There are things the body remembers that the mind tries to forget.

My legs remember. A festival dance floor on a Saturday morning. The concrete floor of a tiny, packed bomb shelter, darkness pressing in from every side. The soil of Israel under my boots. Years of service in the Oketz canine unit. The trails near Kibbutz Malkia in the North. The pavement of Birmingham, England, walking every morning past BDS activists selling lies and trying to cancel out my existence.

Courtesy

Nova music festival survivor Maayan Dee marches in the Israel Day on Fifth parade, wearing shoes emblazoned with 'Am Yisrael Chai' and 'We will dance again,' in New York City on May 31, 2026.

On Sunday, I walked with these legs in the heart of Manhattan. On my feet: white sneakers reading “Am Yisrael Chai” and “We will dance again.”

I came to New York with fear in my stomach. Since Oct. 7, 2023, every time I board a plane I feel like I’m leaving behind the friends who didn’t survive and the survivors who don’t know what tomorrow holds. I was also afraid I’d step onto a street with these shoes, the Star of David on my back, and see that look — the Birmingham look.

What I was not prepared for was what actually happened.

I stood at the Israel Day on Fifth march and heard Hebrew. Not from one person but dozens, hundreds, maybe more. Blue and white everywhere. Tens of thousands of people who came from across America not because they had to, but because they wanted to show us that they see us.

I am Maayan Dee, 26. I grew up in London, made aliyah alone at 19 to serve in the IDF K-9 unit, and in October 2023, I was at the Nova festival. I survived.

The weeks after were brutal. I barely left my apartment. I returned to reserve duty within days — and very quickly understood I needed help in absorbing and understanding what I had been through. I found SafeHeart, an organization founded by mental health professionals in the wake of Oct. 7 who built a unique framework for Nova survivors. They connected me with a therapist at no cost, as they do for every person who reaches out. SafeHeart has changed the lives of over 3,000 survivors and their families.

This healing journey is far longer and more complex than people understand from the outside. It has its impossible days — days when it’s hard to describe where you find the strength to get out of bed. Sunday’s march was one milestone, not an ending; a point on a road that continues.

Trauma isolates. It makes you feel that no one can understand, that the world keeps spinning while you’re frozen in the same field, on the same ground, that same Saturday morning. And after Oct. 7, alongside the personal pain, came something else: the feeling that the world doesn’t see us, that our story is being erased.

But then something like this happens. You plant your feet on a street in Manhattan and you see a sea of blue and white. Jews and non-Jews who had no obligation to be there, and yet they were.

The shoes I wore came from a British organization, Am Yisrael Chai Shoes — sent all the way to Israel, with “Am Yisrael Chai” on one side, “We Will Dance Again” split between the two soles. When I put them on, I don’t think about politics. I think about my legs and every floor, every piece of ground, every road they have carried me across.

I heard more Hebrew than English. I was surrounded. Embraced.

And I understood something I perhaps always knew but had never felt until that moment: Our home is not only the ground beneath our feet in Israel. Our home is every place where there is a Jew who remembers, who cares.

On the legs that fled Nova, I marched in New York with pride.

Maayan Dee is a survivor of the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival near Reim, Israel, on Oct. 7, 2023.