One-third of the 1,200 people killed two years ago in the Hamas-led attack on Israel lost their lives in and around the Nova music festival in the Negev desert.
The touring exhibition opened on Tuesday amid high security in a history-filled location: Berlin’s decommissioned Nazi-era Tempelhof Airport.
An introductory film shows dancing, smiling revellers and the festival’s middle-class hippy vibe just after sunrise on October 7th, 2023, 5km from the border with Gaza.
“When you looked in their eyes,” one survivor recalls, “then you could see how much fun they are having, how they are celebrating life.”
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Then at 6:29am, the film shows the DJ being ordered to turn off the music, shouting: “Red alert, rockets!”
The film ends and exhibition visitors are led into the former Berlin airport’s cavernous departures hall, filled with trees and detritus of devastation: rusted, bullet-riddled car ruins; a single flip-flop; a dirty deodorant spray can; two abandoned camp chairs.
Throughout the hall – on large screens and smartphones – visitors can watch footage from both sides of the October 7th massacre. Men with helmet cameras on motorbikes filming their final preparations, reciting: “There is no God but Allah.” A woman hidden in undergrowth, telling her phone: “I want to go home. I want this to be over.”
Other screens show interviews with survivors, including one Arab-speaking man who heard two other men debating “with joy in their voice whether they should kill or kidnap” the woman they were holding – before shooting her in the head.
[ Two years after the October 7th attack, Israeli families still live in its shadowOpens in new window ]
The hall contains recreations of grey roadside bunkers where some festival-goers took refuge, then were trapped as Hamas fighters tossed in grenades.
In the next section, two side walls show the faces of the dead while, amid artificial candles on benches, visitors have left their reflections.
Beside one postcard reading “I don’t want to hate”, lies another vowing: “Never forget, never forgive.”
In the centre of the room, 10 spotlit tables present abandoned clothes, cosmetic articles and dusty rucksacks – with clear echoes of the Auschwitz camp memorial.
For the curators and survivors featured, the exhibition is about bringing the tragedy and trauma of October 7th for Israelis to a world where attention shifted quickly to the human cost of their country’s retaliation in Gaza.
“It is necessary to show this horror because it is the truth,” said Roey Dery, a survivor who lost three friends at the festival. Asked how he views the war in Gaza, he said: “The hostages should come back, the war must end.”
To leave the exhibition, however, visitors must exit through the gift shop. There the €70 hoodies, €30 baseball caps, necklaces and key-chains will allow visitors join the “tribe of Nova”.
Organisers of the exhibition, dedicated to the memory of the dead, say ticket and merchandise sales will fund therapy, healing ceremonies and other assistance for an estimated 2,500 traumatised survivors and their families.
Leaving the exhibition, having bought nothing in the gift shop, visitor Inge Hohmann is moved but ambivalent.
“It is worth seeing as we know too little about what actually happened,” said the 79 year-old. “But I found some of it a bit lurid.”
A security guard, overhearing her, said: “This is mild. We couldn’t show the worst of it: the people burnt alive, the women draped over rocks to be raped.”
The guard, on loan from the Israeli embassy, has had a busy morning. He points to a man leaving the exhibition who was asked to remove his “Free Gaza” T-shirt before entering.
Inside the exhibition, the security guard says, his colleagues removed a postcard written by another person with the same “Free Gaza” message.
[ Hamas says it wants deal to end war in Gaza but retains set of demandsOpens in new window ]
A 2km no-protest zone has been imposed around the former airport while, anticipating trouble, 1,400 police officers were deployed across the city on Tuesday.
The city cancelled a planned Palestine solidarity march on Tuesday in eastern Berlin and police moved quickly to break up a sit-down protest during morning rush-hour.
On Saturday in Berlin, Germany’s largest Gaza demonstration to date attracted 100,000 marchers, according to organisers, while police registered 60,000 people.
Many marchers carried signs demanding an end to German weapons deliveries to Israel while demonstration co-organiser Ines Schwerdtner, a leader with the opposition Left Party, told the rally: “We are here because a genocide is happening ... we want to end German complicity.”
Chancellor Friedrich Merz had a different focus on Tuesday, warning of a “new wave of anti-Semitism” in Germany in the last two years, taking “new guises, louder and ever-more insolent”.
In a video message, he urged people to reach out to “our Jewish citizens wherever possible ... show that we stand at their side and will do everything so that Jews in Germany can live here without fear”.
