The things that Rotem Matias misses used to be small parts of an ordinary life. The “perfect” pasta dish with cherry tomatoes, mushrooms and basil that no one cooks for him any more. Sitting with his mum, Shachar, after school, chatting about his day. His father Shlomi’s musical gifts, threaded through family life right back to Rotem’s earliest childhood memories.
“Other people’s parents would read bedtime stories when we were little, but my dad took a guitar and sang until I fell asleep,” he says.
That world was obliterated, when Hamas killed his parents in their home in the Holit kibbutz, as they shielded their youngest child with their bodies. Rotem, who heard the men laughing as they shot his mother and father, was injured by the bullets and spent more than seven hours hiding with their bodies.
He was 16 years old on 7 October, one of 20 children orphaned that day, according to the Israel National Council for the Child. Another 96 were left with only one parent.
Half a year later, and now 17, Rotem is living with his uncle, Aron Troen, his wife and their two children, trying to piece together a new life from the fragments of his old one. He wants one day to return to the Holit kibbutz, despite everything he endured there, and even though he knows the events of that one day will shape his life.
“It’s a special place for me – most of my memories are from there, it’s my home. Even after everything that happened, I want to go back as fast as possible,” he says. “I’ll never be the same as before, but I want to at least be in the same place.”
Many friends from the community, who have been evacuated to areas far from the Gaza border, also want to return if they can feel secure again – “if there actually will be protection, assurance that we won’t have to go through that again.” For now, he spends weeks with his head down at a new school near his uncle’s home. “I just want to finish, get the best grades I can, and start my life,” he said in an interview in March. He recently got an electric drum set, and is trying to work out and build some muscle, because he is “nearly underweight”.
He plays Mortal Kombat on PlayStation – but no shooter games – with friends scattered around the country, and takes his dog Marko for walks. Marko somehow survived the attack with what Rotem describes as a “shrapnel haircut”.
Enduring extreme tragedy appears to have shaped his unnervingly dark humour. Sitting on the terrace of his uncle’s house as fighter jets roar overhead, he offers up one of his own jokes: “I opened a website for orphans. It didn’t have a home page.”
Israel has been at war since Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages. The stories of survivors and victims still fill Israeli media, months after the attack and long after the focus of global coverage has shifted to tens of thousands killed in Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
But Rotem has been frustrated with how his family’s story has been told. He describes an obsession with his parents’ deaths, rather than their lives. “Nobody actually asked about who my parents were,” he says. “They just want to know what happened. That’s it. It’s not like I’m gonna change [my account of] what happened. It’s going to be the same thing every time.”
One report on his parents’ funeral has stuck in his mind. A photograph referred to Shlomi Matias and “his partner”. “She was not just his partner,” Rotem says of his mum, Shachar.
The couple were musicians, teachers and peace activists, who sent their children to one of Israel’s few bilingual Arabic-Hebrew schools. Photos from a recent trip to the family home, to see what could be salvaged, show a badge with the slogan “Palestinian Lives Matter” lying on the floor.
Life focused on the kibbutz, and the family, but the couple wanted their children to be independent from a young age, Rotem said, which included teaching them to cook. He hopes he can one day manage to recreate his mother’s cherry tomato pasta dish.
In most of the country, for millions of Israelis daily life has returned to a kind of uneasy normality. Schools, restaurants and bars have reopened, people run along the seafront in Tel Aviv or through parks in Jerusalem, buses and trains are packed with commuters and flights have resumed to much of the rest of the world.
But for those more directly affected by 7 October, the pain of grief is multiplied by the frustrations of bureaucracy. The nation’s trauma has not always translated into practical support as the immediate horror of that day has faded.
Troen, who is now Rotem’s legal guardian, has cut back his working hours because he needs more time to navigate the complex web of social services and charities trying to support victims of the attack.
He recently had to apply for a court order to allow Rotem access to his own bank account. “He’s had his liberty and control over his life restricted in a whole variety of ways simply by the nature of bureaucracy,” he says. “You have to have a lot of patience.”
The teenager is frustrated by constant offers for help, however well-meaning they are, and the legal constraints of being an orphan. “I don’t like relying on people,” he says. “I feel confined; people are helping me but I’d rather do things alone, to be more independent.”
At weekends, he travels to see family and friends. He is taking driving lessons and is eager for the freedom of having his own car.
His sisters, Shir, 21, and Shakked, 19, who were in their own apartments in the Holit kibbutz on 7 October, have got a flat together in the south with a room for Rotem. His dad’s parents live in the north, and his 99-year-old maternal great-grandmother, who survived the second world war is in Jerusalem.
In March, for the first time, he spoke at a public event calling for the return of hostages; several primary school classmates are being held in Gaza. “We lost my parents but we can bring back the hostages,” he told the crowd.
He has visited their family home on the kibbutz. It is still standing but blackened and badly damaged by a fire that gutted the neighbouring house. He is waiting to hear if it can be repaired, or if it will have to be torn down and rebuilt.
The family have been sorting through the house’s contents, some of it damaged beyond repair, but other items preserved – mementos of the time when they were a beautiful but ordinary family.
It is so simple, what Rotem misses about his parents, and so utterly irreplaceable. “They knew me very well. They knew how to help me,” he says, in one of the simplest but most profound tributes a parent might hope to hear from their children.
And the template of love, for each other and for their children, that they left for him will outlast the violence of their deaths. “I miss talking with them, but at least I have something to aim for, to find somebody that could be the same for me.”
