May 21, 2026 • 54 mins
First: a hidden sibling. Then: an unbelievably harrowing hostage situation. As Mimi moves through life, she must confront the scarring secrets stacked against her.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
My parents do not ask any questions about my time
in Jordan. Maybe they think they understand what happened from
reading the New York Times, listening to Walter Cronkite on
the CBS Nightly News, and receiving occasional updates from the
State Department and the airlines. Maybe they just want me
to rest. Or maybe they don't know how to talk
(00:27):
to me about such a delicate topic. We've never discussed
anything real. We laugh and make light of most matters,
even serious ones, keeping pain unspoken and as far as
possible from where we sit. We can't joke about the hijacking,
so we avoid it.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
That's Mimmy Nickter, cultural anthropologist, Professor Emerita at University of
Arizona's School of Anthropology, an author of four books, most
recently her first memoir, a memoir of Terrorism, Trauma and Resilience.
Mimy's is a story of a terrifying incident that becomes
(01:09):
a secret in its aftermath, and the way a legacy
of keeping secrets within a family can form a pattern
it takes a lifetime to break. I'm Danny Shapiro, and
(01:29):
this is Family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Mimmy, tell me about the landscape of
your childhood in nineteen fifties sixties Brooklyn.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Okay, Well, I would say the landscape it was black
and white, and yet the reality is that it was
very gray. Talking about the internal landscape here. From the
time I was about seven, family secrets started early. My
(02:09):
mother instructed my older sister and me that if anyone
asked how my brother was doing, we should always say
he was fine. Now, my brother was eight years older
than me, so by the time he was fifteen, he
often stayed in his room when people visited, and he
didn't go to see us when we went to see
(02:29):
family members. And I didn't really feel comfortable having friends
over because of how he sort of slumped on the
sofa in his sleeless undershirt. He would stare into space
and laugh to himself, and I didn't understand what was
wrong with him.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
I was quite young, but I knew something was wrong.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
And you know what, night I would lay in bed
reading a book my way of escaping the household, and
I would hear him through the very thin wall that
my room shared with the bathroom, sort of mumbling speech
and talking and whispering, and he had this. I figured
he had an imaginary audience in there with him. And
(03:13):
I hear him like hissing, like he was talking to snakes.
And I was an imaginative little girl, and I couldn't
get his sounds out of my head. And yet it
scared me that whatever was wrong with him might be
waiting for me, that something ran in our family.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
And I never asked my parents though, why.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
He hardly smiled, but he did laugh, and he laughed
when nobody was there. And why he talked about things
that were never going to happen, like swimming the English Channel,
for example. I just knew many things were not to
be talked about.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Was he in the world that you and your family
lived in in Brooklyn, in your neighborhood, your community, extended family?
This was never talked to it. Did he go to school?
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I grew up in a religious Jewish family, and he
went to a yeshiva with my sister, she was two
years younger than he was. And yes, he went to school,
and by the time he was thirteen, the principal told
my parents that they should take him to a doctor
because something was a little was off with him. So
(04:27):
he had an early on set schizophrenia, and so he
lived in the house.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
I mean, he was okay until he was maybe twelve.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Did you have that language early on set schizophrenia? Was that?
Were those words you ever heard?
Speaker 2 (04:43):
No, he was not diagnosed because my parents this was
a family secret, and my mother and father both felt
that they didn't want to talk about it, and they thought,
actually he might outgrow it. It was some kind of
a phase. Mental health was not something that was discussed.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
I think it was.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Partly my brother was supposed to be a doctor. That's
what my father wanted, and he was very angry. So
there was anger in the household from my father when
he was home.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Tell me a little bit more about sort of the
shape of your family, And I'm also curious, was this
Orthodox community in Brooklyn that kind of area where the
whole kind of culture and community is observant.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
I grew up in Flatbush and there were two kinds
of communities joined to live side by side there, both
Italian Catholics and Jews. And I think our family life
and many of the Jewish families in our neighborhood revolved
(05:50):
around the people we knew from temple. My mother decided
that I should go to an Orthodox she vote because
she wanted me to skip first, so I did that,
and then that was another point. I think that was
uncomfortable for me because I went to a school where
the girls and boys were from a much more religious
(06:11):
background than I was, and so I knew pretty early
on that I really didn't fit there. And so even
then if somebody asked me sort of what synagogue my
family belonged to, I couldn't answer, because it was not
the right synagogue. That would be a sure giveaway that
I didn't fit. On the exterior, I would say we
(06:33):
looking in from the outside, we looked like a happy family.
That's not what was going on on the inside. I
really didn't know my father very well. My father had
a business in Philadelphia, and he would leave Sunday night
and walk to the subway station going to Manhattan and
(06:57):
take the train to Philly where he lived in a
rooming house kind of situation, and he'd come home on
Friday before Shabus and when he was home, he laid
around on the couch napping, usually with the newspaper New
(07:17):
York Times covering him. And he was a very religious man.
He prayed every day, went to the synagogue, and had
he lived in Brooklyn all the time, I'm sure he
would have been very active in the temple itself, in
some kind of position there. But he wasn't. He didn't
have that kind of life. He was busy working. And
(07:40):
my mother, I never knew what she did actually, but
I knew she had a desk and she had files,
so I thought it was important. Those were times when
I wasn't able to disturb her. I think what really
characterized my mother. She was outgoing, friendly, liked to talk
(08:02):
to people, but because she was also very ashamed of Joel,
she couldn't have a normal life. She couldn't bring people
into the home spontaneously. There was something in her life
that she couldn't talk about that she always had to
cover up. And I think at that time, during the
(08:24):
fifties and sixties, schizophrenia was often blame on the mother's
parenting style, her rejection, specifically her rejection of her child
during infancy and childhood, and so I think she carried
that with her silently. My mother loved music. She had
gone to Juilliard and had to drop out to go
(08:48):
to work. All her life, music was probably the most
important thing to her. Saturdays, she would cocoon herself in
her bed room for the three hours of the Metropolitan Opera.
And even when I was really little, like five years old,
I wasn't allowed to disturb her. That was just the rule.
(09:12):
And sometimes I would go and look through the keyhole
of her room and see what she was doing, and
she looked like she might be sleeping, and I knew
she wasn't sleeping. She was just enjoying this three hour opera.
And I think she got a lot of emotional pleasure
from that that she couldn't express.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
So you left the yeshiva and went to a high
school in Brooklyn.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
By eighth grade, I was just done. I was done
with the whole the mismatch between what I felt when
I was outside of the house and what I felt
inside the house. And I mean, I didn't have words
for it, but I told my parents I wanted to
go to a public high school.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
And they said okay.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
And I think once I got there, it was interesting
because even though they were religious themselves, they realized that
they had taught us. They had given us a sense
of Jewish culture, and now we had a choice. And
I think once I got to high school, I would
go do things on Saturday at football games and things
(10:20):
like that, and Temple was kind of to meek boys.
So I had already started, I think, at an early age,
kind of looking questioning.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
And oddly enough, I.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Think the what I took away from the Yeshiva for
my early age was this idea of questioning, because we
had this very intense sort of Hebrew Talmudik studies and
that kind of thought, that kind of argumentative and deep
thinking about things like that, that fascinated me.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
For college, Mammy goes to George Washington University, close enough
to home to be an acceptable choice to her parents
and far enough away that she can reinvent herself tell
a new story in which she's free of the burden
of keeping a secret. In fact, she can just get
rid of the secret entirely by telling a new story,
(11:17):
one in which she doesn't have a mentally ill brother,
in which she doesn't have a brother at all.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
I could hide him completely. And so when any new
friends asked me, well, how many siblings did you have?
I would say one.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
What did that feel like? Was it fine? Did you
feel guilty?
Speaker 2 (11:35):
I didn't feel guilty about it, because I had been
trained to not talk about him, I had been trained
to hide him. I guess I was a very good learner,
I would have to say, looking back, because I had
really embodied that to hide what wasn't normal, and that's
exactly what I did. And so no, it's a very
(11:58):
interesting question. I'd have to say. From an early age,
I knew how to compartmentalize. In my junior year, I
had this itching to travel. The first two summers I
had come home and worked in New York City. Then
after my sophomore year in college, I told my parents
that I wanted to do it semester abroad, and I
(12:22):
went to London, and then from London, we took a
weekend and flew to Paris, and it was just very
exciting to be in another country. So my travel bug
was really growing. And when I came back from London
after Christmas time for a second semester, I wanted to
(12:42):
go away again. And I knew that my parents would
really want me to go to Israel. And I wanted
to go to Israel because we thought of Israel at
that time as a socialist, very progressive country. I knew
about the kibbutz. It was the sixties, and a kibbutz
seemed like a very immunal and exciting kind of life
(13:02):
because both genders worked. I like the idea of it,
and so my parents agreed to send me.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
And they, of course the reason that they agreed.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Was because they thought going to Israel would bring me
back into the Jewish fault. I knew it wouldn't do that.
