For two and a half years, the Nova exhibition has been traveling. New York. Los Angeles. Other cities I was in. I never went.

There was always a reason. Something on the calendar, something I had to be doing. I told myself I would catch it next time.

I don’t think that was true.

I also told myself I did not need to bear witness. I had been a witness. From October 7 onward I sat at a desk with every Hamas Telegram channel open. Islamic Jihad too. I downloaded what they uploaded. I edited and subtitled and posted. I prosecuted the case in public for two and a half years. I knew the footage. I knew the names. What more was there to see?

That was my way of being there. From a desk. With my hands moving.

It was useful. It was also a way of not feeling anything.

I went yesterday because my husband Marc wanted to go. He wants to take his mother eventually, but he wanted to see it first with me. So I went for him.

There is sand on the floor of the exhibition. Real sand, to match the ground at Re’im, where the festival became a killing field. You walk on it the way the people there walked on it.

The first part is the part nobody warns you about. It comes before any of the violence. Survivors describing what Nova was. The tribe. The friendships built over years of these gatherings. People who loved each other. People who were happy. A party that was supposed to end at dawn.

You sit through that. And then you walk through what came next.

The objects are what I was not ready for. The shoes left behind. The phones. The bags. The clothes. Burned cars brought from Re’im and reassembled in a warehouse in East London. I have spent enough time in Holocaust museums to know what a room of objects taken from murdered people looks like. I did not expect to recognize that feeling from something that happened in my lifetime, to people my age, on a Saturday morning two and a half years ago.

I saw Shani Louk on a screen, smiling at the camera. A few steps later I saw the footage of her body on the back of a truck, heading into Gaza, the crowd cheering as it passed.

Then I saw the video of Noa Argamani being taken. I have watched that footage more times than I can count. I know every frame of it. I have explained it on camera, written about it, posted it, argued about it with strangers online. I know Noa now. We’ve met. Seeing it yesterday, on a wall, on sand, knowing the woman in it as a person and not as a face on a screen, was something I wasn’t ready for. That was when I broke.

I started weeping. Marc was crying next to me.

We had to walk out together.

I did not cry on October 7. I did not cry in the weeks after. I was working. I have not cried like that in a long time.

Before it opened, the London police asked the organizers to take the main sign down. The location of the exhibition was kept secret until opening day. Counterterrorism officers worked with the production team to prepare for what might come at the door.

The day I went, there were four police vans outside. The exhibition that tells the story of what happened to young people at a music festival needs four police vans at the door, in London, in 2026.

What I keep thinking about, hours later, is how unknown this still is. A massacre at a music festival. Young people murdered and raped on open ground. Most twenty-year-olds in the West don’t know what happened that morning. Nobody showed them. And the exhibition built so they can see it has to be guarded.

I spent two and a half years making sure people would see it. I made it my job. The one room built for people to see it was the one room I could not walk into.

I walked into it yesterday with my husband. We walked out of it in tears.

I think I was finally grieving.

Go. If you are Jewish, take one person who is not. The vans will be there. Go anyway. One person at a time is the only way this gets known.