An Earlier Hostage Speaks Out

[1:09]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com, and follow me on Instagram at zibby owens. Mimi Nichter is the author of hostage, a memoir of terrorism, trauma, and resilience. This is not related to the current day hostage situation. This applies to something that happened in 1970 and is a situation that I read about in the book, learned all about, didn't even know about, I'm embarrassed to admit, even though it happened before I was born. But, you know, history, I should have known. Mimi gives us a front row seat and what it was like for her when she was 20 years old going through this horrific experience on a flight from Israel back to The States when her plane was hijacked and she was taken hostage. However, it sounds depressing. It's really inspiring. Mimi sort of shoved down these memories for many, many years and is just now writing and talking about it. And it's amazing. Also sad how little things have changed, but also inspiring by how everybody can get through everything. Not everybody. Well, you know what I mean. Here's her bio. Mimi Nichter is a cultural and medical anthropologist, public speaker, and a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Arizona. She is the author and coauthor of four anthropology related books and the recipient of the Margaret Mead Award and the George Foster Practicing Medical Anthropology Award. Her essays have appeared in HuffPost, Newsweek, and Brevity. Welcome, Mimi. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about your memoir, Hostage, a memoir of terrorism, trauma, and resilience. Oh my gosh. What a book. What a story.

[3:28]Guest: I can't I can't even believe it. Thank you for writing this. Thank you for having me and for giving me the opportunity to talk about it. And, yeah, it's a big story. It's a big story that's an old story. And so I actually thought I might just start with a few minutes to situate people. Yeah. Okay. So the story in a nutshell is it's 1970, long time ago. I'm 20 years old. I'm wearing a green mini dress and I get on the plane. I'm coming home from Israel. I've spent the summer in Tel Aviv on a kibbutz picking pairs and I'm so excited to get home. I'm going back to college to be a senior at George Washington University and then start my other life, whatever that happens next. And get on the plane, sit on the plane and we're flying. We flew for a couple of hours and then we were flying over Brussels and the pilot says, Well, we'll be back in New York in about eight hours. So I kind of settle in. And then a few minutes later, a man and a woman run down the aisle and he has a gun. She has a grenade and they kind of kick on the cockpit door and they enter. And then a few minutes later, they get on the loudspeaker and they say, This is a hijacking. We're from the Popular Front from the Liberation Of Palestine, and we're taking you to a friendly country. And honestly, I didn't know enough to be afraid. This was the first incident of international terrorism. And I was just like, what is this? And so I kind of turned to my neighbor and he really became a rock for me over the next sort of week and longer. But that was sort of how it began. And then, if I can continue for a moment or two. Go, yes, go. Flew the plane. After they said that really, the plane turned around midair and these bags and things just sort of The tilt was so intense that the bags that were under people's seats just fell into the aisle. And we flew for another, I don't know, maybe six hours. And then they got on the plane was kind of silent then. We didn't know what was going to happen. And then they got on like, let's be here again. And they said, again, they said, well, now they said, we're we're going to be landing in Jordan soon. This is a friendly country. Nobody will harm you. And then the pilot started circling and circling. And my neighbor looked out the window and he was in the middle seat. I was in the aisle and there was an Indian man sitting on the window. He was sleeping the whole time. And my neighbor looked out and he looked down and he said, There's nothing there. It was just sunset. And so he had enough light to see. He said, We're in a desert. There's no runway here. There's no terminal. There's just some cans with torches in it. And I was like, What? Finally, the pilot landed. And the man next to Mice, the third person in the row, got up and said, New York? We just kind of laughed and we looked out the window and we saw what was there. All these men in khakis or robes with their heads covered and guns, lots and lots of guns. And that's really when I got afraid. Oh my gosh. Well, the way that you write the story,

[6:45]Zibby Owens: you start off by telling us that you didn't talk about this piece of your life for decades that you kept it hidden, sort of under wraps. Having read to the end, you did you know, you came back as, like, this quasi celebrity, but then, you know, it quickly passed. You didn't wanna do interviews, and you just, like, wanted to go back to your life. And so it faded. And then you just didn't bring it up. Like, somehow, you just stifled it until it came up again, and you had to confront it when one of the other hostages was was doing a project about it. Talk a little bit about that and just the craziness of being in such a unique horrific situation and so terrifying and then having to just come back, a, to college life, but b, to the rest of your life knowing that this was sort of tucked away for you. Yeah. I think the experience was so frightening for me that

