So I will probably talk about Avengers in a different post - but I have watched it and can thankfully now return to me regularly scheduled internet checkups.
What I want to post about, though, is last night: after the movie, I went to my parents', who were hosting a family event. My dad's cousin was captured on the second day of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and was held as a POW in Syria for eight months, until he and the other men were released. This evening, my dad's cousins and anyone in the family who were interested were invited to hear his story.
It was my first time hearing the story - don't think I've met this dude more than once - and as these types of stories are, it was fascinating. Some bullet points from his story and the discussion that followed:
*After a week, he was sent to solitary by, I'm not kidding, mistake, where he ended up staying for 78 days. His guards couldn't find him so just figured he'd escaped. The guards at solitude knew him as an extra body in the solitude cells so might as well feed him too.
*After long in solitary he was so starved for touch that getting slapped by his captors offered a sort of relief.
*Telling himself he needs to recharge his batteries every three months. "I don't even know what that means," he said, "but when three months were over, I told myself that okay, I'm recharging, I'm ready for 3 more months now."
*Wanting to release pressure by crying but not wanting to cry all the time; he told himself he could cry after 100 days, and on the 100th day indeed spent the night crying in his sleep.
*Lots of different coping mechanisms, among them having previously watched movies that included captivity (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Rambo, I don't remember what else. "If those manly heroes could struggle and moan with pain, it was okay to do it too."
*the two hardest things about beatings is not knowing where or when the next blow is going to come from, and hearing your friends shout in pain as it from the next room
*every time someone returned from an interrogation/abuse session, beaten and bruised, the others would help take care of his wounds; this cycle in a way served as mental preparation for your own upcoming sessions.
*you find ways to reduce the pain of beatings: if it's your hands, move them slightly downwards as they're hit to absorb the blow. If it's your back, cry out less when you're hit on your upper back and it hurts; cry louder when you're hit in the lower back where it dips and your shirt absorbs some of the blow. It hurts less, but the captor thinks it hurts more and hits you more there, making him happy and you happy.
*when he was in solitary he was completely alone for about 35 days. After that he discovered he could communicate with the neighboring cells by knocking on the wall, and from that point he wasn't alone anymore. They didn't know morse, but intuitively just knocked out the length of the letters of the alphabet (* for aleph, ** for bet, *** for gimel, etc). Of course that meant that the last letter of the alphabet took 22 knocks, which took forever, so at some point they switched it so that every tenth letter got a double knock (** for the tenth letter, ** * for the 11th letter, etc). "How do you communicate making the switch from one system to the other?" we asked. "Well, you just sit there for two hours knocking: f-r-o-m n-o-w o-n e-v-e-r-y t-e-n-t-h l-e-t-t-e-r etc etc etc."
*After 40 days in Syria, he got his first shower. (When they were released, he saw a woman for the first time after 8 months.)
*food: he listed the things they received, but I just remember that they got a fruit a day. Each two would eat one fruit and save the other for later, and after three days they'd all pool them together and make fruit salad. One time they got a can of Israeli peanuts: they had a math guy who divided them between everyone, three and a half peanuts each.
*30 people living in a 30 square meter room becomes its own microcosm: upper classes and lower classes, ashkenazi and mizrahi, religious and secular. The thirty men were mostly all part of the same armoured corps unit, who'd been stationed at Mt. Hermon, ages probably 18-22. By default, their leader became a Syrian Jew who'd immigrated from Syria, and so spoke Syrian Arabic and could communicate with the guards. They formed into four groups, two of 7 and two of 8, and arranged mattresses in the four quarters of the room: sleeping places would rotate within each group every day, and the four groups rotated between the four quarters once a week, because every corner of the room had its own pros and cons: the one's closer to the window, so nice in summer but colder in winter; this one has more ventilation, but is closer to the toilet; this one has more space, but you're the first people the guards see.
*days were spent in lessons they gave each other: English, math, Arabic, Hindi. In games - they made cards out of cardboard found in some food packaging that they drew on with ash, and a logic puzzle made from soap. Art - one of them made necklaces out of olive seeds, filed against the walls and strung with a string unraveled from a towel. Smoking. Fantasizing. Mostly talking and getting to know each other to their very souls. He said after he was back, he visited the family and friends of one of the other prisoners in Jerusalem without the guy, and realized he knew everybody there, just needed to put names to faces and he knew everything about them.
