In this episode, Richard Pater speaks with Natalie Sanandaji, a New Yorker and survivor of the Nova Festival, who recounts her harrowing experience of that morning, from waking up to the sound of rockets to escaping Hamas terrorists on foot for hours.
Natalie also discusses her work with the Combat Antisemitism Movement, her efforts to build alliances between Jewish and Iranian communities, and the importance of sharing the truth of October 7 with global audiences.
Transcript
(This transcript has been automatically generated by AI — please excuse any potential errors.)
00:00:06:24 – 00:00:27:17
This episode coincides with the two year anniversary of October the 7th, and is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nova music Festival. It is in the memory of 378 people that died, for those kidnaped, and in support of hundreds still in recovery. We are recording this on the 9th of October. Just earlier today we heard the news.
00:00:27:19 – 00:00:52:09
The deal has been agreed to release all the hostages. We hope that by the next episode, they will all be home. Joining me to tell her personal accounts of that day two years ago is Natalie Sanandaji. Natalie, thank you very much indeed for agreeing to share your experience. If I could just ask you to introduce yourself and tell us your story from that day.
00:00:52:11 – 00:01:24:00
Well, thank you so much for having me on, especially during such a important time in this war. The news that we got last night, I feel like I don’t want to let myself get too excited yet. Until I really see them home with my own eyes. But of course, I am already very excited. So my name is Natalie Scientology, and I am a New Yorker, born and raised and, a daughter of an Israeli mother.
00:01:24:00 – 00:01:53:08
And as the daughter of an Israeli mother, I’ve been going to Israel almost every year my entire life. And, the summer of 2023 was no different. I went to Israel for a friend’s wedding, and I ended up extending for the holidays to be with friends and family, and found myself at the Nova Festival and, typically with festivals like these, they, in Israel, for security reasons.
00:01:53:08 – 00:02:16:07
They don’t give the location to the festival until a few hours before it starts. So me and my friends were packing our things and we’re getting ready, and, I’m the only American in the group. My three friends are Israeli, and, we get to location and I see that it’s near Gaza. And obviously I knew,
00:02:16:08 – 00:02:32:12
I knew that people live in those areas, but I have personally never been to those areas, and they kind of look to my friends. And I’m, I’m like a little nervous. And I asked them, you know, should we be worried? But it’s like so close to the border and they’re really gnarly. Like they kind of like laughed at me.
00:02:32:12 – 00:02:49:22
They were like, where were you yesterday? And I was like, well, yesterday I was hiking up in the north of Israel by some waterfalls, and they’re like, okay. And what were you on the border of? I was like, well, I was on the border of Lebanon. And they said, exactly anywhere you go in Israel, you’re going to be bordering some neighbor that maybe doesn’t like us very much.
00:02:49:24 – 00:03:12:05
So I, I figured, you know, they’re right. And, we kind of just finished packing our things and we head down to the festival, and we arrived at around 1:00 am. And, typically with festivals like these, they go anywhere from like 24 hours to three days. So people bring camping gear, and they set up their little campsite with their friends on festival grounds.
00:03:12:07 – 00:03:33:24
And my three friends that I came with, they already had about 10 or 15 friends there that set up the campsites, which kind of just threw our bags at the campsite. And we when we started dancing and my friends said that they, they were tired at around three, 330 and they wanted to go to the campsite and take a nap and wake up for the sunrise of the festival.
00:03:34:01 – 00:04:05:18
So I went with them to, to rest for a little bit, and instead of waking up to the sunrise music, we wake up to the sound of rockets and the way that we were woken up is so surreal to me. So we were sleeping when the first rockets are intercepted and one of the girls from our campsite was on, the dance floor, and she knew that we were sleeping, and she wants to come and wake us up and make sure we were alert to the situation.
