Entebbe, 50 years on: Aged six, I saw my mother trembling – she refused to lie and said the hijackers want to kill us

Regine Levi (left) with her younger siblings a few months after the hijacking[Missing Credit]

“I always felt very unworthy of being included with them,” she said of the more than 100 Israeli and Jewish hostages left in the terminal, held at gunpoint for a week until Israeli commandos stormed it. Three hostages were killed in the raid on July 4, as was the unit’s commander, Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu.

When Levi finally attended a gathering marking the 40th anniversary, the other former hostages challenged her. “They yelled at me,” she said, telling her she had no right to put herself outside the circle.

Now, 40 years after the hijacking, Levi, a high school teacher in Zichron Yaakov, has become tightly bonded with the group that formed then: the “children of Entebbe”. Together with older survivors of the events of 1976, they meet almost weekly. But the hijacking is rarely spoken about. “We don’t need to speak about it. We just have an understanding that is very deep,” she said.

At the time, however, Levi did talk about it to herself. After her June 30 release and return to France with her mother and two younger sisters, then aged three and two, she understood from the questions waiting for her that people would keep asking.

Each night, she told herself the story from beginning to end, instinctively doing what she would later recognise, through her studies in psychotherapy, as a way of processing trauma.

That nightly retelling, she said, left her remembering “many, many details vividly,” some of them in fragments that still have the scale of a child’s memory.

She recalls the colours of the helicopter used by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who visited the hostages, and the sight of a terrorist holding, as she remembers it, a metal Quality Street chocolate tin with explosives.

Idi Amin, president of Uganda at the time of the raid (Central Press/Getty)Getty Images

The image stayed with her because she knew the confection from an aunt in Edgware, in London.

“I really wanted that box,” she said. “I absolutely loved that chocolate.”

Other memories disappeared. She does not remember the exact moment the hijackers took control, something she attributes to it being too traumatic to hold on to. She remembers standing, too short to see what was happening in the aisle, seeing only the back of the seat in front of her.

“It was very scary because I couldn’t see,” she said.

What followed, she said, seemed to unfold at a distorted pace. “When you’re in survival mode, everything happens very quickly.”

Her mother was trembling. Levi asked her whether the hijackers wanted to kill them. Her mother answered yes. Levi began vomiting.

Her mother regretted the answer for the rest of her life, Levi said, but in that moment she had not wanted to lie to her child.

That moment snapped her mother out of paralysis. The only Israeli citizen in the family, she told the terrorists her younger daughter needed the bathroom and used the trip to tear her Israeli passport into tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet, an act Levi called “heroic.” For as long as they remained aboard, her mother was terrified the fragments would resurface as the toilets were in constant use.

Joyful reception for Israeli troops who carried out rescue operation[Missing Credit]

That act meant that when the hijackers later began sorting the captives in the terminal, separating Israeli passengers and some Jewish passengers from the rest, Levi’s family was treated as French. By then, she had grown attached to the children she had been playing with, only to watch them sent to the other side.

“The selection was devastating for me as a child,” Levi said, describing people screaming and Holocaust survivors becoming “hysterical” at the sight of German terrorists separating Jews from other passengers barely three decades after the Nazi Selektion.

“I wasn’t aware of why it was happening,” she said. “I just knew that being in the other room was not good. I felt very guilty for being on the good side.”

Levi’s father, George Teichner, a physician who spoke French, English and German, asked to remain behind with the remaining hostages after his wife and daughters were released.

By offering his help to the hijackers, Levi said, he was able to stay close to the men guarding the captives and observe details that later became important to Israeli planners.

He learned where the terrorists slept, how they behaved, their routines and personalities, and whether the terminal appeared to be booby-trapped. After he reached France, he was questioned for some 30 hours by Amiram Levin, an Israeli officer involved in gathering intelligence for the rescue, and the two men remained in touch for years afterward, after Levin rose to the rank of general.

When Teichner was reunited with his family, he told them to pack their bags – they were moving to Israel. He did not speak Hebrew, but after Entebbe he wanted to live in a place of “mutual responsibility,” Levi said, where young soldiers would fly thousands of kilometres to rescue people they did not know.

It would take them a year to make the move.

Levi did not speak about Entebbe for decades – not out of a conscious decision to bury it but simply because “life went on,” she said.

She now reflects that Entebbe “met me everywhere”. The first time was when she learned about the Holocaust, which she had not been aware of before moving to Israel.

When Holocaust Remembrance Day came, with its language of selections, German guards and Jewish families sent to their deaths, along with the newfound knowledge that her own relatives had been taken to Treblinka, “it killed me,” she said.

“Entebbe came up for me on Yom HaShoah - it was all connected,” she said.

Those echoes returned after October 7, when Hamas-led terrorists attacked southern Israel and abducted 252 hostages to Gaza. Since Entebbe, Levi said, her hearing has been heightened, a symptom she associates with post-trauma; a motorbike passing two streets away can sound like it is passing under her house, she said.

On October 7, the reports of hostages being taken brought back the helplessness of captivity, and the comparison became harder for her to escape weeks later when women and children were the first hostages released, as they had been at Entebbe.

“It was happening all over again, a thousand times worse,” she said.

Still, Levi is careful to draw a distinction between the two events.

“We can’t compare between the two,” Levi said. “The terrorists [at Entebbe] weren’t nice, but they weren’t cruel. It’s not similar. On October 7, people were taken from their beds. It’s a different story.”

Regine Levi with Sorin Herhsko, who took part in the rescue as a soldier with the IDF[Missing Credit]

Years after Entebbe, once she had grown more comfortable sharing her story, Levi recalled one moment from a school trip with her students. The tour guide was surprised to learn from the children that their teacher had been at Entebbe. He told her he had been there too, as a Golani soldier. The two embraced.

Levi asked him to sit with the students under a tree and tell them what it had meant to be 19, to board an aeroplane for the first time and travel 4,000 kilometres to rescue Jews he did not know. The soldiers, he told them, had fought for the chance to go in.

“It was the same thing we saw in Gaza,” Levi said. “They fought to go in to save our hostages. It was an honour.”