1970 Hijackings by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues,maybe even strangers, to listen too. This week, we're discussing the mass hijacking of several planes by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in September, 1970. In particular, we'll look at the experience from the point of view of my guest, American historian, Professor Martha Hodes, who was a 12-year-old passenger on one of the planes, flying with her 13-year-old sister, Catherine. At the end of World War II, responding to the genocide of Jews in Europe, and the desire of increasing number of Jews for a Jewish homeland, the United Nations proposed partitioning Palestine into two independent states, one Palestinian Arab, and the other Jewish. The Palestinians, who were not responsible for the Holocaust and did not want to cede their land, rejected the plan. But the United Nations approved General Assembly Resolution 181 in 1947. In 1948, Israel declared its independence, leading to war with the neighboring Arab states. As a result of the war, Israel expanded its territory beyond that which had been partitioned to it, leaving many fleeing Palestinians as refugees. As a result of another Arab Israeli war in 1967, some of the Palestinians who had been made refugees in 1948, and who had settled in the West Bank, were again forced from their homes as Israel occupied that region. Six months after the 1967 War, physician George Habash founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Habash was originally from Lydda, Palestine. During the 1948 War, his older sister was killed in an attack on the city, and a neighbor's son was shot dead in front of Habash as they were expelled from the city. Habash later pointed to these experiences as the reason he turned to Arab nationalism. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, described itself as a secular militant Palestinian Marxist-Leninist group that aimed to use guerrilla warfare to,    "create a People's Democratic Palestine, where Arabs and Jews would live without discrimination, a state without classes and national oppression, a state which allows Arabs and Jews to develop their national culture." In the summer of 1970, United States Secretary of State William Rogers was trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East, and had the agreement of both Israel and Egypt for a three months ceasefire. The PFLP, which opposed any diplomatic recognition of Israel, developed a plan for mass hijacking in protest of Egypt agreeing to diplomacy, in order to raise awareness of the Palestinian cause. On Sunday, September 6, 1970, aboard TWA Flight 741, which was headed from Frankfurt, Germany, to New York City, armed commandos with grenades took over the cockpit of the Boeing 707. A woman announced over the loudspeaker, "I am the new pilot who has taken command of your TWA Flight. Keep calm. Please cooperate and put your hands behind your head." The hijackers landed the plane near Zarqa Jordan, at a remote desert airstrip called Dawson's Field, which the commandos renamed Revolution Airport. Shortly after they landed, another hijacked plane arrived at Dawson's Field, Swiss Air Flight 100, which had been headed from Zurich, Switzerland to New York City. Commandos hijacked two other flights that day, that didn't make it to Dawson's Field. Two commandos hijacked El Al Flight 219, shortly after leaving Amsterdam. Two others had been screened and removed from the flight. The pilot, Captain Uri Bar-Lev put the plane into a nosedive to disrupt the hijacking, and made an emergency landing at London's Heathrow Airport, where hijacker Leila Khaled was arrested, and her companion, Patrick Arguello died, having been shot by a Sky Martial. The two commandos who had been removed from El Al Flight 219 boarded Pan Am Flight 93 in Amsterdam, and hijacked it. But they feared the 747 jumbo jet might be too large to land at Dawson's Field, and instead landed in Cairo early the next morning, where the plane was evacuated moments before it exploded. With more than 300 hostages in the Jordan desert, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine issued their demands for release of Palestinian militants who were imprisoned in Europe. With United States citizens making up over a quarter of the hostages, the United States Government joined the negotiations. While some of the hostages, mostly women and children, were moved to the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman, Jordan, and others, including three US government officials, were moved to a secret location, many of the hostages remained in the desert, living on the plains and surviving on food and water that the International Red Cross was permitted to bring them. By Tuesday, September 8, US President Richard Nixon suggested bombing Dawson's Field, which his Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird declined to do, using unfavorable weather as an excuse to avoid disaster. On Wednesday, September 9, the fifth plane was hijacked, British Overseas Airways Corporation Flight 775, which was enroute from Bahrain to London. Three Palestinian militants landed the plane in the now crowded Dawson's Field. Finally, on Saturday, September 12, as conditions inside the plains in the desert grew unsustainable, the PFLP released most of the hostages, evacuating them after a week in the desert to Amman, Jordan. As they left the desert, the commandos blew up the three planes with explosives. Not all of the hostages were released, however. More than 50 were held as political prisoners for two more weeks because their governments had not agreed to demands. Toward the end of September, with the Palestinian insurgents losing ground against the Jordanian army, the last hostages came home. Seven Palestinian hijackers held in European jails were released, and Leila Khaled was released by Great Britain. None of the airplane passengers or crew were killed in the mass hijackings, and of the hijackers, only Patrick Arguello was killed. None of the hijackers were ever prosecuted. Joining me now to help us understand more is Dr. Martha Hodes, Professor of History at New York University and author of, "My Hijacking: a Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering."