00:04:05:20 – 00:04:24:15
So she comes and she’s smiling and she’s so calm, and she kind of nudges us awake and she’s like, hey, guys. Booker 12, good morning. I just wanted you to know a few rockets were intercepted overhead, but it’s fine. It’s normal for the area that we’re in. It’s also a holiday. We know that our neighbors love to disrupt our peace on the holidays.
00:04:24:17 – 00:04:48:11
I’m sure it’s going to be fine. It’s going to pass. It’ll be a few and the party will continue. And you know, today, like I say, after the attacks, I remember thinking to myself, imagine some festival was happening anywhere else in the world, like let’s say Coachella in California. And imagine suddenly rockets are intercepted over people’s heads as they’re dancing.
00:04:48:13 – 00:05:13:12
Now imagine them reacting in such a manner that wouldn’t happen. But unfortunately for Israelis, this is their reality. This is something they deal with on a semi-regular basis. And, a lot of non Israelis were so confused by the fact that we didn’t just start running right away. And I had to explain to people in Israel, a typical workday, you’re sitting at your desk, you hear sirens, rockets are coming.
00:05:13:12 – 00:05:33:09
You run to the bomb shelter, you wait ten minutes. If the coast is clear, you go back to answering your emails. In Israel, you can’t simply just stop at everything that you’re doing because of a few rockets. If you did that and you would never get anything done. So we truly believed at the beginning that the party might continue, but I, I was the only one in the group.
00:05:33:10 – 00:06:04:24
I’d never experienced rocket fire before, and I remember getting up from my camping chair and looking up at the sky, and I started counting the rockets and first it was ten and then it was 15, and then it was 20. And I saw other people start to get a little bit nervous. And at this point the vessel security had shut off the music and asked everyone to please evacuate to their cars and leave the can’t the like dance for the festival premises.
00:06:05:01 – 00:06:27:13
And we start heading to our cars and we’re trying to head out by car, and we’re driving in bumper to bumper traffic for maybe ten minutes. And after about ten minutes, the festival security starts yelling at everyone’s please pull their cars over to the side of this dirt road and get out of their cars and start running. And at this point, we couldn’t understand why they would tell us to run from rockets.
00:06:27:13 – 00:06:49:00
It didn’t make any sense, but we figured, you know, they probably know something that we don’t know. They have our best interests at heart. We should just listen to them. So we pull our car over and we’re sitting in the car for a few moments, and that’s when we hear the first gunshots. And as soon as you hear the first gunshots, you automatically understand that there are terrorists on foot nearby and other armed and that they’re coming for you.
00:06:49:06 – 00:07:10:03
And we opened our doors and we started to run, and everyone in the cars around us did the same. Everyone was just running in different directions. Nobody knew what direction was the reach and safety and were running in one direction for a while, thinking that we’re running from the terrorists and suddenly we see other partygoers running towards us and the ring shot out and they’re falling.
00:07:10:05 – 00:07:28:03
And then you realize you’re also running towards terrorists and that they’re coming from multiple directions and in the beginning of the war, I got asked a lot, you know, how did I know what decisions to make to save my life? And it was a very hard question to answer, because the answer is that nobody knew what decisions to make.
00:07:28:05 – 00:07:57:01
And, I spoke at a vigil in Columbus Circle about three months into the war or so, and the man came up to me and he said that he had seen many of my interviews, and he saw how how much I was struggling to answer this question. And he told me that he had interviewed many Holocaust survivors in his life, and that when Holocaust survivors were asked the same question, how they knew what decisions, to make in life and death situations to save their life.
00:07:57:03 – 00:08:15:10
They coined the term called the choice words choice. And basically the meaning of a choice is choices that in these life and death situations, you don’t have much time to assess which decision is going to be the safer decision, which one might save your life or might get you killed. But you simply have to make a choice in that moment.
