Shani Louk’s brother, Amit, wants to take us to the spot where he shared so many conversations.
It is where she made him laugh, think and feel. It is just around the corner from his family home in southern Israel, now full of friends and family who have come to mourn.
This week they received the news that fragments of Shani’s skull had been found at the site of the Nova music festival.
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The last time they heard from her was on the phone, trying to escape from Hamas.
“She said we’re leaving right now, don’t worry,” Amit tells me. But she wasn’t safe.
“The terrorists were waiting in the road,” her brother says.
Then came a video released by Hamas that shook the world. Shani’s body was seen face down and half-naked in a pick-up truck and paraded through Gaza. It was graphic and haunting.
“I never thought I was going to be in contact with this type of video, seeing my sister in that brutal position,” Amit tells me.
“And just in that moment, the whole family just crashed for a few moments.”
They hung on to hope, but this week, there was a knock at the door.
It was Israeli soldiers with news that a fragment of Shani’s skull had been found at the festival site.
“When you see soldiers in the house, you know, bad news, this is going to come,” Amit explains. And yet he feels some relief, that unlike other families in Israel, he knows where his sister is.
“In so many ways, I feel to know this, to know she’s not suffering anymore.” He believes she was fatally shot in the head.
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Unfortunately, one thing his family cannot do is bury her. “There are not enough fragments,” he tells me. But they will spend the next few days working out how they want to honour her.
They already know how they want to remember her – as a spirit that will never leave them, full of joy, wisdom and kindness.
“She loved music. She loved tattoos. She was an artistic person by nature… In the way she was talking and the way she was moving. In the way she danced,” Amit recalls with a beaming smile.
“There was no dark side, only pure angel.”
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But he’s worried about the brutality of what people have been exposed to.
“The kids in Israel are not going to forget these few weeks,” he says.
Graphic videos, like the one of his sister, have been shared widely – images of unfathomable horror.
And yet, in this, Amit’s darkest hour, he is able to provide the kind of light his sister shone on so many – finding comfort in the legacy she leaves behind, her inspiring life, not the manner of her death.