Hello, Martha. Thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Dr. Martha Hodes  10:02  
Thanks so much for having me here.

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:04  
Yes, I am really excited to talk about this book. It is remarkable. I loved it. So I want to dig into it a little bit. I want to start by asking you about your approach to this book. So you're, of course trained as a historian. This is also based on your own memories. So I want to talk a little bit about how you kind of approached writing this book?

Dr. Martha Hodes  10:26  
Yeah, that's a wonderful question and a great place to start. I approached this book as a world historical event in which my family was caught when I was 12 years old. I think of this book as what I call personal history. So I think of that as like personal experiences in historical context. Bringing a historian skills to memoir, I have to say that I'm a bit of a reluctant memoirist. And so I am much more skilled as a historian and I found that hybrid combination actually very interesting, researching what I had remembered about the hijacking, but also researching everything I'd forgotten about the hijacking. And I can talk much more about my research method, but I think that was that was, you know, that was my basic approach. I guess the only other thing I'd say is, as a historian, I wanted to connect my grown up historian self to the 12 year old girl in the past who had forgotten so much of what had happened. And I did have a lot of models, because in the last 20 years or so historians have been writing about themselves, in historical context. The method is not unique to me. And so it was wonderful to look back to various models and decide how I wanted to approach the story.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:57  
Can you talk a little bit about you, as a historian? The other stuff you have worked on has largely been in the 19th century where of course, you can't do things like oral histories. Could you talk a little bit about how it's different then to be looking at something that's from the 20th century where a lot of the participants are still alive?

Dr. Martha Hodes  12:16  
Very different for me. Sometimes, I think I became a historian of 19th century because I just wanted to have my own way into documents without... of course, as a historian, you're always thinking about what the historical actors would make of what you're writing about them. But that's very, very different from having those historical actors alive. And of course, people who do mid 20th, or late 20th century history always have to deal with actors who are still there, and of course, have the advantage of oral history conversations. I had almost never done that before. In one previous book, my book called, "The Sea Captain's Wife," which was about a 19th century American and Caribbean family, I did talk with descendants of one of the protagonists who were still alive on Grand Cayman Island. And that was amazing and wonderful, but the book was still the 19th century story. So it was very different for me, not only to be writing about the late 20th century, but also to be using sources from the late 20th century. You know, for one thing, many of them are typed. In the 19th century, everything's in handwriting. So that was fascinating. But I'd also never used sources, like, I did a lot of research at The Nixon Presidential Library. And I just wasn't used to those kinds of, you know, State Department documents with lots of acronyms that I didn't know, I didn't know what they meant when I first came across them. So I'd be really good telegram and it would say, GOJ. And I thought, what's that, and I had to search and look it up. It turns out, it means Government of Jordan. Who knew? And tons of things like that. And just, you know, the just documents I hadn't worked with, because they weren't part of 19th century history. And that was really fascinating. And then, of course, I did contact some of my fellow hostages, and I had never had that kind of contact with other actors about whom I was writing. So that was very different and very interesting. And I was very clear, very aware, and very, very clear in the book that this is my story only. It's not the story of the other hostages or my captors. It's not even the story of my sister. There's so much about writing about myself, I found that is very, very subjective. So it depended your experience of this hijacking depended on everything from where you were sitting on the plane, to when you were asleep and what you didn't see or hear, to your view of Middle East politics. So this is not THE story of the 1970 hijacking. It's only and only my story of the 1970 hijacking.

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:00  
So I was curious about the kinds of things you're able to access as memoirist, as someone who has lived through this that you might not be able to get in the archives. So things like the emotions, the smells, the feel, the taste, like all of those sorts of things. Could you talk a little bit about that, and I was particularly struck toward the end of the book, you talk about going to Jordan, standing there on the hillside sort of over where this happened. And the you know, there's no one to interview there. There's no archive there. But there's something you're able to access there because you were a participant.