I was seeing it as a new travel location, but
nonetheless I did want to go there.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(13:47):
It's nineteen seventy. Mimy is twenty living on a kibbutz
in Israel, surrounded by young travelers from all over the world.
She hitchhikes across the country, takes a side trip to
Greece and roads, and tastes a kind of freedom she's
never known before. When it's time to come home, she
almost misses her flight.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
I'm ready to go home.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
I'm wearing my green mini dress.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
I'm the last person to board the plane. Almost miss it.
Get put in first class. I'm thrilled and I've had
a great summer, and now I'm anxious to get home
and anxious to get back to my senior year in college.
And after a couple of hours of flying, we stopped
in Frankfurt for refueling, and as we flew over Brussels
(14:38):
a few minutes twenty minutes later, the pilot said, eight
hours to New York. And then just then a man
and woman came running down the aisle and somebody screamed,
he has a gun, she has a grenade.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
And by that time I.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Was in economy class, and I was sitting on an
aisle seat, so I could see them. I had no
idea where they were going or what they were doing.
And they kicked the door of the cockpit, and the
pilot opened the door, and they rushed themselves in there,
and they made an announcement shortly afterwards that this was
the popular front for the liberation of Palestine and we
(15:16):
shouldn't be afraid. They were taking us to a friendly country.
And just then we felt the plane turn in the air,
so much so that the bags that were under people's
seats just kind of flew into the aisle, and we
didn't know where we were going. I had no idea
what was going on. In nineteen seventy, this kind of
(15:38):
hijacking from a plane like this wasn't happening. There had
been hijackings before, but mostly from Miami to Cuba, and
those were for money. They wanted to ransom money or
something like that. So in the beginning I thought, Oh,
this is just going to be like a big inconvenience.
(15:59):
I'm going to get that to New York late, and
that's just going to ruin my plans and sounds so
stupid today now.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
I would say though, that.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
The older people, some of the very orthodox people on
the plane, the dual citizens duel is really American citizens
Holocaust survivors. Because this plane was coming from Tel Aviv,
they knew they were worried. So it wasn't just me.
I think there was a lot of young people on
board too. It was September sixth, so that was Leabre
(16:29):
Day weekend that year, and everyone big families were on
the plane, and so there were some people who understood,
but I wasn't one of them. And we flew for
another six hours and they got on the loudspeaker. Again.
We hadn't heard from them for all this time, and
then they said, we're taking you to a friendly country.
(16:52):
Jordan will be landing soon. This is you know, we
will not harm you. So then the pilot was doing
a lot of circling, and my seat made Bob was
his name, looked out the window and he just said,
I don't see anything down there. There's no terminal, there's
(17:13):
no lights. It's just like desert. It was just like
the sunset when we were landing, so there was still
light enough to see.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
He said, there's no runway.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
There's some drums, like big drums with like torches in them.
And the pilot, i think, kept circling because he didn't
know if he could bring the plane down on the sand.
The pie deckers they had a gun with them and
the grenade, and they they were forcing him to bring
the plane down there. And the man who was sitting
(17:45):
at the window didn't speak English, and he had been
sleeping the whole time, and he suddenly woke up and
he turned to us and he said New York.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Because he felt the plane.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Sort of stop, and he just laughed. It was very
good to have a moment laughter amidst this. And it
wasn't until that moment when I looked out the window
and I saw what was there, and what was there
was a group of very very I know, one hundred
men in takis with guns over their shoulder. That's when
(18:20):
I thought, Oh, what is this and what's going to
happen next? That was when it began to sink in
so slowly for me.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
You also you describe a truly terrifying moment in which
this was not the only jet that was hijacked, and
a second jet is landing and comes very very close
to hitting the jet that you all are on. Yes,
(18:55):
it felt to me like that was the first moment
of terror, like visceral, Oh, we could have died, and
also now there's this other jet, like wtf.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
I couldn't actually see that close. I was on the
other side of the plane, and so I heard everyone
talking and like screaming, and I sort of turned and
I began to realize that this was a lot more serious.
What really, I think took me into reality was slightly
(19:29):
after that the second plane landed, when somebody came on
the plane, a woman without a gun speak in English,
and she explained again that they were from the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine and that they were
going to hand out landing cards, which seemed kind of normal,
and they would be collecting them and our passports. And
(19:53):
in a short time they handed out the cards, and
then the couple across the aisle from me, who were
ultra her box. She took out four passports, two for
her and two for her for her husband. One was American,
one was Israeli. Then she took out the nail clippers
and she and her husband began to clip the pages
(20:13):
of the Israeli passport up. They stuffed the little pieces
into a throw up bag that they had on planes
then and shoved it in between the seats, But the
pictures and the identification page they swallowed. And that's when
I turned to my seat mate Bob again and whispered,
(20:34):
did you see that? Why did they do that? And
he explained to me, also whispering that if they found
out that they were also Israelis, we don't know what
would happened to them. We didn't know that at the time,
but now I know that they actually hijacked four planes
at the same time, all flying over Europe. Two of
(20:57):
them came to where we were, the which is called
Dawson's Field, a very remote area of Jordan, middle of
the desert. And then the other planes. One was an
l All plane and they already had marshalls air marshals
there and one of the hijackers was killed on the
plane and the other one was taken in custody when
(21:18):
they landed in London, and another plane was redirected to Cairo,
and they told the pilots that the plane would blow up,
and so they just had enough time. As soon as
they landed in Cairo, the people were able to evacuate
through the shoots just moments before the plane was blown up.
(21:39):
During the week that we were there, on the third day,
they hijacked a third plane. And they did that because
the demands that they had, which were for the release
of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and in jails in Europe,
they had targeted those countries where they were holding their prisoners.
(22:00):
They wired the planes that we were sitting on and
they brought the third plane down because their demands had
not been met by foreign countries, particularly by the United States.
They wanted us to put the pressure on Israel to
release these people who were in their veils. And when
that didn't happen. They threatened to blow us up inside
(22:22):
the plane, and they also hijacked the third plane.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Were you age twenty aware of the fact that the
plane was wired at that point.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yes, because there were people on the plane who had
been in the army, the Americans, and they could see
what they were doing, and occasionally we were taken off
the plane so they could go through the plane and
see what was there. And that's why I was kepped
for much longer than most other people, because when they
went through the overhead bins, they found a lot of
(22:58):
things to incriminate people. And one of the things they
found for me was an Israeli army shirt that had
been given to me as a going wig present from
a friend who had just gotten out of the army.
You know, we had no idea they'd been going through
our luggage. Then they took us off one day and
they went through the other things that were in our
actual lub ic checked in luggage. So they took the things,
(23:22):
many things, and found many things, and it was based
on math that they decided who they should keep.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
And you were very much somebody that they decided that
they wanted to keep.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
I was, and they interiorated me twice at gunpoint, as
well as a few other young people who they decided
to keep because of also incriminating evidence. They had things
from Israel.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
So they decided that you were Israeli, that you were
an Israeli citizen, and also that you had been in
the army. Yes, and then later that you were married
to an Israeli social and you were both in the army.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
That was the second interrogation, after I denied everything during
the first interrogation, but was so scared, I mean, being
interrogated at gunpoint. The only thing I could think was, well,
they haven't killed anybody yet, so maybe they won't kill me.
And then the second interrogation, which was a day or
two later, that's when they started asking me about my husband,
(24:24):
Where was I Where did we fight in the West
Bank and our Goalen Heights, And they started asking me
these very specific questions.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
I was like, no, no.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
They viewed me as something I was absolutely not. I
was a twenty year old myself, anti imperialist, anti Vietnam
War protester against the American government, and yet to them
I was a representative not only as an Israeli soldier
but also an American. They thought I was Israeli but
(24:54):
also American, so myself very othered. There was no way
that they could understand when I was saying or really listen.
You couldn't listen to me.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
How did you keep yourself remotely in one piece during
that period of time this went on ultimately for you
for twenty one days.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yes it did. I focused on other things I was
used to, like, almost disassociating. It wasn't that I could
really disassociate from that because we were all on the
plane for six days without running water, electricity, no flushing toilets.
In the beginning, it was a full plane of passengers
(25:41):
with many young children on board, so it was really
very very difficult. But we, and when I say we,
myself and another woman got together to help pass the
time for the children, and we began what was like
a summer camp. We called it a summer camp, and
we One of the women who joined us was also
(26:02):
very good with singing, and we sang instead of Leaving
on a Jetplane, which was a popular song at the.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Time, John Denver.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
We sung living on a jetplane and just things like that,
and some of the kids had games like mad libs,
we had a pack of cards, and so we would
just play with those kids and just pass a little
bit of time that way until the Palestinians would tell
us not to be there anymore when we started laughing.