00:08:15:12 – 00:08:38:02
And that really perfectly described every decision me and my friends made while running to Hamas terrorists. They were all choices, choices, and the majority of those choices. I don’t know what the outcome of the other choice would have been like. Let’s say I turned left. I don’t know necessarily what the outcome would have been if I turned right, but there’s one choice that will always stay with me.
00:08:38:02 – 00:08:53:05
It was about two hours or so into running. We ran into a group of friends from our campsite, and they were all hiding in a ditch. There was maybe 10 or 15 of them in this big ditch in the ground, and they called us over and they told us, you know, guys come here like, come here with us.
00:08:53:05 – 00:09:12:10
We’re going to hide from the terrorists. And we start crawling into the ditch. And one of the three friends that I had originally came with, I guess he kind of stood over the ditch and looked down at all of us, and I guess he thought to himself, you know, if I was a Hamas terrorist and I found a bunch of people hiding in a ditch, what would I do with them?
00:09:12:10 – 00:09:35:05
I’d probably shoot them right on the spot. And he started yelling at all of us. And he said that if we say message, we have no chance at survival. Where if they find us, where we’re sitting ducks. And he told us our only chance of survival is to continue running at all times. And because of him, we got out of the ditch and we continue to run.
00:09:35:07 – 00:10:04:15
And unfortunately, we we asked the others to come with us, but they felt it was a safer decision to stay in the ditch. And unfortunately, we found out a day or two later that none of them had made it out of that ditch alive. And from there we continue to run. We ran on and off for about four hours, and after about four hours we hadn’t heard any gunshots in a few minutes.
00:10:04:15 – 00:10:27:17
And we saw this kind of like small tree. So did you have a sense of which direction you were running in, or have you been able to retrace those steps since? So I have very few photos from that day, but the photos that I do have, like Apple iPhone maps, just shows you where you took the photos so I can actually see which way we ran.
00:10:27:19 – 00:10:48:10
And I can see on the map that, in the first 15 minutes we were actually running towards Gaza and we almost accidentally, like, crossed into Gaza. Like, I think we would have realized if we got to the border, we wouldn’t have crossed in. But we ran towards Gaza in the beginning, and after about 10 or 15 minutes of running, we we stopped and we’re like, wait, maybe we should look what direction we’re running towards.
00:10:48:10 – 00:11:09:10
And we looked on the maps and then we change directions. And you can see on like the photo maps on my phone when like we changed directions and and so did you. Did you head north or south? I’m not exactly sure. I would have to look at the map again, but we ran towards Portage. So there is a nearby town.
00:11:09:12 – 00:11:34:15
Called British, which at the time was the nearest town to get to safety, that the Hamas terrorist and, infiltrate yet and, we still had maybe an hour and a half of running to get to this town. And, at this point, we decided to to take a break and sit under this tree, and we’re sitting with maybe, like, ten other people, and suddenly we see a pickup truck driving towards us.
00:11:34:17 – 00:11:55:06
And for all of us, our automatic reaction was that these are Hamas terrorists coming to kill us. And I just remember everyone sitting under the tree, kind of half getting up and contemplating running, and then all simultaneously realizing we have nowhere to run to. If these are terrorists, they’re in a car, they have guns, we’re on foot. We have nothing to protect ourselves with.
00:11:55:08 – 00:12:24:22
And they all kind of just sat back down and accepted our fate. And I remember it was like, almost like an oddly peaceful moment. We all just, like, smiled and nodded at each other as if to say, you know, it was nice knowing you and we tried our hardest, but this is it. And as the pickup truck got closer, we realized that this was someone coming to save us and this man driving the truck yelled at all of us to get in the back of his pickup truck, and he drove us the rest of the way to Portage, which was his hometown.
00:12:24:24 – 00:12:58:06
And as soon as he dropped us off, he went back to save more lives. And because of that, it took me about three months to track him down. And, three months, about three months into the war, I went back to Israel and I was able to meet him and thank him. And, I found out that his name is Moshe SRT, and him and his son drove back and forth from their hometown of British to the festival grounds for about 8 or 10 hours that day, risking their own lives over and over again to save lives of people that they don’t even know.