*there were different kinds of guards: the bad guard, the simple guard, the ugly guard, the sadistic guard, the good guard. The good guard was always gentler and tried to help with whatever they requested. Before they were released, he told them that he'd be going on vacation, and by the time he'd return they'd already be gone. He had tears in his eyes. He'd been a refugee from Quneitra, but treated them fairly.
*when the Red Cross started visiting they would get some news from home. Short postcards with numbered words. He was frustrated that the family always wrote "everything's okay" without giving any real information. A fellow prisoner received a postcard mentioning the upstairs neighbors' and downstairs neighbors' porches, and 25 people coming to visit grandmother; he'd lived in a one-story apartment, and his grandmother was dead. It was an update on the outcome of the war: Israel had the Golan Heights and Sinai, and 2500 dead.
*they got to write their own letters back, carefully numbering words and making it through censorship. He tried reassuring his family he was okay, and lied about saying he missed them - he wasn't missing them at all. When he was there, he said, he'd checked out and was on a different plane of existence. He wrote to give his mother power of attorney to take care of his bank account. That letter never made it, he said, but the bank was considerate anyway.
*when the Red Cross came, they also started getting some better food, including some food sent from home.
*They were taken out for local TV interviews a number of times for propoganda. Red Cross also filmed them a little - here at 2:06 is when they were first captured, here at 05:33 writing letters with the Red Cross.
*There's also a video of them landing in Israel when they were released in a prisoner exchange in June 1974, stepping off the plane and being greeted by family, photos of him arriving at home. They were taken for a few days of tests and recovery at a sanatorium up north, went through debriefings and investigations by intelligence and the military. He was already close to the end of his service, so he was discharged. And that's it. For 20 years, until concepts like PTSD started surfacing in the '90s, he and the others received no special assistance or treatment from the government or the ministry of defense.
*I asked him how it feels talking about it today. He said it was 45 years ago - it's fine, it's just something that happened in the past. I asked how long did it take for him to reach that stage, but he said that for him, it was like that pretty much from the start.
After he finished speaking, the family went around and shared stories about what it was like back home:
*his brother was the only one who knew he'd been transferred to Mt. Hermon, the parents didn't know. When stories started surfacing about soldiers being captured and taken, he was the one who told his parents.
*he was MIA for a long time, and the family didn't know whether he was among the prisoners or not. The Syrians didn't release a list of names until February, 4 months after the war broke and they were captured. There was a photo of prisoners in the paper, where his face was partially hidden by someone's elbow, old back and white photo, and they couldn't figure out of it was him or not. The man on the photo had a beard. They couldn't remember, the last time they saw him - did he have a beard or not? They ended up taking the newspaper photo and a recent photo of him to the police forensics department, asking them to identify if it was him or not. The constable said yes, the curve of his eyebrow is unique; the commander said don't take it as a certainty.
The family would constantly visit the missing persons location center: an office in Tel Aviv where photos of missing and captured soldiers were displayed on large tables, photos taken from Arabic press in the surrounding countries. They would sift through the photos, hoping to recognize his face somewhere, looking to see if any new photos had surfaced.
In February they finally received the following surreal letter from the army:
*his mother lost more weight than he did in captivity.
*My aunt remembers how uncomfortable and strange visiting his parents was. No one knew what to say or do.
*My uncle - his cousin-in-law and friend - was living in the States when the war broke out, and immediately flew to Israel to join the reserves, not even stopping at home on his way from the airport. He happened to be sent to battles in the Hermon area, and he said that walking around there was terrifying: my dad's cousin was already missing at the time, he felt like he'd been send there on a mission to recover his body, that he could stumble upon it at every turn.
After everything, I spoke to him a bit longer, and asked him if he had any idea how captives were treated in Israel. "Nothing's different," he said. "Captors are captors all around the world. Put someone in that position, and they'll play the part."
And one more thing: My grandmother and her boyfriend were also there, listening. I asked the bf, who is a Holocaust survivor whose entire family other than his sister were murdered, who was a partisan living in the forests until 1945, who jumped off the illegal immigration ship to Israel and swam to shore in freezing waters and was immediately drafted to fight in another war, and who worked with Holocaust survivors for years - whether anything about dad's cousin's story or its emotional aftermath rang as familiar. He thought about it for a moment, and said, "No, I don't think so. I was never a prisoner like that. I mean, I was in the ghetto, but I never experienced any traumas."