Dr. Martha Hodes  15:37  
Absolutely. what's so fascinating is apart from going back to the desert, and back to Amman, the capital of Jordan, where we were released, my experience of researching, what I remembered and didn't remember was, in a way, the opposite of what you brought up at first, so that I couldn't remember when I thought back. I didn't remember the 100 degree weather in the desert. I didn't remember being cold at night, when the temperatures plunged. I didn't remember being hungry. I didn't remember being thirsty. I didn't remember how bad the plane smelled. And I know that it did. And it's something that all the fellow hostages I talked to spoke about. And it's something that I found in all the documents, you know, the International Red Cross came on the plane, they were there, the commandos permitted them to come on the plane. And it was in all their reports how horrible the sanitation was. It was in the crew reports that I found from the the cabin crew and the cockpit crew. Everybody wrote about that, but I couldn't remember. And I tried, you know, part of part of what I wanted to do in the book was to reconstruct the experience. And I thought by reconstructing the experience, I would be able to recover some of that. And you know, I'll leave some of this to the reader. But it was a very difficult process. But then when I, when I went back to the desert, and back almost to the spot where it happened. You're right, there was a moment of recognition. I think I say in the book that it was early morning, and it was already very hot, and there was kind of a brush of wind. And suddenly that felt familiar. So that was a really fascinating experience. I think, especially as a historian of the 19th century, I've often gone back to the places where my historical actors lived. And I have often found it very difficult to, to get the sense that I am in the place where they lived, where they worked, where they walked. And yet, when it was my own experience, in some ways, it was easier. And I did have that moment of recognition. But in some ways, it was the same. And by that I mean, that 12-year-old girl I'm writing about is both me and not me. She was me in the past. But one of the things I learned writing the book is, it's not quite the same as who I am now.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:02  
I was really sort of drawn in by this idea that you come back to several times in the book about, "Were you really there?" Like it almost feels like you weren't there. Can you find proof that you were and I think, you know, certainly I haven't been through something as traumatic as this. But I have moments as I look back in my own history and think, "Wow, that that's really a shocking thing. Did I really experienced that?" You know, and it's not always something you can recover. But I wonder if you could talk through that a little bit, that that feeling of as you're talking about the 12-year-old girl, that is you and the you now are not the same person and what that means as you're trying to reconstruct this story.

Dr. Martha Hodes  18:47  
Yeah, wonderful. Thank you so much for that. I think the first thing to say is, you know, many people might read this book and say, "I haven't been through something this traumatic." I mean, some will have but others haven't. And in a way, the book is about any kind of experience, that we've distanced ourselves ourselves from, any kind of experience that we don't feel immediately connected to. It doesn't matter what degree of traumatic it comes in, on in on the scale. So for me, part of writing the book was to try to dispel this sense that I hadn't been there, this hadn't happened to me, this happened to someone else. And I tried to do that by using the skills of a historian, by researching, documenting, reconstructing, but what was so fascinating was along the way, it didn't quite work out the way I thought it would. So just to give one example, you know, when I got in touch with past hostages, I got in touch with hostages I remembered, and there were many, many hostages I did not remember, but I tried to find some of the ones I did. And many of the people I contacted did not remember my sister and me. And there are various reasons for that. One was that some of the people we befriended were held for two weeks longer. We were held for one week and, and some of people were held for three weeks. And those people had much more vivid memories of the two weeks following the release from the desert. The other was that my sister and I were 12 and 13. We weren't little kids, there were some really young kids who were unaccompanied. And a lot of people gave their attention as they should have to those very young children. We also weren't quite old enough to hang out with the teenagers. So we were sort of in between, and as a result, and we had each other. In a way we kept to ourselves. And so people would sometimes say, "Oh, now I remember you," but would say, "You know, at first when you got in touch, I didn't remember you." And I think there are people who never really remembered that we were there. I ended up having a wonderful, wonderful two year email correspondence with a co-pilot who was the most wonderful man and I remembered him so well. And I, although he was incredibly kind, and we became friends, I don't think he actually remembered me from the plane. So that was so interesting, because it reinforced my sense that I wasn't there. And then I also found oddly, and very irrationally, that I could be left unconvinced by evidence that should have convinced me so just to give one example, The New York Times printed a passenger list, and my sister and I were listed as "Hodes" and in parentheses, "Miss" that was my sister, and then "Hodes," and in parentheses, "child." And that was me because we shared a passport and that somehow have and it was such an odd rendering. it was almost like "Hodes Miss" would be like, you know, an unmarried mother of "Hodes child." It didn't make any sense. And by the same token, I found passenger lists in the archives of the International Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland, where I went to search out information about the hijacking since the International Red Cross had been involved in the negotiations, and in the health care for the passengers. And I found our names on a list. But at the top of the list in big capital letters, it said this list is unofficial and unconfirmed. And of course, it's irrational, but it made me think, "Oh, yeah, we weren't there." And I knew that wasn't true. But it was more the sense I can't believe I was there, rather than I know I wasn't there. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:17  
Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the hijackers. And I think you use the term in the book, "commandos." It seems like terrorist maybe wasn't a word that would have been used, then. Can you talk a little bit about their their rationale for this mass air piracy event? And whether you think, from their perspective, at least from what you can gather from the sources, if they if this was a successful hijacking for them? Like it were, did they accomplish at least some of the goals that they were trying to?

