Names, not numbers
Forensic dentist Esi Sharon-Sagie talks about identifying Oct. 7 victims
There’s so much you can’t tell by looking at someone.
Say you meet Dr. Esi Sharon-Sagie at a coffee shop. (This isn’t truly a hypothetical. I did exactly that.)
You are confronted with someone gorgeous. (Beauty isn’t supposed to matter, but it’s hard to ignore.) She’s warm; she’s 50, she tells you with no hesitation, as part of a story, but she looks a decade younger; she has a ponytail with the merest glimmers of silver, and she talks with enthusiasm and flair, in accented but fluent English.
You would never know that you are looking at a dentist, much less the director of the oral rehabilitation post-graduate program at the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Dental Medicine. Much less someone who identified hundreds and hundreds of the bodies — or more often the fractured remains — of victims of the October 7 massacre by looking at what remained of their teeth.
She also was the first professional definitively to identify the dead body of Yahya Sinwar, the terrorist who led Hamas and orchestrated the bloody massacre of October 7.
How can you see what she has seen and still stay sane?
Dr. Sharon-Sagie detailed her background, told her story, and explained a tiny bit — because most of it is beyond explanation — of how it works.
She was born in Jerusalem; her family on her father’s father’s side goes back generations there. Her father’s mother made aliyah from Iraq; her family originally was from Iran. “That’s my Sephardic side,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie said. Her father’s birth name was Zion Busheri.
Her mother was born in 1946, in barely postwar Czechoslovakia; both her maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust, but her grandmother died when she was pregnant with a second baby, so Esti’s mother, Katarina Sara Romer, her aunt, and her grandfather made aliyah when little Sara — as she was known once she got to Israel — was 3, and her grandfather married another survivor. That’s the Ashkenazi side.
“When my parents got married, they changed their last name to Sharon,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie said. “I call myself ‘meorav Yerushalmi.’” That’s a kind of mixed grill, a Jerusalem specialty, full of various chicken parts, including inner organs. “I’m one of those, with so many parts from all over.
Her husband, Tomer Sagie, who works at Yad Vashem as an engineer and now is getting a Ph.D. in the humanities, comes from a similarly mixed background — his father was from Turkey and his mother was from Czechoslovakia. He’s another meorav Yerushalmi — if that’s possible if you’re born in Eilat, as he was. But he’s at least a transplant in Jerusalem.
The couple has three daughters. Yael, 23, just finished her stint in the IDF and as a reservist and just began dental school. Adi, 19, is in the IDF now, and the baby, Noa, is 12.
Dr. Sharon-Sagie, who has worked at Hadassah hospital for 24 years and oversees 16 residents, specializes in oral and maxillofacial rehabilitation.
Since 2010, she’s also volunteered in Israel Police’s forensic odontology victim identification unit. She learned about the unit from a friend, another dentist, who went to Haiti after a massive hurricane struck the already impoverished country and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
“I always wanted to volunteer, to help, to do something that no one else can do. And I knew that I could handle it.” How could she know? “It’s just something you know,” she said.
To be in the unit means that you’ve undergone an enormous amount of training. “They trained us to deal with earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters,” she said. “Over the years, we’ve participated in many disasters. The biggest for me probably was the fire in Carmel, in northern Israel, in 2010. And later on, I worked on events that were smaller by comparison. One of the ones that most affected me was the drowning in Nahal Tzifit in 2018.”
Nine young women and one young man died in that flash flood in the Negev; they were in a mechina program — a preparatory course getting them ready for the IDF. “We had to identify them. That really impacted me. The girls were so pretty, and they were so young! They were very close to my kids’ age.
“About two months before October 7, I was asked to take charge of the unit. The woman who had headed it said that it was enough for her. She would still be in the unit, but not in charge.
“I postponed it. I said that I’d do it, but give me two years. I’m still doing my job in Hadassah.”
On October 6, 2023, the Sagie family got together for Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, which are celebrated on the same day in Israel. The family sukkah was still up, on the family’s balcony. “My husband and my daughters and I build it every year,” she said. “We did it that year, and we sat in it every day. We invited guests. On that day, we had invited our two older daughters’ boyfriends.”
