Yahoo News Mother of Hamas victim Shani Louk on facing first Christmas without her daughter
This will be Ricarda Louk’s first Christmas without her beloved daughter Shani, the 23-year-old whose death at the hands of Hamas reverberated around the world.
Every year, the pair would visit Ravensburg in southern Germany, where Mrs Louk grew up, so they could spend time with Shani’s grandparents and stay in touch with their German heritage.
But this year there will be an empty seat at the table. “It’s strange... everything is difficult without her,” Mrs Louk told The Telegraph.
She described how she had missed an opportunity to see Shani and meet her boyfriend, Orion Hernandez Radoux, for the first time on the eve of the Oct 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel.
“They were always abroad and travelling, they reconnected all the time,” she recalled. “She travelled with him in Mexico and in Europe all summer.”
Shani’s globe-trotting love story echoed that of her parents. Mrs Louk met her husband, Shani’s father, while travelling in Thailand 30 years ago before converting to Judaism and moving to Israel.
Shani and Orion, who is among the Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas, declined Mrs Louk’s invitation to dinner to do what they loved most – dance among friends at the Supernova music festival in the desert at Re-im. They promised they would come to visit the family home the following week.
When alerts for rockets went off in the south of Israel on the morning of Oct 7, Mrs Louk spoke with her daughter for the last time, but had not thought too much of it. “We are used to rockets, we have this routine. We see rockets, we go to the shelter and we go back to our lives,” she said.
But she would never go back to her old life again. Shani, Orion and a friend tried to flee the festival in a car, calling fellow partygoers to alert them to the danger. “They were warning them – they said, don’t come here, they’re shooting,” said Mrs Louk.
The worst terror attack in Israel’s history was unfolding all around them. There were Hamas terrorists on the road leading out of the festival. Shani and her boyfriend could not escape.
As the attack was still unfolding, photos showing Shani’s partially-clothed body, with her long dreadlocks and distinctive tattoos, being carried into Gaza on a truck spread around the world.
Even then, there remained some hope that she was still alive. A friend involved in an Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative had a contact in Gaza who had visited the hospital where it was rumoured that she was being held.
“It gave us hope at that time,” Mrs Louk said. But that faint hope was dashed when two members of the Israel Defense Forces turned up at the Louk family home.
“They knocked on the door at midnight. We opened the door, and you know immediately what’s happened. That’s the only reason they come,” she said, fighting back tears.
Israeli forensics investigators had detected a fragment of Shani’s skull on the road outside the music festival, suggesting she was likely to have died on the spot.
“She was a very independent woman, very peace-loving, a free spirit … When she was a teenager, she didn’t go the conventional way,” said Mrs Louk.
A pacifist by conviction, Shani avoided Israel’s compulsory military service, moving to Tel Aviv when she was 18 and working in all kinds of jobs to get by.
“Retrospectively, we think maybe that’s the plan of life that she had – she experienced a lot of things earlier than others, because she didn’t have much time,” her mother said.
Shani had recently found her passion as a tattoo artist, and her art and adventures around the world were a cause for delight among her family.
Markus Waidmann, her uncle, said his children were distraught at what happened to her. They, along with 10,000 others, followed their cousin’s travels on Instagram and had made plans to get tattoos from her when they visited Israel this year.
“My son and my daughter are very connected to Shani by social media and they know everything about each other,” said Mr Waidmann, an IT consultant. “It was very hard for my daughter.”
With her youthful spirit and hippy style, Shani became a global symbol of the innocent victims of Hamas’s massacre at the Supernova rave.
But when the Louks saw inaccurate reports in a German newspaper that Shani had been beheaded, they were dumbfounded and asked where the information had come from. “From your president,” was the reply.
Mrs Louk called Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, personally to demand an explanation. He had misunderstood official reports. “He apologised 10 times… I think it was really by mistake,” she adds.
Her opinion of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is less sympathetic. “I blame him for many things. The focus of the country has not been in the right place for a long time,” she said, referring to controversial rule of law reforms and Mr Netanyahu’s hardline coalition partners.
But his greatest failure was failing to prevent the Oct 7 massacre, she said, adding: “He is responsible, even if it was an army failure or intelligence failure.”
Despite living with the threat from Hamas for decades, the terror group’s brutality shocked Mrs Louk. “My daughter was killed. I have a right to be very angry at them, but I still wouldn’t imagine killing someone and then cutting them into pieces or cutting up kids.”
But even worse for Mrs Louk was those celebrating the attack in the West, such as Palestinian activists who gave out baklava sweets on the streets of Berlin.
“That makes me angry. That makes me more angry sometimes than our conflict, that so many people don’t understand exactly what’s going on,” she said. Israel’s enemies, she added, “write it in black and white… they want to eliminate Israel. They want to kill everyone”.
Mrs Louk said her family had been touched by the sympathy they received from across the world and back home in Israel, where the family’s neighbours cooked for them every single day for a month.
In Ravensburg, a picturesque city in Germany’s far south-west that seems far removed from the war in the Middle East, locals marched for the release of the hostages.