[7:44]Guest: especially when I well, this is a complex question, Zippy. So thank you for asking it. But I think on a personal level, it was something I was used to not talking about things, even though I'm a friendly person, an outgoing person. There were many things that I grew up with in my Jewish Brooklyn household that were kind of out of the norm. My brother had mental health problems. And we learned from a very early age not to talk about those problems, to just kind of put on a normal face. And just if anyone asked what was wrong with him, or how he was, because they could tell that there was something wrong with him. We were just supposed to say he was fine. And so when you've been coached in that way from the age of seven or eight, that becomes a way you deal with things that you find abnormal. And certainly this trauma that I had was out of the ordinary and I didn't have the words for it at home. When I came home, my parents didn't really ask me about it because we didn't talk about things. I think that's an important cultural point to remember that in 1970, we didn't talk about things like that. We didn't talk about trauma in the way we talk about both mental health and personal trauma today. They were topics that were kept sort of under wraps culturally, maybe taken to an extent, far extent to my family. But certainly for women, not to say too much. And I think even for example, there was no concept of PTSD and that came later. And soldiers even who came home from war were just supposed to go home. Like when I came home from my being hijacked and being a hostage, I didn't have any therapy or any kind of help. I just went back to my parents' house. And then shortly after I went back to college where my friends, this was another turning point for me, where my friends was a time of anti Vietnam activists and I was in DC, so there was a lot going on. And people naively thought that my experience was far out. I had been with real revolutionaries. It sounds kind of unbelievable now, that's but that they saw it like, Oh, wow. Tell us about that. Cool, man. And it was just so stupid, you know, naive at least, naive, suppose. Give them credit for that. You know, those were the days that kept me inside as well. So there were personal cultural reasons for it. And then why now? Why should I suddenly write a book about it? Well, the world really changed. Now it became more acceptable to talk about our mental health. We realized that even though many people won't have a hostage situation, many people will have all kinds of traumas that they carry with them. And so there was a lot, I think, that I learned through the experience and through the years of not talking about it that sort of brought me out to wanna talk about it and and see, you know, I think we're losing a lot of history. Mhmm. And I think

[11:02]Zibby Owens: these are this is important to remember. There are very few people who remember this event. I mean, I have to tell you, I did not even know about this event, and I'm really embarrassed to say that. I'd heard obviously, you know, soon after this was the Munich Olympics, and obviously, I've heard about that. I mean, it's I've watched multiple movies about it at this point. But this incident, I just had never heard of, and it was one of the most jarring things was how little it feels like things have changed since 1970. I'm like, this is such an echo, obviously, to October 7 and that hostage situation and the same some of the same issues, which have have not been resolved and continue to go on today, and that was a little bit depressing, to be honest.

[11:54]Guest: Absolutely. It's very depressing. It doesn't surprise me that you didn't know about it. Many people immediately want to look it up. What should I look up? I said, well, maybe look up Dawson's Field. That's the name of the place where we were held, even though it wasn't an actual runway or anything like that. But the British had used it during World War II. But then when you start reading about it, you realize, wow, it was on the cover of Time. It was on the cover of Newsweek. It's a big international. As I said earlier, it was the first of these sort of things. It was a mastermind thing. Actually, they took four airplanes and they blew ours up. And just moments after taking us off, something similar has happened in Egypt, in Cairo Airport. I mean, it was an unbelievable event. And it was way before we had metal detectors. And it was in fact why we have metal detectors today. Because right after that, Nixon put them into place in airports. But before then, they just got on the plane with their paraphernalia, their guns, their grenades.

[13:03]Zibby Owens: On the other hand, it was a lot faster to get through the airport. That

[13:09]Guest: is very true.

[13:10]Zibby Owens: Yes. Yes. I I hate to even joke at all in this episode because the content is so dark. But yet even through it, you were joking. I mean, you were joking with your buddy Mike in this in the seat, and you had to use some gallows humor to to really survive when you were in the apartment later and, like, dealing with that. And, oh my gosh. So I I think we we use whatever coping we can because it's just so horrible. Yes.