She showed a photo taken that day.
“It was my bright day,” she said. “My happy day. My everything day. We sat together and had lunch. It was sunny out. It was beautiful. Everything was white and bright and everyone was laughing. It had rained the day before, but that day was perfect.”
Dr. Sharon-Sagie had planned to run the next morning, as she does on most Saturdays and holidays. “I run long distances,” she said. That includes marathons. But Jerusalem is so hilly. Isn’t that hard? No, she said flatly. It’s not. “I am used to it.”
She dressed for running.
“And then I started getting messages. I knew that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what, so I asked Tomer to accompany me on the run.” She runs, and he follows in a very slow-moving car, she explained.
“And then I got more and more messages.
“I was starting to get messages from my DVI group” — that’s the dental victim identification group. “Whenever something bad happens, they post something to say ‘be prepared.’ I got that message. When I get it I have to shut myself out of social media, radio, television, everything, so I can do my work.”
That’s to keep herself from knowing the stories behind the dead bodies and their jaws and teeth. “Otherwise, it’s too difficult to manage your emotions,” she said. “As a forensic dentist, I am not supposed to have any feelings when I do my work.
“But it was very difficult. We started hearing sirens. We had to go into our safe room. I was still in my jogging clothes, so I said, ‘Okay, I won’t run outside, but I can run inside.’ But the sirens kept going.”
Her daughters were home, so she didn’t have to worry about them immediately. “So we started taking down the sukkah. I knew that I wasn’t going to be home for at least a few days — I didn’t know how long — so we started tearing it down. It took a day.
“And then I got a message that I was supposed to go to a military camp. To Shura Military Base near Ramle. Usually our work is done in the forensic medical center Abu Kabir, in Tel Aviv, but this time they told us to go to the military camp in the middle of the country.
“It was because there were many bodies. We didn’t know how many bodies.
“At 11 that evening, two of my colleagues went to Shura and saw what was going on. They said they saw the IDF arranging it for bodies, but the bodies weren’t there yet. The IDF was still taking casualties out. They wanted to get out anyone they possibly could save first.”
Then the bodies started coming. “And then we got to work.
“We work eight-hour shifts. Our work is divided into parallel parts. One part is the postmortem, which means the collection of data from the dead. It isn’t just dentists who do this. It’s for everyone who works with the dead. It’s building a database, working with doctors and dentists.”
The medical teams also have access to antemortem databases — information about the dead when they still were alive — “and then there’s reconciliation, which is the comparison of the two sets of data.” The goal is to identify each body.
“I heard something very important in that first week,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie said. “We got body bags with five-digit numbers, and someone said that in the Holocaust, they took away people’s names and gave them numbers.
“Here, we’re trying to turn the numbers on those bags into names. We’re helping them get their names back.”
The facility had to be arranged to handle a nightmarishly large number of bodies.
“When you get into the military camp, you see — and I didn’t notice this at the beginning — big white food trucks. They’re very big. It didn’t look strange to me. It was only after a day or two that I saw, when the truck doors open, that there were racks and racks of bodies. It looked like the Holocaust. Racks and racks of body bags. It looked like the barracks in concentration camps. Each truck held 60 to 70 body bags, and the soldiers took them into the corridors one at a time.
“There were two corridors. One was for the military, and the other was for the civilians. We worked on the civilian side.
“In the IDF corridor, there were many wooden coffins, because the IDF buries bodies in coffins. The civilians were buried in shrouds.
“There were so many coffins. I saw names on the coffins, and I didn’t look at them, because if you look at them you will remember them. These are kids the same age as my kids, lying in coffins. They could be my kids’ friends, or my friends’ kids. If you see it, you will remember it. It will come back to you. I didn’t look and I passed by quickly.
“On the outside of the camp, there were families sitting. I told myself, ‘Don’t look at their faces. You can’t face the sorrow in their faces.
“On the civilian side, there were hundreds of stretchers with body bags. At the beginning of the corridor there were chillers. Most of the bodies were in there. Others were waiting in front of the operating rooms. In the first rooms, there were crime investigators, police, and doctors who took the information — DNA, fingerprints, photos of the bodies. And the next few rooms were odontology rooms.