(26:30):
Then they didn't want us to spend too much time
doing that. We tried to entertain others, and of course
later on, I think myself and the other four women
who were held with me out of the thirty one
who were held when everyone else was released, we engaged
(26:50):
engendered work there too. We cooked because they would just
give us some food, and we were very happy to
be able to cook something because we had very little
food when we were on the plane, and now we
didn't have much more, but we did have something so
we could do that. We also engaged in gallows. You
were when it got really bad.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
So there were these waves of passengers being either taken
away or what appeared to be released. We're no longer
on the plane until it was you five? Why was
it you five?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Basically they'd suspected of being Israeli soldiers. Actually, one of
the women was originally from Sudan, Sudanese jew and she
spoke fluent Arabic, and so they thought she was a spy,
so that's why they held us.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Another acute, unfathomable moment, Mimi is no longer on the plane.
She's heard it onto the tarmac and then onto an
old bus. Through the windows, she can see the three
empty lined up in the distance. One of the members
of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine issues
a strange instruction, open your mouths and block your ears,
(28:11):
because it'll go better that way. A moment later, she
understands why one by one the planes explode, fire blooming
into the sky, metal collapsing in on itself. In a
landscape already saturated with fear, this becomes a new kind
of rupture.
Speaker 4 (28:32):
That was a very.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Surreal moment to watch three jets blown up, and to
see the pieces just flying into the air, and the
seats and the windows and just hurtling through the sky,
and the black smoke that comes almost immediately from the
explosion of these massive jets.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
And at the same time I'm watching.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Us, and the sound is so loud and booming, and
this earth is shaking, and I'm afraid that this small
old bus that we're sitting in is going to somehow
flip over or that a piece of the planes that
are being blown up is going to fly right into
our bus or break the windows of the bus, hit us,
or we'll catch fire. Also because we were that close
(29:20):
to it and we couldn't really block the sound, and
my eyes were burning, I was shaking, the bus was shaking,
and at the.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
Same time, I was relieved.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
I was so believed that I wasn't on the plane, and.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Yet I didn't understand.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Right after this happened, as soon as it became more ash,
some of the Palestinians jumped on top of one of
the engines that was still intact, just a small piece
of the three planes was intact, and they jumped on
top and they were holding their guns in their hands
up high and sheer.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
And I watched this, and I it was.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Almost like watching children hearing a game. They was so
proud of themselves for what they had done, and I
kind of understood their happiness, But of course, my happiness
was about something else. My happiness was my relief at
not having been blown up and how close we had
come in that moment to being dead, and I didn't
(30:25):
know it was coming next, which got us even closer
to almost being dead. But that was such a profound moment.
It's really seared in my mind.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
Even though I never talked.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
About this what happened, I could always see it in
my mind, and I never told anybody about it.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
It was just an image.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
It didn't even have words. It was just that black
smoke rising up and we could see it as we
left the desert and started, you know, making our way
towards the city and along some of the paths, some
of the road. When we finally reached a road, there
were people Palestinian refugees on either side of the road.
(31:06):
They had seen this black smoke for miles and miles
and they knew what the Popular Front, the most radical
of the Palestinian groups at that time, what they had done,
and they were cheering. They were so excited because it
was such a strength and they were victorious over the
Western imperialists. And we were just sitting trying to hide
(31:32):
because even though the buses were moving still it was
so frightening.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
And what was it that happened next that brought you
even closer to death?
Speaker 2 (31:44):
And that then we learned we were really their hostages,
and we were a small group of hostages. We were
taken to a small apartment in Iman, so eventually there
were thirty one people with us. In the first day
or two were actually wonderful because we could sleep now,
laying down, even though there was nothing on the floor,
(32:05):
but just to be able to sleep horizontally rather than
vertically we've been sitting on a plane for six days.
We could walk a little bit, and there was water
there not a shower or anything like that, but there
was a tap with water we could We asked them
for some things like toothbrushes and toothpaste, and they gave
us some and we were able to brush our teeth
(32:26):
we hadn't been able to do that. We were able
to wash our hands, and we could make a cup
of tea if we wanted to. But of course there
was cholera in the region, so we had to be
very careful about boiling our water and things like that.
And that just lasted for two days, and then there
was a war that broke out between the Palestinians and
(32:47):
the King Hussein and his army, the army of Jordan.
Because he didn't want this going on. There were more
Palestinians in Jordan at the time than Jordanians. He didn't
want to be seen like this in the world, to
have these terrorists taking planes and blowing them up and
all this taking hostages, and so he wanted to get
(33:08):
rid of them. And so a civil war broke out
in Iman, and these bombing and we could hear we
didn't want to go near the windows. We didn't want
anybody to see us. We could hear explosions, we could
hear the whistling of bombs.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Well.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
One of the guys that we were held with was
a soldier, American soldier, and he told us where to hide,
where to go to lie down, to crouch down in
case a bomb hit the house. And one day the
house next door was blown up, and we were so
close to our death. Even the person who was collecting
(33:45):
water for us, because immediately when the war broke out,
there was no water anymore, and someone had to go
and get us water, just a little bit of water,
like one cup of day we had at that point,
or not even that much. He went to get us
water and he never came back, and we asked what
happened to him, and we found out he died along
the way, he got blown up. So this death was
(34:06):
all around us, and it was just a miracle that
death was so close to us that they released us.
Because if they lost us, then they lost everything.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
So ultimately that was the reason for your release.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Yes, because they never got what they wanted. They didn't
get the people released from the prisons.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
After twenty one days, Mimi and her fellow hostages are
(34:50):
finally heading home. They're flown to Cyprus, then Rome, where
they meet with President Nixon, then New York, where she's
reunited with her parents sister at JFK. It's an emotional reunion,
of course, but as soon as the family returns home,
it's clear that the entire ordeal is now meant to
(35:10):
be in the rearview mirror. Russiashana is the next day,
and Mimmy can't imagine going to synagogue, being in public,
facing all the questions about what she's been through. When
her mother returns from synagogue, she asks Mimi if she's
feeling better now, as if being held hostage for three
(35:31):
weeks might be like a head cold she's gotten over.
But this is nothing new, after all. Whenever Mimmy's mom
has called her in college instead of saying hello. When
Mimmy answers, she has always said, is everything under control?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
When I first came home, my mother she wanted to
talk about it, and my father did neither.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
I mean, they didn't have the they didn't know.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
What questions to ask, and very much there was idea
that when you came home, you just move forward. There
was no PTSD concept yet that didn't happen until the eighties.
And when soldiers came home from war, they just went
home and they were supposed to adjust, and like that,
I was supposed to adjust also, And I think there
(36:20):
was this other overlay of us being a very hidden family,
you know, master of secrets, and so I should just
you know, put on a strong face that was important,
appear that everything was under control, and go about adjusting
to life.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Now her mother has a solution, well sort of. A
quick jaunt might be just the thing, a getaway to
the sunny Caribbean, a clean slate, an escape.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
My mother came into my room, probably on the second
day I was home, right after russiashan her. She was
thinking about it that she might take me the Virgin
Islands because that was a place where I could relax
before I went back to college, and I was very
reluctant that I tried to be a good daughter and
(37:15):
respectful of her, and I thought, she also needs a
break because she's been the one managing this and really
dealing with this trauma herself of almost losing her daughter.
And so I said, yeah, Okay, we go for a
long weekend. And unfortunately when we got there, there was
a hurricane after a day, and I was right back
(37:39):
where I was kind of now. It was the weather
that was out of control, and after a day of
being in the water and truly enjoying.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
It, I had to stay inside.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
And when I got to the airport, I realized I
was out of my mind to be at at airport
so close in time to what had just happened to me.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
But I thought it could be a moment of closeness.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
When I could tell my mother what I felt and
what had happened in my fear, but I couldn't.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
You really have a sense of what.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
You could talk to people about and what you can't.
And so we left pretty quickly after the storm finishment,
the airport opened up again, and then as soon as
I got back to New York, as soon as I could.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
I went back to college.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
And that was really tough because my friends were anti
war activists and they thought that my experience, which they
had sort of been following a little bit in the
newspaper and things like that. I don't know how much
they knew, but they knew that I'd been held by
Palestinian terrorists and they just thought that was kind of
(38:49):
far out, and they really romanticized it. And so these
were radical people that I was with, and so almost
like by extension, I was now really cool. I was
really overcome with this. How can I deal with this
naive view that's such a romantic and inaccurate view of
(39:09):
what had actually occurred to me? How could I possibly
explain the fear? And actually I'd already compartmentalized it because
I hadn't talked to my parents about it, and it
was very difficult for me when I came back to college.
But in a sense, my compartmentalization skills came in handy
(39:30):
because I was able to sort of talk about it
or somehow avert that hiding from people. So now I
was literally hiding.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
So was that part of the coping mechanism, that feeling
of basically being told, Wow, what happened to you is
a really cool story and it being sort of objectifying
in a certain way.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Absolutely, it is objectifying. It was something that was so
not cool in any way. It was not a story.
It was a terrifying story. And maybe my friends weren't
old enough. And you know, the only person who really
took me in was Mark. He happens to be my
husband now, but he really didn't ask me very much
(40:13):
about it, and he just offered me food because I'd
lost so much weight, like twenty five pounds during that experience.
