Every year, the pair would visit Ravensburg in southern Germany, where Mrs Louk grew up, so they could spend time with Shani’s grandparents and stay in touch with their German heritage.
But this year there will be an empty seat at the table. “It’s strange… everything is difficult without her,” Louk told the Telegraph.
Louk described how she missed an opportunity to see Shani and to meet her boyfriend, Orion Hernandez Radoux, for the first time on the eve of the October 7 attack.
The couple’s relationship had been a whirlwind of international music festivals after they met in Croatia.
“They were always abroad and travelling, they reconnected all the time,” Louk recalled. “She travelled with him in Mexico and in Europe all summer.”
Shani’s globe-trotting love-story echoed that of her parents. Ricarda met her own husband, Shani’s father, while travelling in Thailand 30 years ago before converting to Judaism and moving to Israel.
So it was hardly surprising that Shani and Orion, the latter of whom is among the Israeli hostages still being held hostage by Hamas, declined her invitation to dinner to do what they loved most – dance among friends at the Nova music festival in the desert at Re-im.
They promised they would come to visit the family home next week - a promise they were tragically unable to keep.
Shani Louk in a photo from her Instagram, which had tens of thousands of followers. Photo / Instagram
When alerts for rockets went off in the south of Israel on the morning of October 7, Ricarda spoke with her daughter for the last time, but had not thought too much of it. “We are used to rockets, we have this routine. We see rockets, we go to the shelter and we go back to our lives,” she said.
But she would never go back to her old life again. Shani, Orion and a friend tried to flee the festival in a car, calling fellow party-goers to alert them to the danger. “They were warning them: they said, ‘Don’t come here. They’re shooting’,” said Louk.
The worst terror attack in Israel’s history was unfolding all around them. There were Hamas terrorists on the road leading out of the festival. Shani and her boyfriend could not escape.
As the attack was still unfolding, photos showing Shani’s partially clothed body, with her long dreadlocks and distinctive tattoos, being carried into Gaza on a truck spread around the world.
Even then, there remained some hope that Shani was still alive. A friend involved in an Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative had a contact in Gaza who had visited the hospital where it was rumoured Shani was being held.
“It gave us hope at that time,” Louk said. But that faint hope was dashed when two members of the Israel Defence Forces turned up at the Louk family home.
“They knocked on the door at midnight. We opened the door, and [knew] immediately what had happened. That’s the only reason they come,” Louk said, fighting back tears.
Israeli forensics investigators had detected a fragment of Shani’s skull on the road outside the music festival, suggesting she likely died on the spot.
“She was a very independent woman, very peace-loving, a free spirit … When she was a teenager, she didn’t go the conventional way,” said Louk.
A pacifist by conviction, Shani avoided Israel’s compulsory military service, moving to Tel Aviv when she was 18 and working in all kinds of jobs to get by.
“Retrospectively, we think maybe that’s the plan of life that she had – she experienced a lot of things earlier than others, because she didn’t have much time,” her mother said.
Family and friends of Israeli soldier Lt. Yaacov Elian mourn over his grave during his funeral at Kiryat Shaul cemetery in Tel Aviv, Israel on Friday, December 22, 2023. Photo / AP
Shani had recently found her passion as a tattoo artist, and her art and adventures around the world were a cause for delight among her family.
Shani’s uncle Markus Waidmann said his own children were distraught at what happened to her. They, along with 10,000 others, followed their cousin’s travels on Instagram and had just made plans to get tattoos from her when they visited Israel this year.
“My son and my daughter are very connected to Shani by social media and they know everything about each other,” said Waidmann, an IT consultant. “It was very hard for my daughter.”
With her youthful spirit and hippie style, Shani became a global symbol of the innocent victims of Hamas’ massacre at the Nova rave.
But when the Louks saw inaccurate reports that Shani had been beheaded in a German newspaper, they were dumbfounded, and asked where the information had come from. “From your president,” was the reply.
Louk called Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, personally to demand an explanation. He had misunderstood official reports.
“He apologised 10 times… I think it was really by mistake,” she adds. Her opinion of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is less sympathetic.
“I blame him for many things. The focus of the country has not been in the right place for a long time,” she said, referring to controversial rule-of-law reforms and Netanyahu’s hard=line coalition partners.
But Netanyahu’s greatest failure was failing to prevent the October 7 massacre, she said, adding: “He is responsible, even if it was an army failure or intelligence failure.”
Louk decried the breakdown in negotiations for a second release of hostages.
“Everybody’s trying. The Americans are trying, and the Germans, and many other countries are trying, but there’s nobody to talk to,” she said.
Hamas leaders have refused to enter into discussions over a second truce deal to free more captive Israelis, most recently rejecting an offer for a seven-day truce in Gaza in exchange for the release of 40 hostages.
Despite living with the threat from Hamas for decades, the terror group’s unbridled brutality shocked Louk. “My daughter was killed. I have a right to be very angry at them, but I still wouldn’t imagine killing someone and then cutting them into pieces, or cutting up kids.”
But even worse for Louk were those celebrating the attack in the West, such as Palestinian activists who gave out baklava sweets on the streets of Berlin.
“That makes me angry. That makes me more angry sometimes than our conflict, that so many people don’t understand exactly what’s going on,” she said.
Israel’s enemies, she added, “Write it in black-and-white… they want to eliminate Israel. They want to kill everyone”.
Louk said her family have been touched by the sympathy they’ve received from across the world and back home in Israel, where the family’s neighbours cooked for them every single day for a month.
Even in Ravensburg, a picturesque city in Germany’s far southwest that seems far removed from the war in the Middle East, locals marched for the release of the hostages.
