If You Are Reading These Words - Last Letters From The Heroes Of The October 7th War

Last words are unlike anything else a person writes in their lifetime. They make requests that can be voiced only a moment before the end, and convey things we dare say for the first time only when it’s our last chance.

If You’re Reading These Words is a first-of-its-kind collection of forty-nine final letters from soldiers who fell in the war that broke out on October 7th, 2023. These letters contain dark humor and inside jokes, searing honesty and scorching love, fear of death and blinding courage. There is drama in them, and also escape from drama – spelling mistakes and pleas for forgiveness, expressions of gratitude and even concrete instructions for the day after.

Every hero in this remarkable book fell in battle, yet this book overflows with life. It focuses not on their deaths, but on what they had to say about living – to us, those who are left behind to read it.

Most of these letters have never before been published. This literary-documentary collection of last words is a piece of history being written now, in the words of young fighters who inscribed with their own blood new chapters in the story of Israel.

SHLOMO KAVAS is a copywriter and stand-up comedian.

RACHELI PALANT-ROZEN is a journalist and social entrepreneur.

Their encounter with the soldiers’ last words made them fall in love with the forty-nine heroes they never got to meet. Maybe it will happen to you, too.

Publisher:

The Toby Press

Pages:

228

Date Published:

23\03\2026