i was really honored to speak with her for the book. she has been around from the beginning pay she's an elder, a veteran, worked with used to be friends with help raise him young. has set stories and stories and t it's a blessing to be able to connect with her. also a rapper and outlaws group is meant to acknowledge you and say thank you very much. [applause] textbook tv continues now for television for serious readers. >> now to business. stacy schiff iss the author of zero which one the 2000 pulitzer prize. and a a biography which was a finalist for the 1995 pulitzer

prize.ud her most recent books include cleopas, eight life and that ane and thatwhich is a sale in 1692. she has received fellowships from the guggenheim foundation both the national endowment for the humanities as well as a fellowship in 2002, 2003. martha hodes is professor of history at unit university and author of morning leak again, sea captains wife a true story of love, race, and wore the 20th century and white women black men elicit sex in the 19th century. she is recipient of fellowships in the guggenheim foundation. neh, harvard university. he was a fellow in 2018 -- 2019. we owe her, i owe her a special debt of gratitude for serving wonderfully for two years of the director until last monday. please help me welcome back

martha hodes. [applause] >> thank you. martha, i'm so delighted to join hehere no one tells about the coleman centers when you leave you have a feeling you've been expelled from paradise. i'm very, very happy to be back it's bittersweet but it's good to be back with you. this book is what happened in 1970. it's also about how he retrieved the 50-year-old history. we should start an overview of what actually happened before we get into the reconstructing of what actually happened do you want to describe the hijacking with a little bit of context? >> i do and i will. i also want to say very quickly thank you to salvador into stacy and all of you for being here this evening. all of you joining us virtually. i do not know if the microphone can pick up my fluttering heart. [laughter] that wonderful first question.

i will say september 6, 1970 i was 12 years old. mymy sister named catherine was 13. we were flying from tel aviv to new york. it was the end of the summer we had spent the summer in his isrl with our mother. my parents were modern dancers and might mother had gone to israel to help start israel's modern dance company. and we were coming back to return to school. and on that day at four planes e hijacked from members of the liberation of palestine i cante stay more about them later. one of the planes was foiled and admit it well was flown to cairo and everybody was evacuated and the plane was blown up. two of the plans include the when my sister and i were on blank unaccompanied flown to the jordan desert and three days later another plane joined us there were three planes held hostage in the jordan desert. my sister and i were among those held in the desert inside thee plane for six days and six

nights. so let's leave it there. >> let's talk about the title for one second before go any further. you just reclaim the word hijacking as i see it hijacking as someone takes you away or take something you have away from you and you basically said no, no, and i'm going to perforate the hijacking for my own. did you always think of the boos you worked and you told a reporter in 1970 when you're 12 years old you intended to write a composition about your experiences in the desert. so i guess i could say what took you so long? [laughter] hear you finally have it. tell us what sent you down the road and please answer my title question and very curious about that.at >> yes your own response to such such awonderful one. i think i've had this title for a long time. when people would ask me the title of thes book i would alws

say didn't know what it was i was so reluctant to name it. >> you name it you have to write it. that's an ambivalent. partly it was about reclaiming ssomething that it happened to me. it was also very clearly it beig my experience. and i say that because each hostage is such a different experience everything from where you're sitting in the plane, what you slept through, what you were awake for. your knowledge where you stood on palestine issue i can only write my story that was part of it prone out the possessive pronoun in the title. olivia said about the school competition. i did not remember this. but when i was doing my research

there is an article in "time" magazine or newsweek reported talk to me i think i was called such as going to write a composition about this which i never did by the way. we talked about why i didn't want to talk to the hijacking when i got home. you are the second person to suggest on this had not occurred to me the title of the book is kind of like a seventh grade composition. like my summer vacation. >> may be not be exactly what i said. [laughter] what they will also say the subtitle the personal history is also about being personally caught up in or participating in a world historical events involuntarily. until its history but it's also personal history for the rest of the subtitle go through multiple permutations or was that also really set from afar?

>> i camek up with that pretty quickly and it stuck i like the subtitle it has more beveled about the title. i t come to like the title and think of is my seventh grade composition. [laughter] >> a month seventh grade competition one does not make a narrativee decision that memory and the second time as history which you did here. was obvious from the start you're going to play with the shards of a memory and back up and give us a more objective account of what happened? the very difficult book to structure this energy of what'ss happening in the desert and there are two parents who are need to also be able to see the number in that picture how to dd you cover the structure? >> is doubling another from the beginning as the historians or anyer writers like chronology ad

we usually write thing right thg chronologically and we do that. from harpercollins at the time who is the one who really helped me with the structure. but you start out by telling readers or thing that happened. what i did a site actually start in the preface something of a preface. i give all of the memories i had before, i started writing the book that was january predicted write down those memories before i began researching and writing for thus the first few pages. then i tell the whole story and then i go back and reconstruct what happens in several other parts including my parents experience a and some family context. in reconstructing what happens in the desert and finally what happened when i gotot home. and of all the books i have written those the hardest book to structure.

