(NewsNation) — With no sense of time and water hard to come by, a Chicago-area mom whom Hamas abducted during its Oct. 7 attack on Israel said each day in captivity was like a game of Russian roulette: “You don’t know if you’re going to be dead or alive.”
Judith Raanan, 59, and her daughter Natalie, 18, were taken hostage by Hamas when the militant group ambushed the Nahal Oz kibbutz where they were staying.
In captivity, Raanan said she was guarded by five people at all times and didn’t have access to medication she needed.
Watch Part 1 of Raanan’s post-release interview with NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas here.
“I felt that there was no circulation. I was simply afraid to just die there,” Raanan told NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas in her first television interview.
“The Red Cross never came,” she said.
During their two weeks in captivity, Raanan said conditions deteriorated to a point where they lost water and electricity.
“We had to ask permission to get up. … We could not go to the toilet without asking,” Raanan said.
The environment made it difficult to know what was going on, Raanan said, as bombing went on around them.
“It’s like a casino. There is no clock,” she said.
Raanan and her daughter were dressed in Muslim styles of clothing during their captivity, as they had been in their pajamas when taken from the kibbutz where they were staying. Ranaan said she told her captors they were modest women and asked for a bra and more clothing to cover themselves, which they were given.
To keep calm, Raanan said she sang Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” to comfort her daughter.
“She goes like, ‘Mom, I don’t think that this is appropriate. This is not so wonderful right now.’ And I said, ‘This is appropriate.'”
Raanan also used her background as a therapist to try to understand and relate to her captors, especially younger ones, who she said were more willing to listen when she talked.
“I asked one of them, ‘How do you know that your father of your father of your father of your father was not Jewish? How do you know that?'” she said. “He told the other guy, ‘She’s very smart.'”
When Raanan and her daughter found out they were being released, they were dressed in their own clothes again and taken from the location where they had been held.
Those moments between leaving the home and returning to Israel were the scariest, she said, when she finally saw an Israeli soldier who took them from the Red Cross.
“I was as frightened as I can be by then,” she said. “I asked the commander to hold my hand.”
During captivity, the two were supplied with colored pencils and allowed to draw pictures. Those were destroyed for fear that someone would find them. Now free, Raanan has continued to paint images from her time in captivity.
Some of her paintings also include images of angels, as Raanan relied on her faith to stay strong while she was being held hostage.
“Another captive young lady also spoke about spiritual experiences that you had, especially in captivity,” Raanan said. “Because you’re that threatened, it’s like you’re sitting in front of God.”