And during that time, I was sort of rearranging myself.
I mean, I really couldn't concentrate in classes.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
But Mimy does get through with the excellent coping skills
that have helped her all along. She and Mark eventually
marry and have two boys. She earns a doctorate, advances
in her career, becomes a professor, speaker, author, and during
this whole span of years, she doesn't speak of the hijacking.
(40:52):
She pushes it away, and many people close to her
know nothing about it. But we know what happens when
secrets are buried. As a guest on this podcast said,
several seasons back. When you bury a secret, you bury
it alive.
Speaker 3 (41:09):
For many years.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
How I dealt with this was I put it inside.
And I think the image of a box is a
strong one for me, because eventually, when I decided to
talk about it, I did find a box and I
opened it.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
But I think this was at.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Least twenty five years or more after my hijacking, and occasionally,
if there was something big happened in the world, I
would say something like, oh, I was once hijacking. People
would get so interested that I put it back and yeah,
I was held for a while. It was clear that
I didn't want to talk about it.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
But one time I got a phone call.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
I was in the middle of research project in the US,
and I got a phone call from a former high
school classmate who was now a researcher or PhD researcher
and writing a book on international te rorism. And he
had seen my name in some of the literature that
he was reading as a passenger, and he called me
(42:08):
and wanted to interview me. And I just said a lot,
I have to think about it, I'll let you know.
And I really didn't think I could do it at
that moment. I was in my office and I was
sitting around with my co researchers and other anthropologists. We
were doing a very big study with adolescent girls talking
about body image and dieting, and.
Speaker 3 (42:27):
I felt like, I still I'm thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
I thought, Oh, this guy just wants to interview me.
And my whole career is about interviewing people and asking
them at that point about girls about body image. I mean,
nothing could be more kind of well embodied one word.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
But just something that was so fraught, and so many.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
People have problems with their body and how they feel
about themselves, and yet here I was a researcher about
to say no to this guy, and I realized I
better do this interview. So out and we had an interview,
and then afterwards I really suffered when the story came out,
even though he knew a lot about it already, and
(43:07):
it wasn't so much about my personal sort of fright,
but it was more about getting the facts right for him.
It was very difficult. I'd have a headache, I'd feel sick,
I'd feel so drained and saddened, and so that's how
I really stopped talking about it even more.
Speaker 3 (43:24):
And then there was also this is.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Even before this had happened. A few years after the hijacking,
I joined a law case, and in that lawcase, they
really laughed at some of the things that it happened
to me. Oh, you lost twenty five pounds. Any woman
in America would be happy to lose that weight. And
you know, you thought you didn't get your period for
a long time after this hijacking, but you know now
(43:47):
you're pregnant, so that's not a problem. And I was
so demean by it and so upset by some gendered measures.
I was now just fine.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
I wasn't fine.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
And I realized that these seeds of trauma were inside me,
and given the right sort of weather and the right
kind of watering, the right kind of situation could just
grow and be big again. And so I had to
kind of put them aside.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
These sort of.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Little things that happened through my life made me realize
I had to keep this sort of under wraps.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
Finally, I was in a yoga.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Intensive and I've been practicing every day for a couple
of months, and one day in a very intense pose,
camel pose where you're very wide open, holding onto your
heels from a kind of kneeling position, something flew out
of my body and flew out of my stomach area.
(44:50):
And afterwards it was one of those moments where like
a did that happen? What just happened? But something happened,
and right after the class I knew it was from
my hijacking.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
You described it as a like a blue ball of light.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
Yes, it was a blue ball of light that came
flying out of my body. And by this time I
had spent years working in India and in the Philippines,
and I had seen a lot of healers working on
people's bodies with their hands and taking out things from
people's bodies or so they said. So this someboda have
something emerging from the body, and things inside the body
(45:27):
that can cause unhealed trauma lodged in the body. Was
not something that was really that foreign for me. And
when this happened, right afterwards, I just felt so much lighter,
and I just knew that it was from my hijacking.
This actually happened. When I went home, I realized that
(45:48):
that was the day that I had gotten released from
the hijacking, that I had been brought home, and that
was an anniversary of that day. Yeah, and then it
was still a while before I had the where thought
to actually start writing about it.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
The body knows, I mean, the body even knows. Dates. Yes,
you also write about speaking with one of your yoga
teachers about this experience with this ball of energy that
just emerges and it's as real to you as anything
that you've ever seen. And she says that we human
(46:24):
beings need to feel the full range of our feelings.
And then she says, by not giving voice to your feelings,
you ignored the wisdom of the body. Grief is woven
into the fabric of our lives. We cannot hide from it.
And I just thought that was beautiful and true and
wise and profound, and really feels like that was the
(46:47):
moment after which a kind of deeper healing was possible
for you.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
Yes, it really was, because I think until then I
was in some way I've already opened up to the
experience and it was beginning to sort of come out,
It already burst out, but now it was a long
time to be able to write it, but didn't really
understand the experience. And for a long time I thought
(47:16):
maybe it had something to do with those poses, and
I wanted to know more about how yoga affected the body,
and what she said was self profound, as you said,
because it just made it much bigger, and it really
brought it back to all the feelings that I couldn't have,
and I couldn't have them because you know, I was
(47:37):
really socialized into this silence and not being able to
express feelings, not being able to ask questions, and not
being able to be be real and just about the
whole range of things. And I think I just carry
that really to an extreme. I was ready to hear
(47:57):
what she said when she told me. I was ready
to hear it, And I think that's always something important.
When you hear wisdom, you have to be ready to
accept it.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
Mimi soon accepts something else, an invitation. It's during the pandemic,
another time rife with fear and uncertainty, when Mimy is
contacted by one of the former hostages. It's the fiftieth
anniversary of the hijacking and there's going to be a
gathering over Zoom. That was the first time I saw
(48:35):
these people in so many years.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
I saw that there was such a range a ways
that this impacted people. It was only the people who
were children at the time who I felt may have
walked away unscathed, but yet they saw something that happened
to their parents. But for most of us, who are
the people who are held in her twenties, thirties, forties, fifties,
(49:00):
it was just a range of things that happened that
we carried, But we all carried the trauma in different ways.
Some people never flew again. Some people like myself, didn't
talk about it. They just put it aside. Some people
moved to Israel because they felt they had to, this
was their calling. Other people couldn't get off their couch
(49:21):
for months. So it was really fascinating for me to
see how each of us is impacted by trauma in
a very different way, but we still all carried it.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
You know. It makes me think about something I've thought
about a lot, which is that it's not so much
what happens to us as when it happens. And when
it comes to secrets, it's not so much the secrets
that are kept, but when they're revealed. And it struck
me earlier in our conversation when you were talking about
(49:56):
the Holocaust survivors and the older people on plane, like
they knew they had the knowledge that bad things could
happen in their bones. They carried that knowledge and coming
full circle talking about the people who were very small
children on a flight who very well may not have carried,
(50:17):
you know, the imprint or at least sort of the
conscious imprint of the danger that they were in. But
as you said, then they grew up with parents who
did fully have that imprint.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:29):
So you and Mark have been married for a long time,
you have two grown sons, You've written this book and
it's come out, and when your parents died, you inherit
the care of Joel. So where does all this, if
you can somehow tie this together, kind of sit with
(50:51):
you in your life? Now, where do you hold all
of that?
Speaker 2 (50:56):
Well, that's a big question, isn't it? Answer Quarry about
my brother, Well, he has passed. But when my parents passed,
my sister and I became his caretakers, and I think
by that time we realized he was a person living
with a disability, and we loved him, and I just
(51:17):
I felt the pain, and even though he's not here now,
I still feel that pain of what his life or
our life could have been if we didn't have to
make him a secret. We didn't have to be ashamed
of him.
Speaker 3 (51:29):
I mean, really, why did we have to be ashamed
of him?
Speaker 2 (51:31):
Why couldn't we just have loved him and realized what
he was living through himself. I think the world is
in a better place now in terms of mental health,
but I feel like for him, I carried the secret.
He had to be a secret and a shame for
my mother's whole life and my father's whole life. They
(51:53):
never spoke of his mental illness. They were definitely in
the closet about him. Was very, very painful, And I
think I've realized that what a difficult position that is,
and how many people like myself were socialized, particularly women,
to speak about things that were uote unquote normal, and
(52:15):
how the world has changed and how we need to
change and how we need to talk about things because
unhealed trauma can manifest in all sorts of ways. And
I think, going back to what we were discussing in
terms of the range of emotions that I limited myself with,
you'll enjoy no that if you haven't allowed yourself to
(52:37):
feel pain and sadness of trauma, of secrets, your.
