On a December morning in 2025, the sound of construction work echoed across Nir Oz, a kibbutz in southern Israel less than three kilometres from the Gaza Strip. Excavators tore down damaged roofs, workers hammered nails into timber and the air carried the taste of dust. From time to time, the ground trembled as tunnels were being demolished across the border. Among the ruins, Sonja Bohl-Dencker, who had travelled from Germany, walked past the remains of homes destroyed during the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023. Photographs of former residents still hung on some of the buildings. Black flags marked houses where people had been murdered; yellow flags identified those from which residents had been abducted.
She stopped outside a house marked by two black flags. Her daughter, Carolin, and Carolin’s close friend Danny Darlington had been killed there. She was 22; he was 34. Bohl-Dencker recalled how the attackers had shot her daughter in the leg, back and neck. The entrance to the reinforced safe room, she believed, showed that the two young people had tried to hold the door shut. The house was due to be demolished. Her reason for returning was not simply to confront the place where her daughter died, but to help restore the kibbutz. Nir Oz, she said, had to become Nir Oz again. Carolin would have wanted that because she had loved the place.
The account, published by the German newspaper Die Zeit, follows a mother’s struggle to live with the murder of her only child, while tracing the final days of Carolin’s life and the destruction of the community she had come to admire.
Carolin and Danny had originally planned to leave Nir Oz for Tel Aviv on Friday, 6 October. They were due to fly back to Berlin the following day. But they cancelled their lift and stayed another night at the home of Danny’s friends. On Saturday evening, Carolin’s best friend, Madeleine Hesse, had planned to meet her in Berlin for a music event in Neukölln. Instead, at 7.16am Israeli time on 7 October, Sonja received a message from her daughter: “We didn’t go to Tel Aviv yesterday after all, but stayed in the kibbutz.” A second message followed: “A war has actually broken out.”
At first, her mother responded with the familiar humour of a parent accustomed to unexpected complications during her daughter’s travels. Carolin had suffered a concussion in southern Italy and once become ill while travelling in Africa. Now, her mother thought, there was a war in Israel. She replied: “When you have a daughter like you, there’s always something happening.”
The attack had begun at 6.29am with rocket fire from Gaza. According to an Israeli military reconstruction cited in the Die Zeit report, attackers breached the border installations at 114 locations. Up to 130 members of Hamas’s Nukhba unit entered the area around Nir Oz, followed by other militants and civilians who looted homes. The first shots were heard in the kibbutz at about 6.52am. Residents of its local security team attempted to resist.
The attackers moved through the community, killing residents, visitors and foreign workers, setting homes on fire and abducting people into Gaza. At 9.06am, Carolin sent her mother another message: “I love you with all my heart, Momichen. And I am endlessly grateful to you for everything.” Around 9.15am, she and Danny were shot dead inside the safe room. The reinforced shelter was designed to withstand rocket attacks, not gunmen armed with automatic weapons.
The last recorded terrorist in Nir Oz was documented at 12.30pm. Israeli border police special forces entered the kibbutz at 1.10pm, with the first soldiers arriving at 1.47pm — more than seven hours after the attackers had begun their assault.
The toll in Nir Oz was devastating: 47 people were killed and 76 abducted, including nine who had already been murdered. Around one in four residents was killed or taken hostage. More than 80 per cent of the kibbutz’s homes were badly damaged, and only six of its more than 200 houses were not entered by the attackers. The youngest hostage, Kfir Bibas, was eight months and 19 days old; he later died in captivity. The peace activist Oded Lifshitz, who had helped bring patients from Gaza to Israeli hospitals before the attack, also died in captivity.
Carolin was the only German citizen killed on 7 October who had no Israeli background. She had travelled to Nir Oz with Danny, a British-Israeli photographer whose mother had grown up there. The kibbutz had been established in 1955 and later became associated with peace initiatives. Some residents had visited Gaza’s beaches, eaten in restaurants and shopped with Palestinian neighbours. Palestinians from Gaza had also worked in its fields. In September 2023, Lifshitz was still travelling to the border to collect patients for treatment in Israel.
Carolin had been drawn to the community’s warmth and its unassuming way of life. In a video recorded shortly before the attack, she described the contrast between the beauty of the place and the threat of violence. It was, she said, “heaven on earth”, although something could happen at any moment. Usually, she added, that happened about once a year — a war.
For her mother, the first days after the attack were marked by uncertainty and an urgent need to bring her daughter’s body home. When Carolin stopped responding, Bohl-Dencker initially hoped the family might have lost contact because the safe room had no electricity or internet. She contacted the German embassy in Israel and the Foreign Office in Berlin, but received no information. A survivor eventually contacted a neighbour in Germany, and rumours circulated that Carolin and Danny had been abducted. The confirmation of their deaths came only on Sunday evening, when Danny’s family telephoned.
Bohl-Dencker has also described the response from German authorities as painfully distant. She said that only after she told the Foreign Office that her daughter was dead did the official machinery begin to move. Police officers arrived at her home seeking information rather than providing it. Friends came to support her, but many acquaintances stayed away, uncertain about what to say. Their silence deepened her isolation. What mattered, she explained, was not a casual greeting but a genuine question: “How are you?”
She also criticised the lack of personal contact from German institutions. After attending a federal commemoration for victims of terrorist violence in 2025, she said she had received formal correspondence and information about compensation applications, but what she needed was a conversation with another person. She contrasted that experience with the support she had received from Israeli representatives, including a consul who continued to contact her and visited her at home.
Her grief has been compounded by anger over attempts, in her view, to relativise the killings. She said that some people in Germany had celebrated her daughter’s murder and that sections of the political left continued to contextualise the killings, rape and torture in ways she regarded as minimising the crimes. The struggle over how the attack and the subsequent war are interpreted, she said, had become an additional burden.
Yet Bohl-Dencker has continued to return to Nir Oz. In December 2025, she joined German volunteers helping with reconstruction. She visited the house where Carolin and Danny were killed, showing others the bullet-riddled safe-room door and the marks left by the Israeli police. The house was demolished in January 2026. By March, the daffodils planted by Bohl-Dencker and other volunteers had begun to flower along the kibbutz’s main path.
The community’s rebuilding is itself uncertain. Some older residents had returned by December 2025, but families with children remained absent, and many were unsure whether they would ever come back. Young members of Hashomer Hatzair, the left-wing Jewish scouting organisation that helped establish the kibbutz, were living in partly completed houses and preparing to settle there permanently. One volunteer argued that security and peace could not be achieved through weapons alone, but also required rebuilding and cooperation.
For Bohl-Dencker, work and remembrance have become ways of continuing. She speaks in Germany about her daughter, raises money for Nir Oz and tries to draw attention to antisemitism. But she does not describe her life as recovered. “I can laugh,” she said during the visit. “That has nothing to do with happiness.”
In the summer of 2026, nearly three years after Carolin’s death, she said the thought of living without her daughter remained unbearable. The hope that time would make the loss easier had not been fulfilled. “It was pretty bad for quite a long time,” she said. “I thought at some point it had to get better, but it doesn’t get better. The thought of living without Carolin is unbearable. And that will not change.”