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What I want to post about, though, is last night: after the movie, I went to my parents', who were hosting a family event. My dad's cousin was captured on the second day of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and was held as a POW in Syria for eight months, until he and the other men were released. This evening, my dad's cousins and anyone in the family who were interested were invited to hear his story.
It was my first time hearing the story - don't think I've met this dude more than once - and as these types of stories are, it was fascinating. Some bullet points from his story and the discussion that followed:
*After a week, he was sent to solitary by, I'm not kidding, mistake, where he ended up staying for 78 days. His guards couldn't find him so just figured he'd escaped. The guards at solitude knew him as an extra body in the solitude cells so might as well feed him too.
*After long in solitary he was so starved for touch that getting slapped by his captors offered a sort of relief.
*Telling himself he needs to recharge his batteries every three months. "I don't even know what that means," he said, "but when three months were over, I told myself that okay, I'm recharging, I'm ready for 3 more months now."
*Wanting to release pressure by crying but not wanting to cry all the time; he told himself he could cry after 100 days, and on the 100th day indeed spent the night crying in his sleep.
*Lots of different coping mechanisms, among them having previously watched movies that included captivity (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Rambo, I don't remember what else. "If those manly heroes could struggle and moan with pain, it was okay to do it too."
*the two hardest things about beatings is not knowing where or when the next blow is going to come from, and hearing your friends shout in pain as it from the next room
*every time someone returned from an interrogation/abuse session, beaten and bruised, the others would help take care of his wounds; this cycle in a way served as mental preparation for your own upcoming sessions.
*you find ways to reduce the pain of beatings: if it's your hands, move them slightly downwards as they're hit to absorb the blow. If it's your back, cry out less when you're hit on your upper back and it hurts; cry louder when you're hit in the lower back where it dips and your shirt absorbs some of the blow. It hurts less, but the captor thinks it hurts more and hits you more there, making him happy and you happy.
*when he was in solitary he was completely alone for about 35 days. After that he discovered he could communicate with the neighboring cells by knocking on the wall, and from that point he wasn't alone anymore. They didn't know morse, but intuitively just knocked out the length of the letters of the alphabet (* for aleph, ** for bet, *** for gimel, etc). Of course that meant that the last letter of the alphabet took 22 knocks, which took forever, so at some point they switched it so that every tenth letter got a double knock (** for the tenth letter, ** * for the 11th letter, etc). "How do you communicate making the switch from one system to the other?" we asked. "Well, you just sit there for two hours knocking: f-r-o-m n-o-w o-n e-v-e-r-y t-e-n-t-h l-e-t-t-e-r etc etc etc."
*After 40 days in Syria, he got his first shower. (When they were released, he saw a woman for the first time after 8 months.)
*food: he listed the things they received, but I just remember that they got a fruit a day. Each two would eat one fruit and save the other for later, and after three days they'd all pool them together and make fruit salad. One time they got a can of Israeli peanuts: they had a math guy who divided them between everyone, three and a half peanuts each.
*30 people living in a 30 square meter room becomes its own microcosm: upper classes and lower classes, ashkenazi and mizrahi, religious and secular. The thirty men were mostly all part of the same armoured corps unit, who'd been stationed at Mt. Hermon, ages probably 18-22. By default, their leader became a Syrian Jew who'd immigrated from Syria, and so spoke Syrian Arabic and could communicate with the guards. They formed into four groups, two of 7 and two of 8, and arranged mattresses in the four quarters of the room: sleeping places would rotate within each group every day, and the four groups rotated between the four quarters once a week, because every corner of the room had its own pros and cons: the one's closer to the window, so nice in summer but colder in winter; this one has more ventilation, but is closer to the toilet; this one has more space, but you're the first people the guards see.
*days were spent in lessons they gave each other: English, math, Arabic, Hindi. In games - they made cards out of cardboard found in some food packaging that they drew on with ash, and a logic puzzle made from soap. Art - one of them made necklaces out of olive seeds, filed against the walls and strung with a string unraveled from a towel. Smoking. Fantasizing. Mostly talking and getting to know each other to their very souls. He said after he was back, he visited the family and friends of one of the other prisoners in Jerusalem without the guy, and realized he knew everybody there, just needed to put names to faces and he knew everything about them.
*there were different kinds of guards: the bad guard, the simple guard, the ugly guard, the sadistic guard, the good guard. The good guard was always gentler and tried to help with whatever they requested. Before they were released, he told them that he'd be going on vacation, and by the time he'd return they'd already be gone. He had tears in his eyes. He'd been a refugee from Quneitra, but treated them fairly.