Speaker 4 (52:41):
Range of emotions is very limited. And that's not the
way we want to move through the world. Family Secrets
(53:04):
is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Accur is the
story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If
you have a family secret you'd like to share, please
leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on
an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight
Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find
me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd like
(53:28):
to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
My parents do not ask any questions about my time
in Jordan. Maybe they think they understand what happened from
reading the New York Times, listening to Walter Cronkite on
the CBS Nightly News, and receiving occasional updates from the
State Department and the airlines. Maybe they just want me
to rest. Or maybe they don't know how to talk
(00:27):
to me about such a delicate topic. We've never discussed
anything real. We laugh and make light of most matters,
even serious ones, keeping pain unspoken and as far as
possible from where we sit. We can't joke about the hijacking,
so we avoid it.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
That's Mimmy Nickter, cultural anthropologist, Professor Emerita at University of
Arizona's School of Anthropology, an author of four books, most
recently her first memoir, a memoir of Terrorism, Trauma and Resilience.
Mimy's is a story of a terrifying incident that becomes
(01:09):
a secret in its aftermath, and the way a legacy
of keeping secrets within a family can form a pattern
it takes a lifetime to break. I'm Danny Shapiro, and
(01:29):
this is Family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Mimmy, tell me about the landscape of
your childhood in nineteen fifties sixties Brooklyn.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Okay, Well, I would say the landscape it was black
and white, and yet the reality is that it was
very gray. Talking about the internal landscape here. From the
time I was about seven, family secrets started early. My
(02:09):
mother instructed my older sister and me that if anyone
asked how my brother was doing, we should always say
he was fine. Now, my brother was eight years older
than me, so by the time he was fifteen, he
often stayed in his room when people visited, and he
didn't go to see us when we went to see
(02:29):
family members. And I didn't really feel comfortable having friends
over because of how he sort of slumped on the
sofa in his sleeless undershirt. He would stare into space
and laugh to himself, and I didn't understand what was
wrong with him.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
I was quite young, but I knew something was wrong.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
And you know what, night I would lay in bed
reading a book my way of escaping the household, and
I would hear him through the very thin wall that
my room shared with the bathroom, sort of mumbling speech
and talking and whispering, and he had this. I figured
he had an imaginary audience in there with him. And
(03:13):
I hear him like hissing, like he was talking to snakes.
And I was an imaginative little girl, and I couldn't
get his sounds out of my head. And yet it
scared me that whatever was wrong with him might be
waiting for me, that something ran in our family.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
And I never asked my parents though, why.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
He hardly smiled, but he did laugh, and he laughed
when nobody was there. And why he talked about things
that were never going to happen, like swimming the English Channel,
for example. I just knew many things were not to
be talked about.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Was he in the world that you and your family
lived in in Brooklyn, in your neighborhood, your community, extended family?
This was never talked to it. Did he go to school?
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I grew up in a religious Jewish family, and he
went to a yeshiva with my sister, she was two
years younger than he was. And yes, he went to school,
and by the time he was thirteen, the principal told
my parents that they should take him to a doctor
because something was a little was off with him. So
(04:27):
he had an early on set schizophrenia, and so he
lived in the house.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
I mean, he was okay until he was maybe twelve.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Did you have that language early on set schizophrenia? Was that?
Were those words you ever heard?
Speaker 2 (04:43):
No, he was not diagnosed because my parents this was
a family secret, and my mother and father both felt
that they didn't want to talk about it, and they thought,
actually he might outgrow it. It was some kind of
a phase. Mental health was not something that was discussed.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
I think it was.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Partly my brother was supposed to be a doctor. That's
what my father wanted, and he was very angry. So
there was anger in the household from my father when
he was home.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Tell me a little bit more about sort of the
shape of your family, And I'm also curious, was this
Orthodox community in Brooklyn that kind of area where the
whole kind of culture and community is observant.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
I grew up in Flatbush and there were two kinds
of communities joined to live side by side there, both
Italian Catholics and Jews. And I think our family life
and many of the Jewish families in our neighborhood revolved
(05:50):
around the people we knew from temple. My mother decided
that I should go to an Orthodox she vote because
she wanted me to skip first, so I did that,
and then that was another point. I think that was
uncomfortable for me because I went to a school where
the girls and boys were from a much more religious
(06:11):
background than I was, and so I knew pretty early
on that I really didn't fit there. And so even
then if somebody asked me sort of what synagogue my
family belonged to, I couldn't answer, because it was not
the right synagogue. That would be a sure giveaway that
I didn't fit. On the exterior, I would say we
(06:33):
looking in from the outside, we looked like a happy family.
That's not what was going on on the inside. I
really didn't know my father very well. My father had
a business in Philadelphia, and he would leave Sunday night
and walk to the subway station going to Manhattan and
(06:57):
take the train to Philly where he lived in a
rooming house kind of situation, and he'd come home on
Friday before Shabus and when he was home, he laid
around on the couch napping, usually with the newspaper New
(07:17):
York Times covering him. And he was a very religious man.
He prayed every day, went to the synagogue, and had
he lived in Brooklyn all the time, I'm sure he
would have been very active in the temple itself, in
some kind of position there. But he wasn't. He didn't
have that kind of life. He was busy working. And
(07:40):
my mother, I never knew what she did actually, but
I knew she had a desk and she had files,
so I thought it was important. Those were times when
I wasn't able to disturb her. I think what really
characterized my mother. She was outgoing, friendly, liked to talk
(08:02):
to people, but because she was also very ashamed of Joel,
she couldn't have a normal life. She couldn't bring people
into the home spontaneously. There was something in her life
that she couldn't talk about that she always had to
cover up. And I think at that time, during the
(08:24):
fifties and sixties, schizophrenia was often blame on the mother's
parenting style, her rejection, specifically her rejection of her child
during infancy and childhood, and so I think she carried
that with her silently. My mother loved music. She had
gone to Juilliard and had to drop out to go
(08:48):
to work. All her life, music was probably the most
important thing to her. Saturdays, she would cocoon herself in
her bed room for the three hours of the Metropolitan Opera.
And even when I was really little, like five years old,
I wasn't allowed to disturb her. That was just the rule.
(09:12):
And sometimes I would go and look through the keyhole
of her room and see what she was doing, and
she looked like she might be sleeping, and I knew
she wasn't sleeping. She was just enjoying this three hour opera.
And I think she got a lot of emotional pleasure
from that that she couldn't express.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
So you left the yeshiva and went to a high
school in Brooklyn.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
By eighth grade, I was just done. I was done
with the whole the mismatch between what I felt when
I was outside of the house and what I felt
inside the house. And I mean, I didn't have words
for it, but I told my parents I wanted to
go to a public high school.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
And they said okay.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
And I think once I got there, it was interesting
because even though they were religious themselves, they realized that
they had taught us. They had given us a sense
of Jewish culture, and now we had a choice. And
I think once I got to high school, I would
go do things on Saturday at football games and things
(10:20):
like that, and Temple was kind of to meek boys.
So I had already started, I think, at an early age,
kind of looking questioning.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
And oddly enough, I.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Think the what I took away from the Yeshiva for
my early age was this idea of questioning, because we
had this very intense sort of Hebrew Talmudik studies and
that kind of thought, that kind of argumentative and deep
thinking about things like that, that fascinated me.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
For college, Mammy goes to George Washington University, close enough
to home to be an acceptable choice to her parents
and far enough away that she can reinvent herself tell
a new story in which she's free of the burden
of keeping a secret. In fact, she can just get
rid of the secret entirely by telling a new story,
(11:17):
one in which she doesn't have a mentally ill brother,
in which she doesn't have a brother at all.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
I could hide him completely. And so when any new
friends asked me, well, how many siblings did you have?
I would say one.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
What did that feel like? Was it fine? Did you
feel guilty?
Speaker 2 (11:35):
I didn't feel guilty about it, because I had been
trained to not talk about him, I had been trained
to hide him. I guess I was a very good learner,
I would have to say, looking back, because I had
really embodied that to hide what wasn't normal, and that's
exactly what I did. And so no, it's a very
(11:58):
interesting question. I'd have to say. From an early age,
I knew how to compartmentalize. In my junior year, I
had this itching to travel. The first two summers I
had come home and worked in New York City. Then
after my sophomore year in college, I told my parents
that I wanted to do it semester abroad, and I
(12:22):
went to London, and then from London, we took a
weekend and flew to Paris, and it was just very
exciting to be in another country. So my travel bug
was really growing. And when I came back from London
after Christmas time for a second semester, I wanted to
(12:42):
go away again. And I knew that my parents would
really want me to go to Israel. And I wanted
to go to Israel because we thought of Israel at
that time as a socialist, very progressive country. I knew
about the kibbutz. It was the sixties, and a kibbutz
seemed like a very immunal and exciting kind of life
(13:02):
because both genders worked. I like the idea of it,
and so my parents agreed to send me.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
And they, of course the reason that they agreed.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Was because they thought going to Israel would bring me
back into the Jewish fault. I knew it wouldn't do that.
I was seeing it as a new travel location, but
nonetheless I did want to go there.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
(13:47):
It's nineteen seventy. Mimy is twenty living on a kibbutz
in Israel, surrounded by young travelers from all over the world.
