’, ordering an evacuation, to the frustration of the crowd. The party I went to was cancelled because of rockets from Gaza. At Nova, it ended with the deadliest attack on a music festival in history, with 413 festival-goers murdered and dozens of hostages taken.
The following rooms of the exhibition depict this hell. Between original festival stalls, abandoned tents, lost shoes and empty snack wrappers, screens broadcast, in loops, videos from Hamas body cameras and from the phones of the hunted festival-goers.