Dr. Martha Hodes  22:56  
Yeah, very complicated point. Our hijackers were the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It was an organization founded in 1967, right after the '67 War. And they were a new generation of revolutionaries. They were part of the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had been founded in 1964, which was a kind of umbrella organization for resistance groups. The PFLP were a minority, but quite influential. And their goal was as the goal of many of the resistance groups was return to the Palestinian homeland, but they believed very strongly in armed resistance rather than diplomacy. Very important to say that PFLP were Marxist-Leninists. So they were not Islamic jihadists. There's not a straight line from the PFLP to 911. They believed in a secular, pluralistic democratic state for Jews, Muslims and Christians. They also believed in modernization of conservative Arab governments, they were proponents of women's liberation. They were anti-imperialists, anti-Zionist, of course. Their leadership was educated  upper and  middle classes, doctors, lawyers, intellectuals. Their members were often recruited from the refugee camps. The point of the hijackings, from their point of view, was to call attention to the cause of return of the Palestinian homeland. It's also important to note, because nuance often slips out of this kind of history, the PLO and the other resistance, most of the other resistance groups, were against hijacking as a strategy, and were displeased with this strategy. It's so interesting, the effect of these hijackings, which at the time, were the biggest and most spectacular events of air piracy in history. On the one hand, they accomplished their goal of calling attention to the Palestinian cause, so that even Palestinians who radically disapproved of hijacking of innocent civilians, commented, and I found this in my reading, people were talking about this in a way they hadn't been talking about Palestinians and Israel before, and I was amazed to read, coverage in the mainstream press, The New York Times, Washington Post, were, I would say it was a mixture, obviously condemned the strategy, but there was more writing in 1970 about the problems of the founding of Israel and Palestinians who had lived on the land than there had been before and than I had expected there to be at all. Ultimately however, what happened in the end, and the reason all the hostages were let go, was because there came to be a war, a shooting war, in Jordan between the PFLP and the Jordanian government. It's a complicated and complex situation with the government of Jordan and the Palestinians. It's not one versus the other, it's very intertwined. But ultimately, the Popular Front was losing that war,and were eventually exiled from Jordan, and ultimately, the hijacking, probably, although it brought attention to their cause, it probably harmed their cause, more than not. That's not just my assessment. That came from reading everything that came after so very complicated in terms of what they accomplished and didn't accomplish.

Kelly Therese Pollock  26:39  
Do you think that this changed your view or, or the view of anyone else who was on these planes? You know, I know, one of the things that they were trying to do was to convince everyone on the planes that, you know, that the cause was, was righteous. You know, did you get a sense, as you have talked to other people, that that it did change anyone's mind? Or, you know, is it is it more like, no, these people put me through a terrible experience? And so you know, they're the enemy like it is that I'm sure, it's much more nuanced than that. But you know, what, what is your sense of, of what it was like for the people involved?