She hitchhikes across the country, takes a side trip to
Greece and roads, and tastes a kind of freedom she's
never known before. When it's time to come home, she
almost misses her flight.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
I'm ready to go home.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
I'm wearing my green mini dress.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
I'm the last person to board the plane. Almost miss it.
Get put in first class. I'm thrilled and I've had
a great summer, and now I'm anxious to get home
and anxious to get back to my senior year in college.
And after a couple of hours of flying, we stopped
in Frankfurt for refueling, and as we flew over Brussels
(14:38):
a few minutes twenty minutes later, the pilot said, eight
hours to New York. And then just then a man
and woman came running down the aisle and somebody screamed,
he has a gun, she has a grenade.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
And by that time I.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Was in economy class, and I was sitting on an
aisle seat, so I could see them. I had no
idea where they were going or what they were doing.
And they kicked the door of the cockpit, and the
pilot opened the door, and they rushed themselves in there,
and they made an announcement shortly afterwards that this was
the popular front for the liberation of Palestine and we
(15:16):
shouldn't be afraid. They were taking us to a friendly country.
And just then we felt the plane turn in the air,
so much so that the bags that were under people's
seats just kind of flew into the aisle, and we
didn't know where we were going. I had no idea
what was going on. In nineteen seventy, this kind of
(15:38):
hijacking from a plane like this wasn't happening. There had
been hijackings before, but mostly from Miami to Cuba, and
those were for money. They wanted to ransom money or
something like that. So in the beginning I thought, Oh,
this is just going to be like a big inconvenience.
(15:59):
I'm going to get that to New York late, and
that's just going to ruin my plans and sounds so
stupid today now.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
I would say though, that.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
The older people, some of the very orthodox people on
the plane, the dual citizens duel is really American citizens
Holocaust survivors. Because this plane was coming from Tel Aviv,
they knew they were worried. So it wasn't just me.
I think there was a lot of young people on
board too. It was September sixth, so that was Leabre
(16:29):
Day weekend that year, and everyone big families were on
the plane, and so there were some people who understood,
but I wasn't one of them. And we flew for
another six hours and they got on the loudspeaker. Again.
We hadn't heard from them for all this time, and
then they said, we're taking you to a friendly country.
(16:52):
Jordan will be landing soon. This is you know, we
will not harm you. So then the pilot was doing
a lot of circling, and my seat made Bob was
his name, looked out the window and he just said,
I don't see anything down there. There's no terminal, there's
(17:13):
no lights. It's just like desert. It was just like
the sunset when we were landing, so there was still
light enough to see.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
He said, there's no runway.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
There's some drums, like big drums with like torches in them.
And the pilot, i think, kept circling because he didn't
know if he could bring the plane down on the sand.
The pie deckers they had a gun with them and
the grenade, and they they were forcing him to bring
the plane down there. And the man who was sitting
(17:45):
at the window didn't speak English, and he had been
sleeping the whole time, and he suddenly woke up and
he turned to us and he said New York.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Because he felt the plane.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Sort of stop, and he just laughed. It was very
good to have a moment laughter amidst this. And it
wasn't until that moment when I looked out the window
and I saw what was there, and what was there
was a group of very very I know, one hundred
men in takis with guns over their shoulder. That's when
(18:20):
I thought, Oh, what is this and what's going to
happen next? That was when it began to sink in
so slowly for me.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
You also you describe a truly terrifying moment in which
this was not the only jet that was hijacked, and
a second jet is landing and comes very very close
to hitting the jet that you all are on. Yes,
(18:55):
it felt to me like that was the first moment
of terror, like visceral, Oh, we could have died, and
also now there's this other jet, like wtf.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
I couldn't actually see that close. I was on the
other side of the plane, and so I heard everyone
talking and like screaming, and I sort of turned and
I began to realize that this was a lot more serious.
What really, I think took me into reality was slightly
(19:29):
after that the second plane landed, when somebody came on
the plane, a woman without a gun speak in English,
and she explained again that they were from the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine and that they were
going to hand out landing cards, which seemed kind of normal,
and they would be collecting them and our passports. And
(19:53):
in a short time they handed out the cards, and
then the couple across the aisle from me, who were
ultra her box. She took out four passports, two for
her and two for her for her husband. One was American,
one was Israeli. Then she took out the nail clippers
and she and her husband began to clip the pages
(20:13):
of the Israeli passport up. They stuffed the little pieces
into a throw up bag that they had on planes
then and shoved it in between the seats, But the
pictures and the identification page they swallowed. And that's when
I turned to my seat mate Bob again and whispered,
(20:34):
did you see that? Why did they do that? And
he explained to me, also whispering that if they found
out that they were also Israelis, we don't know what
would happened to them. We didn't know that at the time,
but now I know that they actually hijacked four planes
at the same time, all flying over Europe. Two of
(20:57):
them came to where we were, the which is called
Dawson's Field, a very remote area of Jordan, middle of
the desert. And then the other planes. One was an
l All plane and they already had marshalls air marshals
there and one of the hijackers was killed on the
plane and the other one was taken in custody when
(21:18):
they landed in London, and another plane was redirected to Cairo,
and they told the pilots that the plane would blow up,
and so they just had enough time. As soon as
they landed in Cairo, the people were able to evacuate
through the shoots just moments before the plane was blown up.
(21:39):
During the week that we were there, on the third day,
they hijacked a third plane. And they did that because
the demands that they had, which were for the release
of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and in jails in Europe,
they had targeted those countries where they were holding their prisoners.
(22:00):
They wired the planes that we were sitting on and
they brought the third plane down because their demands had
not been met by foreign countries, particularly by the United States.
They wanted us to put the pressure on Israel to
release these people who were in their veils. And when
that didn't happen. They threatened to blow us up inside
(22:22):
the plane, and they also hijacked the third plane.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Were you age twenty aware of the fact that the
plane was wired at that point.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yes, because there were people on the plane who had
been in the army, the Americans, and they could see
what they were doing, and occasionally we were taken off
the plane so they could go through the plane and
see what was there. And that's why I was kepped
for much longer than most other people, because when they
went through the overhead bins, they found a lot of
(22:58):
things to incriminate people. And one of the things they
found for me was an Israeli army shirt that had
been given to me as a going wig present from
a friend who had just gotten out of the army.
You know, we had no idea they'd been going through
our luggage. Then they took us off one day and
they went through the other things that were in our
actual lub ic checked in luggage. So they took the things,
(23:22):
many things, and found many things, and it was based
on math that they decided who they should keep.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
And you were very much somebody that they decided that
they wanted to keep.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
I was, and they interiorated me twice at gunpoint, as
well as a few other young people who they decided
to keep because of also incriminating evidence. They had things
from Israel.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
So they decided that you were Israeli, that you were
an Israeli citizen, and also that you had been in
the army. Yes, and then later that you were married
to an Israeli social and you were both in the army.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
That was the second interrogation, after I denied everything during
the first interrogation, but was so scared, I mean, being
interrogated at gunpoint. The only thing I could think was, well,
they haven't killed anybody yet, so maybe they won't kill me.
And then the second interrogation, which was a day or
two later, that's when they started asking me about my husband,
(24:24):
Where was I Where did we fight in the West
Bank and our Goalen Heights, And they started asking me
these very specific questions.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
I was like, no, no.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
They viewed me as something I was absolutely not. I
was a twenty year old myself, anti imperialist, anti Vietnam
War protester against the American government, and yet to them
I was a representative not only as an Israeli soldier
but also an American. They thought I was Israeli but
(24:54):
also American, so myself very othered. There was no way
that they could understand when I was saying or really listen.
You couldn't listen to me.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
How did you keep yourself remotely in one piece during
that period of time this went on ultimately for you
for twenty one days.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yes it did. I focused on other things I was
used to, like, almost disassociating. It wasn't that I could
really disassociate from that because we were all on the
plane for six days without running water, electricity, no flushing toilets.
In the beginning, it was a full plane of passengers
(25:41):
with many young children on board, so it was really
very very difficult. But we, and when I say we,
myself and another woman got together to help pass the
time for the children, and we began what was like
a summer camp. We called it a summer camp, and
we One of the women who joined us was also
(26:02):
very good with singing, and we sang instead of Leaving
on a Jetplane, which was a popular song at the.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Time, John Denver.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
We sung living on a jetplane and just things like that,
and some of the kids had games like mad libs,
we had a pack of cards, and so we would
just play with those kids and just pass a little
bit of time that way until the Palestinians would tell
us not to be there anymore when we started laughing.
(26:30):
Then they didn't want us to spend too much time
doing that. We tried to entertain others, and of course
later on, I think myself and the other four women
who were held with me out of the thirty one
who were held when everyone else was released, we engaged
(26:50):
engendered work there too. We cooked because they would just
give us some food, and we were very happy to
be able to cook something because we had very little
food when we were on the plane, and now we
didn't have much more, but we did have something so
we could do that. We also engaged in gallows. You
were when it got really bad.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
So there were these waves of passengers being either taken
away or what appeared to be released. We're no longer
on the plane until it was you five? Why was
it you five?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Basically they'd suspected of being Israeli soldiers. Actually, one of
the women was originally from Sudan, Sudanese jew and she
spoke fluent Arabic, and so they thought she was a spy,
so that's why they held us.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Another acute, unfathomable moment, Mimi is no longer on the plane.
