Israeli civilians drove through fields and roads littered with bodies to escape Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, a survivor told Hillsdale students and faculty this week. 

Terrorists shot at Shye Klein, a photographer, and his friends as they fled the Nova Music Festival, where Hamas murdered 378 people. Klein told his story over Zoom Feb. 24 in the Hoynak Room. 

“I remember seeing videos weeks later, there are cars on that road with people also killed, people who were in the same place as we were, almost home, and didn’t make it,” Klein said.

Hillsdale’s Jewish Mishpacha, Passages, and StandWithUs hosted Klein’s talk, according to sophomore Lilly Faye Kraemer, vice president of the Jewish Mishpacha. 

Passages enables Christian students to travel to Israel, and StandWithUs is an organization that combats antisemitism. 

Klein grew up in Toronto, Canada, but he moved to Israel about six months before the attack to be closer to his grandparents, who were in their late 80s. 

“Going to the Nova, it was my first music festival,” Klein said. “I’d never been to one before. It wasn’t really my thing, and I just immigrated to the country, so I was still new.”

Klein went to the festival with his cousin, his cousin’s girlfriend, and five mutual friends. The festival began on Friday, Oct. 6, and attendees camped overnight in the nearby woods. Around 5 a.m. on Oct. 7, Klein and his friends joined the party at the main stage. 

“Everybody’s having a good time,” Klein said. “Everyone’s happy to invite you to join them, to eat or drink or smoke or whatever. And you know, everybody was happy to include you in their friend circle.” 

Eventually, Klein left his friends to talk to other people and take pictures. Around 6 a.m., the music stopped. 

“I see, in the sky, black spots, and I soon realize that they’re rockets,” Klein said. “And the producer comes over the speakers, and he says, ‘Code red, code red. Party’s over, go home.’ And then the music stops, and the security starts telling people to go back to their campsite and get their things and go home.”

When Klein reunited with his friends at the campsite, they were reading the names of the Israeli cities that had intercepted rockets. 

“The whole country, from north to south, east to west, everything except the sea itself, being fired at by Hamas terrorists with thousands and thousands of rockets,” Klein said. “It’s so many rockets, it’s insane.”

Klein’s cousin, who had served in the Israeli Defense Forces, told him that they were safe because they were in the desert close to Gaza, away from densely populated Israeli cities, but Klein insisted that they leave. 

“Eventually he says, ‘OK, let’s go. We’ll go. We’ll pack up our stuff, but I want to finish my beer,’ or something along those lines,” Klein said. 

At 7:30 a.m., when they had finished packing, they heard machine gun fire in the distance. They made their way to a mostly empty parking lot, and five of them climbed into a small, white car. 

“When the terrorists arrived, we didn’t see them because they were opposite of us between the festival and the parking lot, but we heard them,” Klein said. “We heard the machine guns. We heard the explosions. We heard everything that we didn’t want to be hearing.” 

Klein drove toward the exit as fast as possible, trying not to hit people who were running on foot. Police barricaded the road to the north, and Hamas waited on the road to the south, so Klein drove through the surrounding fields. 

“Then from behind us somewhere, there’s terrorists,” Klein said. “They open fire in this field and start shooting at all of us, and we hear this, and my cousin’s girlfriend screams at us, ‘Get out of the car!’ And we all start running out of the car, and we drop on the ground, and everyone’s just holding on to each other while my cousin had stopped in his tracks.” 

Klein’s cousin ran back to the car, climbed in, and returned to pick up Klein and his other friends because he knew running on foot was a bad idea. 

After driving through fields for around 45 minutes, they managed to get back on the road. Klein saw bodies, police cars riddled with bullets, rockets flying overhead, and huge, black pillars of smoke rising in the sky. 

“I didn’t realize that this black smoke was caused by Hamas terrorists going house to house, burning people alive in their homes, in their cars, in the streets,” Klein said. “Really inhumane, inhuman acts that I could not imagine taking place outside of fiction.” 

Klein said he photographed the entire drive, but he tried not to photograph those who were murdered. 

They arrived home in Tel Aviv at 9:47 a.m., but they didn’t find out that their other three friends were alive until that night. They hid in a bush for seven and a half hours until they were rescued. 

Now, Klein hopes to photograph portraits of other Nova survivors. 

“I’m working on a project to photograph other Nova survivors, who are alive, who are around, who are healing and doing their best,” Klein said. “And I’m hoping to have that as an exhibition somewhere in Canada or the U.S., in order to use it as a platform and use the money towards initiatives to help with mental health, PTSD, and psychiatric care.”

Senior Tully Mitchell, who traveled to Israel with Passages in January 2025 and 2026, said she visited the memorial at the site of the Nova massacre twice. 

“The Nova festival in particular is a story of civilians and people like us getting caught in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Mitchell said. 

Sophomore and secretary of the Jewish Mishpacha Leon Rapoport said he was interested in hearing the firsthand story of an Oct. 7 survivor. 

“I think people can be a little unaware of what actually happened on Oct. 7,” Rapoport said. “And I think this event would really help to show literally, with live photos and video what actually happened. I think that’s just helpful for people who are unfamiliar with it to know.”