“We knew what we had to do.
“When I got to the camp, it didn’t take more than a second. I got into a suit and gloves, I went into the room, and I started my work.”
The team — Dr. Sharon-Sagie headed a team of 62 dentists — “took X-rays. We wrote everything down. We were supposed to note if a body was male or female. Sometimes it said so on the form. Sometimes you had to open the body bag. Sometimes the body was so mutilated that you couldn’t tell.
“Sometimes the heads were cut off. Sometimes they were cut down the middle. We still had to take X-rays, and we managed.
“At the beginning, the bodies were still pretty fresh. Some of them still had glitter on them, from the Nova festival, and they had nice clothes. By the end of the second and third days, they started to be rotten. They were swollen. They were black and blue. We couldn’t recognize their faces as faces any more.
“Later, there were maggots.”
There was the smell. “People always talk about the smell,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie said. “But I stopped smelling it. I just couldn’t smell any more. Sometimes I didn’t even need a mask.
“Some of the bodies were totally burned,” she continued. “Some of them were cuffed with wires around their hands.” Sometimes the head was intact, but she and her team couldn’t open the mouth to take X-rays because everything would just fall apart. “When you take X-rays from a burned body, you can’t get it right,” she said. They used CT scanners that doctors at Hadassah Hospital gave them.
Once she and her colleagues finished their eight-hour shifts, they used the data they had collected to try to identify the victims.
It was relatively easy to identify soldiers’ bodies, because the IDF’s databases had the information the doctors and dentists needed, Dr. Sharon-Sagie said. “Normally getting that information from the IDF is not trivial, but this is wartime, so they gave it to us.” It was far harder to get the necessary data about private patients, because it was not in any one central place. But “the national health department gave us whatever we needed,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie said. “We got information from private practices, from X-ray centers, from insurance companies. We got it from every place that still was open, but that wasn’t good enough. Some of the private practices were in the south. So the soldiers went and got file cabinets with hard copies of the data. Some of the file cabinets had bullet holes in them.
“We did that work in the camp for a week, and then we moved into the Israel Police’s national headquarters in Jerusalem, so that we could be with all the other services.
“We started trying to find people. We didn’t know who had been captured, so we started checking Hamas bodies to see if any of them were ours. We looked at thousands of bodies. Every one of them was compared to one of the missing persons.
“After about three weeks, we had 96 percent of the bodies identified. We already knew the names of the hostages. The list was more organized. We knew what we were looking for.”
As soon as a body was identified, it was buried, Dr. Sharon-Sagie said.
Life took on a pattern. “My husband drove me back and forth,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie said. “I usually came home, slept for about two or three hours — I just fell asleep, lost consciousness.” And then she was up, and it all started again. “Almost every day, they would wake me in the middle of the night, sending me a message, saying ‘Hi, how are you. Sorry about sending you horrible pictures in the middle of the night but we got something from the field.’”
Because individual people and their stories get lost in the middle of so much pain and death, and because it is a huge responsibility to hinge questions of whether someone has died on a few teeth, Dr. Sharon-Sagie told the story of one person, “one specific boy, 23 years old,” she said. “His name was Elyakim Liebman. It was on February 28. I got a message asking me to do the second phase of identification. They thought that this boy was kidnapped to Gaza. His two brothers were fighting in Gaza, and they wrote on walls there, ‘We are coming to get you.’
“So I got a message asking me to go through 40 body bags, remains from what I call ‘the ‘ambulance of death,’ an ambulance that was hit by an RPG in the area of the music festival.” (RPGs — rocket-propelled grenades — are meant for use against tanks, Dr. Sharon-Sagie said.) “We knew that there had been 17 people in the ambulance, and they were looking for one boy. He was working security at the festival. And I said ‘Of course.’