[13:38]Guest: Laughter was very important. It was even important in my home, even though, as I said, we didn't talk about things. But we could joke about things. We would joke about, you know, feelings. We would talk about other people and make jokes about them. That was kind of acceptable. So this kind of outward joking was something that was familiar to me. And I like to tell, I like to laugh, right? We're laughing together now, which is great. But I really felt that laughter was something that helped me get through. Laughter and bonding with people on the plane was something that was so important. One of the first things we did, as you read about in the book, was play with the children who were so frightened. And so a few, two of us women got made a camp, like a summer camp and sang songs with kids and whatever games they had, cards, you know, we had playing cards, we had Mad Libs, you know, they had Mad Libs. So we played with those things just to pass the time because six days on an airplane in the desert with people with guns on board was extremely stressful. There were so many kids on board. Laughter and the gallows humor later on laughing about our own death was something that took us out of the space we were really in.

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[17:32]Zibby Owens: It felt like you only really cried when you were in that gymnasium or the auditorium. Like Yeah. When they were like, this is an international thing. You're a pawn in it. Good luck. Door closed.

[17:45]Guest: And you're like, now what? Well, that was the thing too when you're on a plane with so many people, you know, for those all those days on the plane, days and nights, you couldn't cry really. I couldn't cry. I mean, I've been taught to always put on a positive face, so that was what I did. To cry would have affected others. And we had to stay, I felt I had to stay strong for everybody because if people saw me crying, well, they might cry too. Of course, did cry. They cried when their husbands were taken off the plane in the middle of the night at gunpoint. But that was the thing.

[18:23]Zibby Owens: With so many people initially, didn't wanna cry. Well, you also have that scene later in the apartment where the older woman, I can't remember her name, Susan, maybe, that who was married to the rabbi got so upset thinking, you know, like, I need to see my husband. I'm sure he's you know? And she was just so out of out of her mind with grief and and worry as she should have, as we all could understand. So much so that the hostage keepers actually went and got him, which I couldn't even believe happened. But to see the power of what happens when one of you in your small circle breaks down and the effect it had on the rest of you.

[19:05]Guest: That's right. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. And they were he went to get him because they were trying to keep us hidden away. Mhmm. And if they people heard her cries, her shrill cries for her husband, she was yelling out his name. And she was so longing for him and so worried about him and his health that they didn't know how to make her quiet. And he was being held nearby. So he was able to get him. He just made it, I think it speaks to an issue of humanity, that there was humanity. He saw her pain, and he could do something for her in that moment.

[19:48]Zibby Owens: And he did. And the difference in this because I've also read Ellie Sherabi's hostage book. Did you read that? Yes. So now we are far enough from the Holocaust and the some of the kids, not kids, but younger people that Ellie, for example, was down there with, they didn't have that as fresh in their minds as some of the people who literally on the plane had survived not so long ago at nineteen seventy. It was still relatively fresh. And there was one moment where you say something about where they were separating the Jews from the non Jews, and you even spoke back to a German man on the plane. And to have that come so close to the aftermath of the horrors of that time, which also were not as widely discussed,

[20:35]Guest: was just wild. That's right. But there were people on the plane who had survived the Holocaust. Yes. And those people understood what was happening in a way, the potential of what was happening right away. And yes, that man, the German man on the plane, wanted to pay his way off, just get his life out of there. Wasn't me, was actually a woman who had survived the Holocaust who said, You're not gonna be able to buy your way out of this. You're gonna have to suffer with us now. And there, I guess maybe overcast of the Holocaust, which had been a long time before. As you rightly say, people didn't talk about that either. When I was growing up, it was already not a story that was going to be told. Even people who had survived the Holocaust when they came back did not find a welcome talk, you know. People wanted to keep it distant. And I write a little bit about that in the book. Learning that history was extremely upsetting also. And so I think those things woven together made me feel like this story had to be written.

[21:44]Zibby Owens: Yeah. I'm so glad you wrote it. I'm so glad I read it. I mean, it's wild to me that I've now interviewed two Jewish hostages. Just as a Jewish woman myself, it just gives me goosebumps. You know? Like, it's not so far away. These things are literally right there in front of us, and they're not necessarily ever going away. Yeah. They're present.