*when the Red Cross started visiting they would get some news from home. Short postcards with numbered words. He was frustrated that the family always wrote "everything's okay" without giving any real information. A fellow prisoner received a postcard mentioning the upstairs neighbors' and downstairs neighbors' porches, and 25 people coming to visit grandmother; he'd lived in a one-story apartment, and his grandmother was dead. It was an update on the outcome of the war: Israel had the Golan Heights and Sinai, and 2500 dead.
*they got to write their own letters back, carefully numbering words and making it through censorship. He tried reassuring his family he was okay, and lied about saying he missed them - he wasn't missing them at all. When he was there, he said, he'd checked out and was on a different plane of existence. He wrote to give his mother power of attorney to take care of his bank account. That letter never made it, he said, but the bank was considerate anyway.
*when the Red Cross came, they also started getting some better food, including some food sent from home.
*They were taken out for local TV interviews a number of times for propoganda. Red Cross also filmed them a little - here at 2:06 is when they were first captured, here at 05:33 writing letters with the Red Cross.
*There's also a video of them landing in Israel when they were released in a prisoner exchange in June 1974, stepping off the plane and being greeted by family, photos of him arriving at home. They were taken for a few days of tests and recovery at a sanatorium up north, went through debriefings and investigations by intelligence and the military. He was already close to the end of his service, so he was discharged. And that's it. For 20 years, until concepts like PTSD started surfacing in the '90s, he and the others received no special assistance or treatment from the government or the ministry of defense.
*I asked him how it feels talking about it today. He said it was 45 years ago - it's fine, it's just something that happened in the past. I asked how long did it take for him to reach that stage, but he said that for him, it was like that pretty much from the start.
After he finished speaking, the family went around and shared stories about what it was like back home:
*his brother was the only one who knew he'd been transferred to Mt. Hermon, the parents didn't know. When stories started surfacing about soldiers being captured and taken, he was the one who told his parents.
*he was MIA for a long time, and the family didn't know whether he was among the prisoners or not. The Syrians didn't release a list of names until February, 4 months after the war broke and they were captured. There was a photo of prisoners in the paper, where his face was partially hidden by someone's elbow, old back and white photo, and they couldn't figure out of it was him or not. The man on the photo had a beard. They couldn't remember, the last time they saw him - did he have a beard or not? They ended up taking the newspaper photo and a recent photo of him to the police forensics department, asking them to identify if it was him or not. The constable said yes, the curve of his eyebrow is unique; the commander said don't take it as a certainty.
The family would constantly visit the missing persons location center: an office in Tel Aviv where photos of missing and captured soldiers were displayed on large tables, photos taken from Arabic press in the surrounding countries. They would sift through the photos, hoping to recognize his face somewhere, looking to see if any new photos had surfaced.
In February they finally received the following surreal letter from the army:
Dear family,
The IDF is pleased to inform you that First Sergeant XX XX appears in the list of Israeli prisoners in Syria, as it was delivered to us by US Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger.
We have requested the International Red Cross confirmation that he is among the captives. We will inform you immediately upon receiving information.
*his mother lost more weight than he did in captivity.
*My aunt remembers how uncomfortable and strange visiting his parents was. No one knew what to say or do.
*My uncle - his cousin-in-law and friend - was living in the States when the war broke out, and immediately flew to Israel to join the reserves, not even stopping at home on his way from the airport. He happened to be sent to battles in the Hermon area, and he said that walking around there was terrifying: my dad's cousin was already missing at the time, he felt like he'd been send there on a mission to recover his body, that he could stumble upon it at every turn.
After everything, I spoke to him a bit longer, and asked him if he had any idea how captives were treated in Israel. "Nothing's different," he said. "Captors are captors all around the world. Put someone in that position, and they'll play the part."
And one more thing: My grandmother and her boyfriend were also there, listening. I asked the bf, who is a Holocaust survivor whose entire family other than his sister were murdered, who was a partisan living in the forests until 1945, who jumped off the illegal immigration ship to Israel and swam to shore in freezing waters and was immediately drafted to fight in another war, and who worked with Holocaust survivors for years - whether anything about dad's cousin's story or its emotional aftermath rang as familiar. He thought about it for a moment, and said, "No, I don't think so. I was never a prisoner like that. I mean, I was in the ghetto, but I never experienced any traumas."