Have you ever been so terrified you thought you were about to die? I have.
At five years old, I fell through a tyre tube into the murky waters of the Lami River. I sank fast. My little lungs screamed for air. By a miracle, my late stepsister Gail found me, grabbed my hair, and dragged me to safety. Her courage saved my life.
At fourteen, I was ambushed and beaten by a gang on my way home from listening to a band at a Church Hall in Desvouex Road. Hemmed in, fists flying, I prayed. Rescue came in the form of a person who intervened. Once again, I was spared.
At seventeen, a horrific car crash near Laqere left me with severe head injuries. Thanks to a passing SCC truck, I was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery. I survived.
At twenty-six, I was surrounded by eight men on Amy Street in Toorak. They rained blows from every side. I fought desperately, knowing if I fell to the gravel, they would finish me off. By divine mercy and sheer will I escaped with only minor abrasions and bruises. Shaking with adrenaline, I was consumed with rage, tempted to seek revenge. But I chose to forgive.
Some might call this a curse. I call it grace. Time and again, I’ve stared into the face of fear and lived.
But nothing I endured compares to the terror unleashed on October 7, 2023.
That day, in Israel, families met horror beyond imagination. Masked gunmen stormed homes. Husbands were beaten while forced to watch their wives and daughters brutalised. Children were executed before their parents. Babies strangled with cold intent. These were not soldiers falling in battle. These were civilians being slaughtered in acts of calculated human degradation.
And while bodies lay broken, crowds in Gaza and elsewhere celebrated. That reeks of a culture that has somehow become devoid of humanity and become demonised.
How does a child ever sleep again after watching their parents murdered? How does a mother rebuild after her children are ripped from her arms in cold blood? These are not questions for textbooks. They’re the daily torment of the survivors.
October 7 forces us to confront a searing truth: evil is not theoretical. It’s not an idea. It’s a decision made by human beings who choose to strip others of their humanity. No grievance, no ideology, no cause can ever justify the massacre of innocents.
This recognition does not erase the suffering of Palestinians, nor silence the urgent cry for dignity, justice and statehood. It does not excuse Israel’s harsh retaliations. But it does draw an unbreakable moral line: rape, slaughter and terror against civilians can never be sanitised, relativised, or excused. Not in Israel. Not in Gaza. Not anywhere.
Two years on, remembrance matters. Forgetting allows evil to reinvent itself. Remembering demands we name it, resist denial and honour the victims with unflinching truth.
Justice matters too. Not vengeance that fuels more hate, but accountability that prevents the repetition of such crimes against humanity.
I’ve looked death in the face more than once. Enough to know the icy grip of fear. Enough to empathise. Never enough to truly comprehend the hell those families endured. But it makes me ask: what if it was my family? The thought is unbearable. And that’s precisely why the world must not look away.
October 7 is not only Israel’s wound. It’s humanity’s wound and it’s humanity’s test. It demands that we call evil by its name, stand for the dignity of the victims and refuse to let politics, prejudice or convenience eclipse truth.
I’m in my seventies now, grateful simply to be alive. But gratitude comes with responsibility: to speak, to remember, to stand with the innocent whose voices were silenced.
The cry of October 7 still echoes of grief, blood and unyielding truth. It calls us not only to mourn, but to act. To declare that our measure as human beings lies not in what we survive, but in how we stand with those who suffered unimaginable loss.
And yet, even in the valley of shadows, I hold to this hope: that good will triumph over evil, and that peace will one day embrace every people of this fractured earth.
That’s my prayer. This is my tribute to the innocent fallen.
- COLIN DEOKI is a regular contributor to this newspaper. The views expressed in this article are his and not necessarily of this newspaper.