00:12:58:06 – 00:13:25:20
And they they saved about 300 to 400 lives that day. Wow. Incredible. Yeah. He’s, he’s my hero. So. All right. So. So you made the decision. You were with. You stayed with the three friends that you you came with. Basically, you’re all able to, you were able to get out together. Yes. Thankfully, we we stuck together, and we made it to parties together and then eventually made it home together.
00:13:25:22 – 00:13:49:16
Wow. Well, first of all, thank you for thank you for for sharing that, Have you, have you since then? You said you’ve been back. Is there a, kind of a camaraderie amongst other people that have survived that you’re also in touch with, that you have a network? Oh, definitely. There. Well, there’s the like Nova community that they would do like community days.
00:13:49:18 – 00:14:13:20
And in the beginning of the war, I felt very alienated and disconnected from the rest of the survivors because they didn’t, really stay in touch with the people I ran with. And I didn’t know anyone else at the festival. So I was over here in the States doing interviews and speaking out as much as possible. And I didn’t feel like I had a community who understood what I went through because I didn’t know anyone else.
00:14:13:20 – 00:14:35:05
And the first time I went back to Israel, I was able to, I was able to go to this retreat that was set up for Nova survivors in Cyprus, and that was my first time meeting other survivors. And I, I felt I felt like I belonged for the first time in a long time, and it was a very good feeling.
00:14:35:05 – 00:14:52:05
And since then I’ve, I’ve met so many other survivors. Every time I go back to Israel, I meet more and we really become a community. And it’s really, it’s this, like, mutual understanding of each other that only we understand what the other person went through.
00:14:52:07 – 00:15:12:16
I’m sure. I’m sure that’s, Well, that’s that’s minutes of powerful, powerful bonds that you, you’ve established there. And how how is it between you’re based in New York, so you’re kind of one step removed, but at the same time, you’re exactly on the, on the on the front, on the front line of, the, the diplomatic, public diplomacy, battles.
00:15:12:16 – 00:15:41:15
How is that, how have you found the last two years in that context? I, I chose this role because of the fact that I’m American. I didn’t do the Army. I couldn’t go back to reserves. And I, in the first day or two after the war started, I saw my cousins and I saw, like other Nova survivors, going back into reserves and protecting their country and using the fact that they survived that day for a purpose.
00:15:41:17 – 00:16:04:07
And I felt so helpless. I, I felt that I owed it to all those who didn’t survive and all those who were taken hostage to do something on their behalf. And then right away I realized I’m like, oh, well, I have my story. And and I have perfect English because I’m American. And I also realized in those first few days that I was still very much disassociating and my disassociation.
00:16:04:07 – 00:16:21:15
I considered it. I was very much aware of it, and I considered it my superpower at the time, because it gave me the ability to speak out and share my story without breaking down and crying every time. And I knew that so many other survivors could not do the same. So many of them were too traumatized at that time, and even some of them are too traumatized until today to speak.
00:16:21:15 – 00:16:43:04
So, and right away I realize that that was my that was kind of my service. That was my duty. That was my way of giving back to all those who were less fortunate than I was. I couldn’t physically go out on the frontlines and protect my country in that way and give back in that way, but I could I could speak out and be on the frontlines here.
00:16:43:06 – 00:16:54:13
And, that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. For the past two years. So what sort of campaigning have you been involved to? Where you where have you where have you been speaking?
00:16:54:15 – 00:17:19:12
So a month into the war, I started working for the combat antisemitism movement. I’m the public affairs officer. And what that means is I speak out at our events, I do public speaking, events outside of our organization. Really just trying to share my story. Share the story of October 7th as a whole as much as possible.
