The evening news on September 6, 1970 began: “A TWA flight from Tel Aviv was hijacked shortly after takeoff from Frankfurt, and commando leaders say that it has landed at a revolutionary airport somewhere in Jordan.”
Aboard that plane were two young girls, ages twelve and thirteen, traveling as what would be classified today as “unaccompanied minors.” They were on their way back to their father’s home in New York after spending the summer with their mother and stepfather in Israel. Together with other passengers, they were held on the plane, in the Jordanian desert, for six days and nights.
When the ordeal ended and the hostages were released, the two girls, Martha and Catherine Hodes, did not talk about the experience. Neither did their parents, who “thought silence would better serve us.” So they continued their lives as if the hijacking had never happened — and for the girls, that included return trips to Israel.
More than fifty years later, Martha Hodes, now a professor of history at New York University, has finally examined and researched the incident. Drawing on archival material, interviews, and her own limited memory of events, Hodes has written a riveting book that is both a memoir and a record of history.
In order to gather information, Hodes scoured newspapers and television broadcasts and unearthed company records and reports to try to reconstruct what was happening at the time. She interviewed airline crew members and other hostages in order to fill in details that she had either willfully forgotten, buried within herself, or failed to understand as a twelve-year-old.
In addition to exploring these facts, Hodes sought to recover the emotions she’d felt at the time. There were guerrillas with hand grenades and machine guns aboard the plane, and tanks and artillery were visible outside. There was fear and tension among the passengers, but there was also geniality and acts of kindness. As the days wore on, there was boredom and resentment, but there was laughter, too.
For the sisters, the trauma of being held hostage was part of an even greater trauma they were coping with: the breakup of their family. It was the reason they were on that TWA flight in the first place.
Decades later, when Hodes returned to the diary she had kept, she found that it contained her own edited version of events. It was an unreliable document; she had left out and revised too much. She tried to reshape both traumas, and she succeeded. That girl in the desert, Hodes concludes, is “completely disconnected … from the rest of my life.”