She's heard it onto the tarmac and then onto an
old bus. Through the windows, she can see the three
empty lined up in the distance. One of the members
of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine issues
a strange instruction, open your mouths and block your ears,
(28:11):
because it'll go better that way. A moment later, she
understands why one by one the planes explode, fire blooming
into the sky, metal collapsing in on itself. In a
landscape already saturated with fear, this becomes a new kind
of rupture.
Speaker 4 (28:32):
That was a very.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Surreal moment to watch three jets blown up, and to
see the pieces just flying into the air, and the
seats and the windows and just hurtling through the sky,
and the black smoke that comes almost immediately from the
explosion of these massive jets.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
And at the same time I'm watching.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Us, and the sound is so loud and booming, and
this earth is shaking, and I'm afraid that this small
old bus that we're sitting in is going to somehow
flip over or that a piece of the planes that
are being blown up is going to fly right into
our bus or break the windows of the bus, hit us,
or we'll catch fire. Also because we were that close
(29:20):
to it and we couldn't really block the sound, and
my eyes were burning, I was shaking, the bus was shaking,
and at the.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
Same time, I was relieved.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
I was so believed that I wasn't on the plane, and.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Yet I didn't understand.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Right after this happened, as soon as it became more ash,
some of the Palestinians jumped on top of one of
the engines that was still intact, just a small piece
of the three planes was intact, and they jumped on
top and they were holding their guns in their hands
up high and sheer.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
And I watched this, and I it was.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Almost like watching children hearing a game. They was so
proud of themselves for what they had done, and I
kind of understood their happiness, But of course, my happiness
was about something else. My happiness was my relief at
not having been blown up and how close we had
come in that moment to being dead, and I didn't
(30:25):
know it was coming next, which got us even closer
to almost being dead. But that was such a profound moment.
It's really seared in my mind.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
Even though I never talked.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
About this what happened, I could always see it in
my mind, and I never told anybody about it.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
It was just an image.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
It didn't even have words. It was just that black
smoke rising up and we could see it as we
left the desert and started, you know, making our way
towards the city and along some of the paths, some
of the road. When we finally reached a road, there
were people Palestinian refugees on either side of the road.
(31:06):
They had seen this black smoke for miles and miles
and they knew what the Popular Front, the most radical
of the Palestinian groups at that time, what they had done,
and they were cheering. They were so excited because it
was such a strength and they were victorious over the
Western imperialists. And we were just sitting trying to hide
(31:32):
because even though the buses were moving still it was
so frightening.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
And what was it that happened next that brought you
even closer to death?
Speaker 2 (31:44):
And that then we learned we were really their hostages,
and we were a small group of hostages. We were
taken to a small apartment in Iman, so eventually there
were thirty one people with us. In the first day
or two were actually wonderful because we could sleep now,
laying down, even though there was nothing on the floor,
(32:05):
but just to be able to sleep horizontally rather than
vertically we've been sitting on a plane for six days.
We could walk a little bit, and there was water
there not a shower or anything like that, but there
was a tap with water we could We asked them
for some things like toothbrushes and toothpaste, and they gave
us some and we were able to brush our teeth
(32:26):
we hadn't been able to do that. We were able
to wash our hands, and we could make a cup
of tea if we wanted to. But of course there
was cholera in the region, so we had to be
very careful about boiling our water and things like that.
And that just lasted for two days, and then there
was a war that broke out between the Palestinians and
(32:47):
the King Hussein and his army, the army of Jordan.
Because he didn't want this going on. There were more
Palestinians in Jordan at the time than Jordanians. He didn't
want to be seen like this in the world, to
have these terrorists taking planes and blowing them up and
all this taking hostages, and so he wanted to get
(33:08):
rid of them. And so a civil war broke out
in Iman, and these bombing and we could hear we
didn't want to go near the windows. We didn't want
anybody to see us. We could hear explosions, we could
hear the whistling of bombs.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Well.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
One of the guys that we were held with was
a soldier, American soldier, and he told us where to hide,
where to go to lie down, to crouch down in
case a bomb hit the house. And one day the
house next door was blown up, and we were so
close to our death. Even the person who was collecting
(33:45):
water for us, because immediately when the war broke out,
there was no water anymore, and someone had to go
and get us water, just a little bit of water,
like one cup of day we had at that point,
or not even that much. He went to get us
water and he never came back, and we asked what
happened to him, and we found out he died along
the way, he got blown up. So this death was
(34:06):
all around us, and it was just a miracle that
death was so close to us that they released us.
Because if they lost us, then they lost everything.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
So ultimately that was the reason for your release.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Yes, because they never got what they wanted. They didn't
get the people released from the prisons.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
After twenty one days, Mimi and her fellow hostages are
(34:50):
finally heading home. They're flown to Cyprus, then Rome, where
they meet with President Nixon, then New York, where she's
reunited with her parents sister at JFK. It's an emotional reunion,
of course, but as soon as the family returns home,
it's clear that the entire ordeal is now meant to
(35:10):
be in the rearview mirror. Russiashana is the next day,
and Mimmy can't imagine going to synagogue, being in public,
facing all the questions about what she's been through. When
her mother returns from synagogue, she asks Mimi if she's
feeling better now, as if being held hostage for three
(35:31):
weeks might be like a head cold she's gotten over.
But this is nothing new, after all. Whenever Mimmy's mom
has called her in college instead of saying hello. When
Mimmy answers, she has always said, is everything under control?
Speaker 2 (35:48):
When I first came home, my mother she wanted to
talk about it, and my father did neither.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
I mean, they didn't have the they didn't know.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
What questions to ask, and very much there was idea
that when you came home, you just move forward. There
was no PTSD concept yet that didn't happen until the eighties.
And when soldiers came home from war, they just went
home and they were supposed to adjust, and like that,
I was supposed to adjust also, And I think there
(36:20):
was this other overlay of us being a very hidden family,
you know, master of secrets, and so I should just
you know, put on a strong face that was important,
appear that everything was under control, and go about adjusting
to life.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Now her mother has a solution, well sort of. A
quick jaunt might be just the thing, a getaway to
the sunny Caribbean, a clean slate, an escape.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
My mother came into my room, probably on the second
day I was home, right after russiashan her. She was
thinking about it that she might take me the Virgin
Islands because that was a place where I could relax
before I went back to college, and I was very
reluctant that I tried to be a good daughter and
(37:15):
respectful of her, and I thought, she also needs a
break because she's been the one managing this and really
dealing with this trauma herself of almost losing her daughter.
And so I said, yeah, Okay, we go for a
long weekend. And unfortunately when we got there, there was
a hurricane after a day, and I was right back
(37:39):
where I was kind of now. It was the weather
that was out of control, and after a day of
being in the water and truly enjoying.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
It, I had to stay inside.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
And when I got to the airport, I realized I
was out of my mind to be at at airport
so close in time to what had just happened to me.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
But I thought it could be a moment of closeness.
Speaker 2 (38:00):
When I could tell my mother what I felt and
what had happened in my fear, but I couldn't.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
You really have a sense of what.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
You could talk to people about and what you can't.
And so we left pretty quickly after the storm finishment,
the airport opened up again, and then as soon as
I got back to New York, as soon as I could.
Speaker 3 (38:23):
I went back to college.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
And that was really tough because my friends were anti
war activists and they thought that my experience, which they
had sort of been following a little bit in the
newspaper and things like that. I don't know how much
they knew, but they knew that I'd been held by
Palestinian terrorists and they just thought that was kind of
(38:49):
far out, and they really romanticized it. And so these
were radical people that I was with, and so almost
like by extension, I was now really cool. I was
really overcome with this. How can I deal with this
naive view that's such a romantic and inaccurate view of
(39:09):
what had actually occurred to me? How could I possibly
explain the fear? And actually I'd already compartmentalized it because
I hadn't talked to my parents about it, and it
was very difficult for me when I came back to college.
But in a sense, my compartmentalization skills came in handy
(39:30):
because I was able to sort of talk about it
or somehow avert that hiding from people. So now I
was literally hiding.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
So was that part of the coping mechanism, that feeling
of basically being told, Wow, what happened to you is
a really cool story and it being sort of objectifying
in a certain way.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Absolutely, it is objectifying. It was something that was so
not cool in any way. It was not a story.
It was a terrifying story. And maybe my friends weren't
old enough. And you know, the only person who really
took me in was Mark. He happens to be my
husband now, but he really didn't ask me very much
(40:13):
about it, and he just offered me food because I'd
lost so much weight, like twenty five pounds during that experience.
And during that time, I was sort of rearranging myself.
