Fifty years ago, Air France’s Flight 139, from Tel Aviv, was hijacked by terrorists. Originally bound for Paris, the plane was rerouted to Entebbe, Uganda. Most of the passengers were held hostage in an abandoned terminal in the Entebbe airport until the IDF carried out a remarkable rescue.
While there are numerous written accounts, documentaries, and dramatizations of that 1976 hijacking and rescue, Entebbe: Diary of a Hostage is the first publication of a diary kept by one of the passengers taken hostage. It is a day-by-day account, describing the conditions at the Entebbe airport terminal — the food, the sleeping facilities, the hygiene, impressions of the terrorists, descriptions of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, fears, hopes — as experienced in real time.
The diary-keeper, Yehuda Gottlieb, was with his wife, Regina, on the Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris. From there, they were to fly to Boston to visit their daughter and son-in-law to celebrate their granddaughter’s second birthday. The flight to Paris stopped in Athens to pick up an additional fifty-eight passengers.
Among those Athens passengers were four terrorists — two Germans and two Arabs. From Athens, the plane flew not to Paris but to Benghazi, Libya, where four more terrorists boarded.
“The longest night of our lives began when we departed Benghazi,” wrote Yehuda Gottlieb. The flight lasted more than thirty hours. No country except Uganda was willing to accept the hijacked plane with its terrorists and their hostages.
Then, on July 4, 1976 — the eighth day of captivity — “the impossible happened.” Israeli soldiers, having travelled 4,000 kilometres, landed at Entebbe, and the rescue began, with the hostages led to a waiting Hercules transport plane.
“We owe our endless gratitude and thanks to the Israeli military and to our government for what they achieved on that historic date. They extracted us from a living hell … We witnessed a miracle, thanks to our IDF angels who risked their lives for all of us,” wrote Gottlieb.
Keeping a diary was Gottlieb’s way of countering his fear and uncertainty while in captivity. He later told his daughter about his record-keeping, and his intention one day to publish his account. He even edited it into a draft of a book, with publication in mind.
He and his wife passed away in 1985, without publishing the diary. It was not until 2019 that his daughter took out the notes she had kept in a drawer, and began to translate the entries from the original Polish.
The result is a unique account, filled out by a foreword and a brief history of the event by Gottlieb’s daughter, Ester Gottlieb Smith, along with her perspective of that horrific week of captivity. It is a valuable work documenting a terrorist attack that ended with a heroic rescue.