00:17:19:14 – 00:17:43:17
Really trying to take any news interviews that any and all news interviews that come my way. To to be that voice and to try to amplify the voices of those who can’t speak as much as I can. And also as an Iranian Jew, I spearheaded a project at the combat antisemitism movement called the Iranian Coalition.
00:17:43:19 – 00:18:21:07
And basically the idea of this project was to bring Iranian activists together from all over the world, from all walks of life, to speak out against the regime in Iran, which, as we know, Hamas is just one of the proxies of this regime. And to show the rest of the world a united front between the Jewish community and the Iranian community right now during this war, and to really try to educate the rest of the world about, you know, the deep history between the Iranian people and the Jewish people, the fact that we have the same enemy today and we’re fighting the same enemy, and that the rest of the world needs to see
00:18:21:07 – 00:18:46:01
that we’re actually fighting the enemy of the rest of the world’s. Most of Western civilization does not understand that their next they’re going to be at threat if we don’t fight this enemy for everyone. And, that’s really what I’ve been trying to do, because the media is obviously not on our side, and the media is doing a horrible job of portraying the truth to the rest of the world.
00:18:46:01 – 00:19:10:24
So, really just trying to speak the truth as much as possible and, and hope that people listen. Yeah. I’m presuming you’re you’re engaging with, with non-Jewish audiences as well. I think the what the, the ties with the Iranians is, is absolutely kind of fundamentally, important for how have your audience, kind of, dealt with your, your story and your your message.
00:19:11:01 – 00:19:28:07
So a lot of the time, I, I don’t get the opportunity to speak to, that many non-Jewish audiences face to face. A lot of the time, it’s through my interviews and like the news interviews that they hear my story and.
00:19:28:09 – 00:19:49:13
I think I’m in a very unique position where I get to see that we actually have a lot more allies than we think we do. It’s just that the allies tend to be more quiet, and the ones who are not on our side tend to be louder, so they seem bigger in number. But I receive a lot of messages of love and support online from people who see my interviews, who are allies and, who aren’t in the Jewish community.
00:19:49:15 – 00:20:15:24
And, there have been instances where people, you know, message me or come at me in a combative tone and sometimes I try to have a conversation with them, and after a while I realize that they’re not hearing me at all. And there have been a few instances where I’ve tried to have a conversation with someone, and they actually heard me out, and they came out of the conversation seeing the world completely in a different light.
00:20:16:01 – 00:20:30:15
And, it’s a good feeling, you know, feeling like you had an effect on someone and that maybe that will cause a ripple effect. And then they’ll go talk to their friends or their family members and share what you showed them.
00:20:30:17 – 00:20:45:13
And it’s like, you know, so you kind of from the friends that you had that experience with and your and your wider Israeli friends and, and family, how do you pursue their attitudes have changed kind of in the last, in the last two years.
00:20:45:15 – 00:21:10:03
Well, it’s it’s a whole country in mourning, you know, like this entire country is mourning while still fighting a war. And you see that in, it’s like very surreal. You see that in the street signs. I remember the first time going back to Israel, I saw so many signs on on the streets and like graffiti and on poster boards saying, bring them home now and then.
00:21:10:03 – 00:21:34:07
Right next to that sign, there’s a sign saying, bomb shelter. This way. And it’s it’s really surreal to see such a thing, to see a whole country in mourning while still fighting a war. So, everyone’s attitude has changed, you know, like, like before October 7th, Israel was still going through wars every few years. But it was never like this.
00:21:34:09 – 00:21:42:14
And I feel that the people of Israel have really been shaken up and will never be the same.
00:21:42:16 – 00:22:00:01
Thing. You’re right. I mean, I don’t want to get too much into the projection. As you say, we’re talking here on the day that, that it was announced. So we will, we will together share a prayer for the speedy return of, of all the hostages and kind of the rehabilitation of, of everyone, everyone affected.
00:22:00:07 – 00:22:06:07
But for today and for now, Naftali, thank you very much indeed for sharing your story. Thank you so much.