“I finished my work and I sat there and started going through the numbers that were given to me, and I asked my friend who was in the unit to be my partner in this
“About an hour and a half later, I saw two teeth. It was a body bag with a number, and inside there were 38 incinerated teeth. I saw two teeth that were his lower molars, with root canals. It was totally incinerated, so we couldn’t get any DNA from it. I sent a picture of it to my friend, and the second she saw the picture she said, ‘We found him.’”
But identifications are hard. You have to be sure. And so does a colleague. A certificate needs two signatures.
“From that moment, on Wednesday, to Saturday morning it was in my mind. I showed it to everyone I could find. I said, ‘See the resemblance? It’s him, right?’ Because before you sign the certificate, you have to be sure. It means so much.
“So on Saturday, after my morning run, I decided that I am going to write the protocol and send it to my friend, and I said, ‘I am going to sign it. Will you?’ And she said, ‘Yes. I was waiting for you.’
“I couldn’t sleep. His family should know that I signed it. I asked two other colleagues, and they agreed. So I sent it to the police. It means so much.
“Then it has to go through a whole process. That was just the beginning.”
Where was his body?
The ordeal was resolved in May, when the body was found, buried in another person’s grave. “I called my friend and said, ‘It’s over,’ and I heard her starting to cry over the phone.”
“I couldn’t cry,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie said. “From the beginning of the war, I haven’t been able to cry. I usually cry at cartoons. I cried at ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ People turn to look at me because I’m crying.
“But I hadn’t been able to cry from the beginning of the war, because I was afraid I would lose my power to do what I was doing. But that day, in May, I left my clinic, I was alone on the 10th floor of the hospital, and I started to cry.”
The work of identifying bodies has slowed down, although it has not stopped.
“But on October 7 this year, I got a picture and a phone call, asking me what I think. I looked at the picture and I said immediately that I knew who it was. I knew that it was Sinwar.
“I knew it was him because two months before, in August, I decided that I was going to be the one to identify Sinwar, so I decided to build a file on him.
“He had very specific teeth and morphology. I asked a very smart colleague in the unit to build the file. She knew about the brain surgery that he’d had in 2005, so we said, ‘Let’s find his files.’ We got authorization from the police — they were very helpful.
“They had a lot of his DNA. They knew we would get him. They knew that my request was very relevant. So we got his CT scans and an X-ray of his profile from the archives. You can see his amalgam fillings.
“We also knew that he had a small hole in his skull from the brain surgery” — when he was in an Israeli prison, Sinwar had a brain tumor that Israeli doctors removed; the irony of Israelis saving his life is too obvious to dwell on — “so when I saw the picture they sent, I knew it was him.
“I told the soldier to do this” — she pulled at her lips one way, exposing some teeth — “and this” — she pulled at the lips in the other direction – “and in a few minutes I got pictures.
“I had the privilege of signing his dental identification. Later there also was fingerprint and DNA identification, but I had the privilege of recognizing the person who killed so many of our people.”
Dr. Sharon-Sagie has been touring the United States, talking about her experiences for Hadassah Hospital. She’s also been attempting to regain some normal life.
In September, she said, she ran the Berlin Marathon. “It was the marathon’s 50th year, and I am 50. We both started in 1974.”
It’s not always easy to keep going, but it’s necessary, she said. “I have my friends. Whenever I feel bad, I can just talk to them or to one of my colleagues from the team.
“Sometimes I have a bad day, so I try to do as much as I can that day. I try to overfill the day with activities. I ran a marathon. I started a Ph.D. in forensic odontology. I am trying to build some kind of manual, a cookbook to identify incinerated remains. I want to validate everything I have learned this year, so I am trying to do as much as I can.
“Everyone is around me and everyone hugs me all the time. My friends won’t let me fall. Hadassah won’t let me fall. Every time they look at me and see that something is not quite right, they do something.
“A very good friend said, ‘You don’t look that good. What do you need?’ I said that I didn’t know, so he said ‘We are leaving today to go to the sea. So we went to Jaffa and sat drinking beers, and we came back to Jerusalem in the evening.’
“My friends know me so well, and they are all around me.
“This is life. I am into life. I have to be.”
And there’s one more thing. “My work won’t end until the hostages are home,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie said. “Whenever that will be.”
comments