I mean, I really couldn't concentrate in classes.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
But Mimy does get through with the excellent coping skills
that have helped her all along. She and Mark eventually
marry and have two boys. She earns a doctorate, advances
in her career, becomes a professor, speaker, author, and during
this whole span of years, she doesn't speak of the hijacking.
(40:52):
She pushes it away, and many people close to her
know nothing about it. But we know what happens when
secrets are buried. As a guest on this podcast said,
several seasons back. When you bury a secret, you bury
it alive.
Speaker 3 (41:09):
For many years.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
How I dealt with this was I put it inside.
And I think the image of a box is a
strong one for me, because eventually, when I decided to
talk about it, I did find a box and I
opened it.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
But I think this was at.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Least twenty five years or more after my hijacking, and occasionally,
if there was something big happened in the world, I
would say something like, oh, I was once hijacking. People
would get so interested that I put it back and yeah,
I was held for a while. It was clear that
I didn't want to talk about it.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
But one time I got a phone call.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
I was in the middle of research project in the US,
and I got a phone call from a former high
school classmate who was now a researcher or PhD researcher
and writing a book on international te rorism. And he
had seen my name in some of the literature that
he was reading as a passenger, and he called me
(42:08):
and wanted to interview me. And I just said a lot,
I have to think about it, I'll let you know.
And I really didn't think I could do it at
that moment. I was in my office and I was
sitting around with my co researchers and other anthropologists. We
were doing a very big study with adolescent girls talking
about body image and dieting, and.
Speaker 3 (42:27):
I felt like, I still I'm thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
I thought, Oh, this guy just wants to interview me.
And my whole career is about interviewing people and asking
them at that point about girls about body image. I mean,
nothing could be more kind of well embodied one word.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
But just something that was so fraught, and so many.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
People have problems with their body and how they feel
about themselves, and yet here I was a researcher about
to say no to this guy, and I realized I
better do this interview. So out and we had an interview,
and then afterwards I really suffered when the story came out,
even though he knew a lot about it already, and
(43:07):
it wasn't so much about my personal sort of fright,
but it was more about getting the facts right for him.
It was very difficult. I'd have a headache, I'd feel sick,
I'd feel so drained and saddened, and so that's how
I really stopped talking about it even more.
Speaker 3 (43:24):
And then there was also this is.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Even before this had happened. A few years after the hijacking,
I joined a law case, and in that lawcase, they
really laughed at some of the things that it happened
to me. Oh, you lost twenty five pounds. Any woman
in America would be happy to lose that weight. And
you know, you thought you didn't get your period for
a long time after this hijacking, but you know now
(43:47):
you're pregnant, so that's not a problem. And I was
so demean by it and so upset by some gendered measures.
I was now just fine.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
I wasn't fine.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
And I realized that these seeds of trauma were inside me,
and given the right sort of weather and the right
kind of watering, the right kind of situation could just
grow and be big again. And so I had to
kind of put them aside.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
These sort of.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Little things that happened through my life made me realize
I had to keep this sort of under wraps.
Speaker 3 (44:25):
Finally, I was in a yoga.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Intensive and I've been practicing every day for a couple
of months, and one day in a very intense pose,
camel pose where you're very wide open, holding onto your
heels from a kind of kneeling position, something flew out
of my body and flew out of my stomach area.
(44:50):
And afterwards it was one of those moments where like
a did that happen? What just happened? But something happened,
and right after the class I knew it was from
my hijacking.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
You described it as a like a blue ball of light.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
Yes, it was a blue ball of light that came
flying out of my body. And by this time I
had spent years working in India and in the Philippines,
and I had seen a lot of healers working on
people's bodies with their hands and taking out things from
people's bodies or so they said. So this someboda have
something emerging from the body, and things inside the body
(45:27):
that can cause unhealed trauma lodged in the body. Was
not something that was really that foreign for me. And
when this happened, right afterwards, I just felt so much lighter,
and I just knew that it was from my hijacking.
This actually happened. When I went home, I realized that
(45:48):
that was the day that I had gotten released from
the hijacking, that I had been brought home, and that
was an anniversary of that day. Yeah, and then it
was still a while before I had the where thought
to actually start writing about it.
Speaker 1 (46:02):
The body knows, I mean, the body even knows. Dates. Yes,
you also write about speaking with one of your yoga
teachers about this experience with this ball of energy that
just emerges and it's as real to you as anything
that you've ever seen. And she says that we human
(46:24):
beings need to feel the full range of our feelings.
And then she says, by not giving voice to your feelings,
you ignored the wisdom of the body. Grief is woven
into the fabric of our lives. We cannot hide from it.
And I just thought that was beautiful and true and
wise and profound, and really feels like that was the
(46:47):
moment after which a kind of deeper healing was possible
for you.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
Yes, it really was, because I think until then I
was in some way I've already opened up to the
experience and it was beginning to sort of come out,
It already burst out, but now it was a long
time to be able to write it, but didn't really
understand the experience. And for a long time I thought
(47:16):
maybe it had something to do with those poses, and
I wanted to know more about how yoga affected the body,
and what she said was self profound, as you said,
because it just made it much bigger, and it really
brought it back to all the feelings that I couldn't have,
and I couldn't have them because you know, I was
(47:37):
really socialized into this silence and not being able to
express feelings, not being able to ask questions, and not
being able to be be real and just about the
whole range of things. And I think I just carry
that really to an extreme. I was ready to hear
(47:57):
what she said when she told me. I was ready
to hear it, And I think that's always something important.
When you hear wisdom, you have to be ready to
accept it.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
Mimi soon accepts something else, an invitation. It's during the pandemic,
another time rife with fear and uncertainty, when Mimy is
contacted by one of the former hostages. It's the fiftieth
anniversary of the hijacking and there's going to be a
gathering over Zoom. That was the first time I saw
(48:35):
these people in so many years.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
I saw that there was such a range a ways
that this impacted people. It was only the people who
were children at the time who I felt may have
walked away unscathed, but yet they saw something that happened
to their parents. But for most of us, who are
the people who are held in her twenties, thirties, forties, fifties,
(49:00):
it was just a range of things that happened that
we carried, But we all carried the trauma in different ways.
Some people never flew again. Some people like myself, didn't
talk about it. They just put it aside. Some people
moved to Israel because they felt they had to, this
was their calling. Other people couldn't get off their couch
(49:21):
for months. So it was really fascinating for me to
see how each of us is impacted by trauma in
a very different way, but we still all carried it.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
You know. It makes me think about something I've thought
about a lot, which is that it's not so much
what happens to us as when it happens. And when
it comes to secrets, it's not so much the secrets
that are kept, but when they're revealed. And it struck
me earlier in our conversation when you were talking about
(49:56):
the Holocaust survivors and the older people on plane, like
they knew they had the knowledge that bad things could
happen in their bones. They carried that knowledge and coming
full circle talking about the people who were very small
children on a flight who very well may not have carried,
(50:17):
you know, the imprint or at least sort of the
conscious imprint of the danger that they were in. But
as you said, then they grew up with parents who
did fully have that imprint.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:29):
So you and Mark have been married for a long time,
you have two grown sons, You've written this book and
it's come out, and when your parents died, you inherit
the care of Joel. So where does all this, if
you can somehow tie this together, kind of sit with
(50:51):
you in your life? Now, where do you hold all
of that?
Speaker 2 (50:56):
Well, that's a big question, isn't it? Answer Quarry about
my brother, Well, he has passed. But when my parents passed,
my sister and I became his caretakers, and I think
by that time we realized he was a person living
with a disability, and we loved him, and I just
(51:17):
I felt the pain, and even though he's not here now,
I still feel that pain of what his life or
our life could have been if we didn't have to
make him a secret. We didn't have to be ashamed
of him.
Speaker 3 (51:29):
I mean, really, why did we have to be ashamed
of him?
Speaker 2 (51:31):
Why couldn't we just have loved him and realized what
he was living through himself. I think the world is
in a better place now in terms of mental health,
but I feel like for him, I carried the secret.
He had to be a secret and a shame for
my mother's whole life and my father's whole life. They
(51:53):
never spoke of his mental illness. They were definitely in
the closet about him. Was very, very painful, And I
think I've realized that what a difficult position that is,
and how many people like myself were socialized, particularly women,
to speak about things that were uote unquote normal, and
(52:15):
how the world has changed and how we need to
change and how we need to talk about things because
unhealed trauma can manifest in all sorts of ways. And
I think, going back to what we were discussing in
terms of the range of emotions that I limited myself with,
you'll enjoy no that if you haven't allowed yourself to
(52:37):
feel pain and sadness of trauma, of secrets, your.
Speaker 4 (52:41):
Range of emotions is very limited. And that's not the
way we want to move through the world. Family Secrets
(53:04):
is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly z Accur is the
story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If
you have a family secret you'd like to share, please
leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on
an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight
Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find
me on Instagram at Danny Rider. And if you'd like
(53:28):
to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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