Dr. Martha Hodes  27:22  
Yeah. So the first thing I should say is, my sister and I were pretty different from many of the other American Jews on the plane. It was three years after the '67 War. Many American Jews were ardent Zionists. They were eager to visit the territories that had been gained by Israel in the '67 War. There were people on our plane who were going to Jerusalem to have a Bar Mitzvah at the Wailing Wall. My sister and I were raised in a very, very secular household. We identified as Jewish, but we never went to Hebrew school. So we hadn't learned the kinds of stories that people who had grown up with that kind of education had learned. Like other American Jews in 1970, however, we my sister and I, at 12 and 13, had no idea that Palestinians had once lived on that land. We certainly didn't learn that from our young Israeli friends, the kids we played with. It just wasn't something people talked about. And by the way, that's something that I read many, many narratives, autobiographies, stories by American Jews at this time. And what I just said is what was echoed, you know, we just didn't know we had no idea. Obviously, some people did, but many did not. I think that many of my fellow hostages were, I'd say somewhat interested in what the commandos our captors had to say, but most remained unconvinced. That's my sense. My sister and I had a little bit of a different experience because we didn't come to the experience with our own narratives. We were interested in what our captors had to say. Being we were kids, we were trying to, we were trying to mix all the stories together. There were on the plane, there were some Holocaust survivors, who now it's very important to say the Holocaust survivors, understandably, were triggered by the hijacking, but of course, Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust. You know, that was a Christian European defamation. We felt sorry for those people for the Holocaust survivors. We also felt sorry for the commandos who had been children in 1948. Their families had been exiled from their homes. So one of the things I say in the book is we felt sorry for everyone. And as kids, it was like, we wanted to figure out a way for everybody to be happy and we couldn't think of a way for that to happen. We couldn't I think I say in the book, we couldn't think of a solution. But I also, I also read something that I that I thought was very important, and that spoke to me when I was doing my research. You know, a lot of people use the phrase Stockholm Syndrome. Whenever I say anything about the captives being interested in the cause of their captors, and Stockholm Syndrome, which, by the way, it's not an official medical diagnosis and has never ever been never recognized by medical professionals. It refers to this 1973 Swedish bank robbery in which the hostages identified with their captors, and were hostile to the rescuers and did not want to be released. And none of that was true for any of the hostages in 1970. I mean, we all wanted to be rescued. We all wanted to be released. But I read a very interesting article when I was reading up about Stockholm Syndrome by a Yale psychiatrist who, who made the point, "You know, why shouldn't someone exposed to new views express sympathy? Why should we assume that captivity would automatically cancel out that kind of logic or judgment?" And that made sense to me. I mean, of course, they were our captors. Sometimes they were nice to us. Sometimes they were not nice to other passengers, they were mostly nice to the kids. And so I have to say, you know, our experience of the captors was more positive than many other because we were young. But we were interested. And we did learn something we didn't know before. And and when I look back, what we started to learn in the desert that week, was the irreconcilable narratives of both of each side, that they just were completely different stories that each side was telling, and they didn't match up in hardly any way at all.

Kelly Therese Pollock  31:46  
I was sorry, to see that your father had passed away recently. And I wonder if you're willing or able to talk a little bit about the role that you wanting to protect him and his view of what had happened? What role that played in your own emotional response immediately afterward?

Dr. Martha Hodes  32:10  
Sure. I'm happy to talk about that. So let me start by saying, part of my research involved talking to family members. My sister was incredibly supportive. She answered all my questions. We remember different things. We corrected each other's memories when we could and respected each other's memories. I also talked to my mother and my father. My mother's memories were very hazy. My father took a different approach. My father was willing to answer all of my questions. But what I found was, he had a certain number of what I called scripts, certain anecdotes, he would always resort to when I brought up the hijacking. He would always tell the story that when he picked us up at Kennedy Airport, when we were released, we ran into his arms. And my sister said, "Oh, Dad, we were so worried about you." And I realized he loved that memory, because it gave him the sense if we were worried about him that we weren't suffering so much. He also liked to tell a story. My father was a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. And in 1970, he was in his mid 40s, and he was running his own small dance company. And the day he was supposed to pick us up at Kennedy Airport, the day of the hijacking, he had a performance at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park with his company. And he heard the news that morning that our plane had been hijacked. He made all the appropriate phone calls. And then he went on with the show. And he loves to tell that story about going on with the show and how afterwards, the dancers said to him, you know, "We're all going out to get something to eat. Do you want to come?" And then he said to them, "I can't. I need to go home, you know, and watch the news. My daughters were on this hijacked plane." And in my father's story, the dancers were astounded that he had gone on with the show. It's not a story of self aggrandizement. I read it as a story of survival. He did what he had to do. He knew it wouldn't make a difference. He didn't want to bother the dancers. He didn't want to ruin the program. So he did that. And I think, because he was a dancer, and dancing meant so much to him. I think there was a sense like, if if dance went on, if dance continued, then his daughters would come home, the world wouldn't be disrupted. I don't think he would give that analysis. That's my analysis. But what I realized in listening to my father's repeated over and over again scripts of these anecdotes was that when I came home, it was also very important for me to protect him ,because I had a sense of how devastating it must have been to him. And so part of what I did, part of the reason I wanted to forget was that I didn't want him to know how awful it had been. And that's also one of the reasons I believe now, although I wrote in my diary every day on the plane, I didn't write down the bad stuff. It's like I didn't want it preserved. Not that he would read my diary. But I didn't want a record of that, because I wanted to protect him. And I should say that I know from talking to my stepmother, that my father was far more devastated than he let on to me. And I write about that in the book.