[22:06]Guest: And I I mean, I I think that in my writing, though, I mean, I'm talking about a very different time. I was That's true. In my I tried to be clear in my book, that this was something that happened a long time ago. And for people like you, like really interested readers to see those connections and to see this is something that's, there are elements that are so similar. Although as you say, much more violent now, Even we knew that if this had happened to us just a few years later, we wouldn't have survived. Just like what happened at the Munich Olympics. But we were, I guess, very fortunate. And I really did feel that when I was writing it, how fortunate we were Mhmm. That we came back alive. We all came back alive. What does it mean to you to be Jewish now? How do you feel about that? You know, I feel, well, I'm gonna talk about this a little bit in relation to the book. I feel like my experience taught me about, you know, othering and see well, about seeing a divisive world. Like, we were on this side. Like, the Palestinians saw me, our captors, the DFLP, saw me as an imperialist, someone who was a strict Zionist, who was someone who had taken their land. Now I was a 20 year old woman who was a grown up religious, but by this time I was already moving into a more secular Jewish life. And that's not who I perceived myself as. I was a college student and I loved Israel. I had a wonderful time there. But they just saw me in one way and I realized I'd already grown up that way too in a very black and white world. If anything I took away from my experience was that this othering of people thinking they're this way or that way, it's kind of mirrored the same divisiveness is so difficult and so what side are you on kind of That's not how I wrote about the book. That's not the voice that I wanted. It's a story that is a memoir, but maybe reads a little bit like a novel, especially The Part on the Plane. And I wanted it to be that. I tried to give it the voice of a woman looking back And being a Jewish woman today is a difficult thing. Not because I'm not proud of my Jewish identity. I am. But people don't seem to understand this complexity and what's happened to the world today and how we think people are this way or that way and you're not. We hate you, we hate you. And it's so much more complex than that. And I know that from my own life as an anthropologist, I've lived in so many cultures and worked so closely with people and talked to them. I know that history is very complicated and you really have to sort of look carefully. If anything, I try to bring that to the story and to my life as well, like really kind of read about things and try to understand.

[25:11]Zibby Owens: What are your hopes for the book? Well,

[25:15]Guest: I hope a lot of people read it, of course. I hope that many people who read it, of course, will not have been a hostage and I hope they never are and they never have that experience. But to get a little bit, I wanted to offer people like a panoramic view of being on that plane and being a hostage and what it's like also to sit with trauma and to not talk about it. And I think there's a lot of people who are in that position I think because I never talked about this even in therapy. It wasn't like I didn't talk about other things. But I hope that we learn what we're capable of, how much we can rise to an occasion. We have more resources than we think we do. And I think it doesn't matter, of course, as I said, you're not going to have been a hostage most probably in that kind of the sense that I was. But you can be a hostage to your own trauma, a trauma like, for example, taking your child to an ER because they've swallowed a bottle of vitamin gummies. Right? And that's a very powerful trauma. Risk of something terrible is happening to your child or you're stuck in a subway for hours you're in a dark tunnel and you're absolutely freaking out. And we carry these things with us. And I really live with that. So I hope people take away that message that, you know, we can be a lot more and we can carry these things, we can open up at some time, at any time in our life and it makes a difference. It really it helps. I love that.

[26:52]Zibby Owens: Mimi, thank you for the book. Thank you for deciding to open up. Oh, I had one last question. You didn't do a PS, like, the epilogue

[27:02]Guest: about your family. Whatever happened with your brother and your sister? Well, my brother passed away, but my sister is still around wonderfully. And my brother, his mental health well, he wasn't diagnosed actually until his mid twenties. And he was finally diagnosed as a person living with schizophrenia and he lived a long life for a schizophrenic. And eventually my sister and I became caretakers for him. And that was a wonderful experience because he had been hidden and he had been sort of the shame of the family. And once we became the caretakers, we're like, We want to know you. We don't see you that way. We see you as a person and a person with a disability. And that's who you are and we love you. And so I did write an article about it, which I'll send to you. It was in Huffington Post personal about him and about my experience with him and that shame growing up, how it impacted me and how I came out of that. So Yeah. Would love to read I

[28:14]Zibby Owens: would love to read that. Alright. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate Okay. Thanks for listening. Okay. Take care. Bye. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Sibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.