‘We just saw bodies’: Survivor recounts Bondi terror

Tessa Horwitz Gnesin attended Chanukah by the Sea on Bondi Beach with her husband that horrific night and shared her harrowing story with The AJN.

As her son was arriving with his young children in the car, Tessa and her husband headed to the doughnut stand to give their grandchildren a snack. Minutes later she heard bullets. At first, she thought they were fireworks, but soon realised they were bullets and ducked for cover in the doughnut stand.

“My husband was lying right next to me. There was this other man in the middle, and then on the other side, opposite me, was this most beautiful grandmother, shielding this six-week-old baby … this grandmother was so calm, and she crouched over protecting this baby who did not make a sound.”

Tessa feared for her life. She told her son on the phone that she loved him, his brother and sister and began to pray.

“I started davening. I’m a very Zionistic, passionate Jewish woman, but I’m not religious. I don’t read or speak Hebrew, but I know the Shema, and I said it continuously.” She also told her husband she loved him. “I told him I love him more in those … 10 minutes than I’ve told him in 49 years of marriage.”

As she hid in the doughnut stand, Tessa didn’t see the massacre as it was happening around her, but her husband did. “My husband said, ‘Oh my God, there are bodies lying two feet away from us’ … He saw people doing CPR to people around them. That noise [of the bullets]. It was loud, it was deafening, and it just never stopped. We just couldn’t believe, where was anybody? Where were the police? What was happening? Just why did it continue?”

When the bullets stopped, Tessa couldn’t get up from the ground, but a young man said they needed to leave in case the danger was not over and picked her up and carried her to the end of the park, other young men also helped.

“Walking to the end of the park, we just saw bodies,” she said. When Tessa was finally home, she lit Chanukah candles with her family.

“We got home and sang as loudly as we could while we lit our Chanukah candles. It was our Chanukah miracle, because if we hadn’t run, if we hadn’t walked to that doughnut stand, if we hadn’t been there looking for food for our grandchildren at that moment, we would have been openly exposed, like everybody else.

“I’m grateful that we survived, but I’ve got lots of anger. I don’t know who I’m angry at, certainly angry that antisemitism has been allowed to fester that led to this tragedy. But I’m incredibly grateful to Hashem that we survived.”

Tessa conveyed her hope for the speedy recovery of the injured, and her loving thoughts to the families of the bereaved. She would also like to be reunited with the grandmother whose calmness helped her remain calm under traumatic circumstances.