Kelly Therese Pollock  35:25  
So I wonder if this experience of writing about an event in which you were a participant, if that changes at all, how you now will view archives about other events, things that other people have seen, you know, knowing what you know? You know, of course historians know that people can be unreliable narrators. But you know, knowing what you know about how your own diary didn't necessarily reflect how you might have been feeling at the time, does that change at all how you then look at other archives?

Dr. Martha Hodes  35:58  
Yeah, also wonderful question. So yes, absolutely. Historians, we all know about the unreliability of memory. And of course, many documents are based on memory. My last book was called, "Mourning Lincoln." It was about personal responses to Lincoln's assassination. And one of the things I found when I was researching that book, was that reading sources that were not immediately from the days, weeks, maybe months after the assassination, reading what you know what I would call reminiscences were quite unreliable. And my favorite example is, Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theater. And then he was carried, he didn't die immediately, and he was carried across the street to a boarding house where he was laid out in a room. And if you just read reminiscences, so many people remembered that they were the ones who helped carry Lincoln across the street. So many people remembered that,there wouldn't have been room around a stretcher for all of those people. And it's not that they were lying or fabricating. But, you know, maybe, maybe you followed the stretcher or stood right near somebody who was holding it. And, and it's, it's just how memories evolve. So we all know that memory is unreliable. I have to say, even as a historian who knows that, I was surprised at how unreliable my diary was. Maybe unreliable isn't exactly the right word. I didn't make stuff up. But I left stuff out. And you know, the thing about my diary is that historians prize documents that are closest to the time and place we're studying. So my diary, I thought would be the trusted scaffolding of my book. And then when I read it, I wrote every single day, and I sometimes filled the page. But I didn't record the frightening events. I didn't record my own emotion. I didn't record for example, you know, I saw the co-pilot come out of the cockpit, up in the air with a gun in his neck. One of the commandos pointed her gun right at me, that was very frightening. I saw the plane being wired with dynamite. You know, when we were released to Amman, there was a war going on around us, we heard shooting. I didn't write about any of that. And at first, I was disappointed, almost in myself, like, "Why did I do that? How could I have been? How could I have written something that was so partial and fragmented?" And then over the course of researching the book, I came to have a lot more understanding and empathy for that 12-year-old girl who was both me and not me, but it was just too hard to write about, I knew I wouldn't want to remember. And then that does make me think about the other kinds of documents. You know, when I go back to say, if I write another book about the 19th century, or whatever book I write next or the research my students do undergraduate and graduate, we have to remember those things about documents. I mean, at a certain point, you have to tell the story that the document tells, but what a gift if a historian is able to evaluate a document with other kinds of accounts that would let us know what somebody omitted. And historians do that all the time. It's called parallel accounts. If a document doesn't give you everything you want, you find other kinds of documents from the same time or place or something similar and put them all together, which is what I did, by the way, in reconstructing the hijacking. And that gave me a sense of everything that was missing from my diary, but which now I know, I could not possibly have written at 12 years old.

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:31  
So as I said, up front, this is a remarkable book. I really encourage people to read it. Can you tell listeners how they can get a copy?

Dr. Martha Hodes  39:39  
Certainly. I always encourage people to order books from your local bookstore. If you go in and ask for it, they'll order it for you. If you don't live near a local bookstore, you can do that online, and you can go to bookshop.org, which is a wonderful independent bookstore website. You can also order it from the HarperCollins website and you can also order it from Amazon.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:02  
Is there anything else that you wanted to make sure we talk about?

Dr. Martha Hodes  40:06  
I think the last thing I'd say is readers will find that in the narrative, I interject quotations from the book, "The Little Prince." And I did that because it was a book I had read that summer, the summer I was 12. And it was very important to me. And I also found through reading the account of another hostage that we had actually talked with another hostage about that book one night on the plane. And what I realized much later, after I used those words from Little Prince was that, in a way, those words and the use of those words reflect my inability to express feelings in my own words. And so I was able to take a narrative that was very important to me at 12 years old, and in that particular summer, and that, and to use that to help me express my own feelings about everything that had happened.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:59  
Well, Martha, thank you so much for speaking with me. I love when I read a great book like this and then get to pick the brain of the person who wrote it. So I really appreciate you coming on and speaking with me.

Dr. Martha Hodes  41:10  
Thank you so much. It's been a wonderful conversation.

Teddy  41:26  
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