The new season of Netflix's hit series "The Diplomat" includes a moving, hidden tribute to Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Aner Shapira, an IDF soldier and a Hamas hostage who were killed on and after October 7.
In a short scene in the fourth season, which premiered last week, Frances Munning, the housekeeper at the U.S. ambassador's residence in London, tells the ambassador's top aide, Stuart Heyford, a story about her father. She recalls an American soldier named Hershel Polin who fought alongside him in Belgium during World War II. According to Munning, Polin saved her father's life by catching a live grenade and throwing it away, losing part of his arm in the process. She adds that the soldier was from Richmond, Virginia.
The connection to October 7 is unmistakable. Goldberg-Polin, born in Berkeley, California, lived in Richmond, Virginia, as a young child before his family immigrated to Israel in 2008. On October 7, he and his best friend Aner Shapira fled the Nova music festival and sheltered in a roadside bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re'im. As the terrorists hurled grenades inside, Goldberg-Polin's left arm was blown off below the elbow. He was abducted to Gaza and murdered in captivity in August 2024, along with five other hostages.
Shapira, a soldier in the IDF's Nahal Brigade, stood at the shelter's entrance and caught and threw back seven grenades, saving many lives, before the eighth grenade killed him.
The scene weaves Goldberg-Polin's name, hometown and injury together with Shapira's act of heroism into a single story.
Hersh's mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, told the Times of Israel that the family had been informed about the tribute but had not watched the episode.
