2 min read
Shay Gross was five years old when the hijackers took over the plane on which he and his family were travelling. His mother hid him under her airline seat. "I asked her: 'Mummy, does it hurt to die?'"
Benny Davidson was on the same flight. He was happy and excited, flying for the first time and looking forward to his barmitzvah, "then hearing yells and a couple of minutes later seeing a stewardess who is completely white with her arms up in the air and a gun to her head."
The two men were among eight former child hostages who met Shimon Peres this week, to hear that their plight inspired the then Defence Minister to launch the daring raid that saved their lives.
Davidson also remembers his father's worry that he could be singled out for harm if the terrorists discovered that he was an air force navigator - so the family ate his military identification paper.
Once the hostages were moved to the airport, the parents set up play areas and "library" areas and played games with the children, which "fended off a lot of the fear and terror."
I asked my mother how does it feel to die?
"I'm sure that the way I got over this and some of the other children got over this so well and were not traumatised was that our parents shielded us and masked us from terror as much as possible."
Davidson, a 53-year-old father-of-four, was born in April, but he will celebrate a "40th birthday" on Monday. "Every year I celebrate another 'birthday' on July 4 - the date we got rescued and when I got my life back."
Mr Peres, not normally known for his emotional displays, flung his arms around the 11-year-old son of Shay Gross, who had celebrated his sixth birthday as a hostage. Gross's admiration for the politician was similarly warm: "Peres was so excited and he hugged my son," said Gross, "If he wouldn't have succeeded it would have been the end of his political career and many leaders wouldn't have taken this risk." He named his son Yoni after Yoni Netanyahu, hero of the raid.
His life, he says, has been very much affected by the experience. "It has been not 100 per cent normal but 70 per cent normal."
Like Benny Davidson, Mancunian Entebbe survivor Patricia Martel managed to leave behind the terror of the hijacking and live a normal life.
Martel, who had previously nursed Idi Amin at an Israeli hospital, feigned pregnancy and a miscarriage to successfully persuade the hijackers to free her. She died three years ago. "It was not a day-to-day thing in her life," said her widower Howard Martel from his home in central Israel on Tuesday.
One sticking point in getting back to normal was overcoming antipathy to flying, which took some time, but she eventually decided that she should not worry because she had already been through her worst imaginable airline scenario.
"She'd then say that when you've been on a hijack with people running round with hand grenades, there's nothing worse than that."
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