Be’eri massacre survivor: ‘This was a pogrom, they butchered my community’

Her first Facebook post was penned on Saturday morning and published when the majority of Israelis were still not aware of the extent of the catastrophe that had become our new reality. “Where is the army??” Sofie Berzon MacKie, 39, demanded to know.

Berzon MacKie told The Jerusalem Post that she wrote these words while fearfully hiding in the bomb shelter inside her house with her husband and their three children, aged 12, nine and three years old. The family had been quietly sheltering there since 6:30 AM that morning, when hundreds of Hamas gunmen perpetrated multiple Israeli communities on the Gaza border. Several hours later Berzon MacKie published another post, putting together what she thought would surely be her last public statement: “If something happens to me, I had a good life. I loved a lot. I had many blessings. I was dealt a bad hand, and it turned into a beautiful life.” About an hour later, she tried to alert the world once more. “We’re surrounded by terrorists,” she wrote in another post that reached thousands of shocked followers. “Houses are going up in flames. I wish someone would save us.” In the afternoon, right before her cell phone died and electricity shortages left the community cut off, Berzon MacKie pleaded for her family’s life one last time, writing: “Besieged in our homes. God, someone please help.”

Berzon MacKie, an artist and curator, resided in the kibbutz since the age of seven, when her family emigrated to Israel from London, only leaving for brief periods to pursue her studies. She devoted the majority of her life to this community, where her father, two sisters and their families also live nearby. The village is usually known for its printing shop and art gallery, where Berzon MacKie has curated multiple exhibitions. But on that fateful Saturday morning it became the scene of atrocities. As of Wednesday, at least 108 of the bodies of Israelis murdered in the Hamas assault of October 7 were located in Berzon MacKie’s community, now dubbed the site of the “Be’eri Massacre.”

At around 6 PM, finally the family heard soldiers knocking on their door; rescue arrived. “The soldiers asked us to pack our bags in two minutes. We were standing on the road with our neighbors and getting briefed on how this was going to take place,” she explains. “All of a sudden two rocket alerts sounded one after the other, and shots were fired at us. The soldiers pushed us back inside and said they were going to neutralize the terrorists and then come back for us. They said ‘soon,’ but that soon turned into six more hours. We waited in the locked up bomb shelter, without electricity, water or air circulation, in terrible heat and in complete darkness. At 12:15 AM they returned and started evacuating us.”

The realities of terror

Berzon MacKie says that during the many hours of uncertainty she told her children the truth, and asked them to try to hold on and to sleep as much as possible. While hiding, she received numerous messages on WhatsApp groups of the kibbutz members, including voice notes by mothers begging for help, screaming and recounting in real time that they are being assaulted. “This was a pogrom, they butchered my community. I knew that the terrorists were passing from house to house and slaughtering everyone. I understood that eventually they were going to get to us, I heard them entering the home of our neighbors 10 meters away, I smelled the houses burning and heard neighbors trying to jump from the windows. At that point I told myself: ‘Sofie, you’re going to die today and you need to accept it, let the fear pass, soon you will feel nothing.’”

The long-awaited rescue, she adds, felt like a scene out of a surreal movie. For 12 minutes she and her children walked to safety under crossfire, with rockets flying over their heads. “Imagine the worst possible battlefield scene from any film you’ve seen and multiply it. We walked past bloody corpses, charred trees, destroyed homes. I carried my toddler close to my chest, my two other children held on to the straps of my backpack and that’s how we advanced, with 30 soldiers and their loaded weapons flanking us on all sides. The soldiers told my children to shut their eyes, so they wouldn’t witness the horrors.”

While she expresses her gratitude to the soldiers who saved her life, Berzon MacKie stresses that her community feels abandoned by the authorities. “I tried to call the police hundreds of times since the morning and no one even answered the phone.” she shares. To this moment, no official institution has contacted Berzon MacKie and her family to offer psychological or any other means of support, and she is relying on the help and kindness of friends, with whom she is sheltering at the northern village of Ein Hod.

“This government is responsible for this unimaginable and horrific human disaster. They need to bring back home the abducted civilians,” she says. “I want the world to know what these terrorists did to us. I have voted for the Left my entire life, but now I want retribution. I want the Gaza Strip and these horrible people to be erased off the face of the Earth.”