i'm the one i have never written a whole draft and restructured and part of that was difficult but i'm really glad that i did. >> initial structure it was different. >> it aptly was yes it was. >> you talk about what historians do, generally only write history we tend to look at documents. and we tend to believe the documents are actually going to deliver up the story. one of the resources was your childhood diary. it turns out to be something of an unreliable diary keeper. [laughter] i sayso that with great psalm this. you realize you could write the stories you could bear it from the truthfulul story. i'll tell her story that we we canlive with at the same tim. at one point you give us a list of the things you did not read

about in your diary. he want to talk about that disconnect? the diary is a record of what you erase is much as a record of what you really preserve it. again historians and the audience will know historians love forces from the time and place we are writing about they are considered the most reliable to the event. it kept a diary the summer i was 12 but i had it with me on the plane. i saved all of my diaries i dug it out this'll be my scaffolding for this book at the structure of the book, here is what i experienced and of course that's not at all, not at all what i found as you so eloquently put it in your question. what i found was and took me a while to formulate this.

i crafted a story in the diary that i could tolerate they could tolerate with interesting enough some that memories i was never able to erase from my consciousness even though i made an effort and was quite determined not to absorb these things going on around me. these were some of the most frightening moments. the firste was up in the air wh the hijacking was taking place the copilot emerging from the cockpit with a gun in his neck and image i was never able to erase with and another was the night we landed our captors wearing the plane with dynamite. and another was -- some of my captors were very nice and nice to the children especially. there are different kinds of human being some were not nice people.

there was one woman, there are several women commandos the popularop front believe in womes liberation that was part of their ideology. so that women were in charge of our plane but one woman was not a nice person at all and she at one point put her gun to me is is walking back to my seat. i do not write down any of that. it's funny when i broke my diary felt frustrated with myself. but i did not tell a full story. over the course of writing the book i learned to have more empathy for the 12-year-old girl who is not able to absorb everything around her. but i just want to give our listeners one example that is s telling. weni landed on the sunday night and i described my diary the hijacking. and i wrote the sentence. my sister was sitting next to me and he was crying up in the air because it was very scary.

i use the word hostesses which we called flight attendants in those days. i said the hostesses comforted a crying and called everyone. and then, it must have done this when i got backit because he ony time i read my diary i crossed out the words a crying catherine to the sentence read the hostesses comforted and combed everyone. i crossed out really well i took a lot of light holding up the light to see the words. so p clearly my older sister, my protector was afraid and crying. i could not bear that so that had to be struck from the record. that was such a clue to me the record i kept was so incomplete and unreliable. >> trying to read through it someone erased.

we talk about it wit so fascinating a late tell the story you are year end a half apart. you are completely different takes on whatmo happened. it's almost as if you outsource your emotions to her on some level. you also rebuild as a 17 year old blowing us a completely different take on what is happening. so, did you and your sister -- i know you didn't talk about over the years. code or were not going to talk about? did it never come up you are never in an airport and one turned to the other and looked away and said were not going to discuss that. how did that even work? she was . and i think any older sibling, she felt responsible for both of us, like any younger sibling, perhaps did. i like the way you put it, staci. i let her be my buffer. she was the one who answered the

commandos questions when they questioned the hostages. she was the one who made. she was very concerned that we would not be separated. and she made sure that that was not going to happen or told herself she wouldn't let that happen. she was the one who got us in the capital city that night so she did everything. and for that reason she had to be much more present and more confident and that's one of the reasons i was not able to absorb everything going on lk around me . i think of her in a way as my hero and she read the book before it went to press and was incredible and talked me through the process of writing it but she pointed

out just tocall her a hero doesn't do justice to her own experience because she was a child to and it was traumatic for her as well and she was also a survivor of all of this . so as far as i should also say this and after my sister read the book she sent the most wonderful formulation. she put it this way, she was her words, she's speaking and she said you forgot and wanted to remember, you remembered andwanted to forget . it's so right and then ... >> how can you say that's not in the book, it is in the book. >> the spirit of that is absolutely right but thank you for that. i didn't say there was any sort of code. in 1970 women as our rule were not encouraged to think about terrible things that happened to them once they were over. there were some families who didn't make a point of talking about the hijacking

but it was true of the majority of hostages that the idea was to go back to school and my father had gone to my school and then said marcy won't be here, she's on one of the planes and my teachers did not even know. in this day and age there was counseling and my best friend who every time a teacher called my name at the beginning of the school had to say she's not here because she's on one of those planes but could we save her a seat in the front row because she is short. it was traumatic for my best friend and i got in touch with teachers when i was writing a book, we were astounded they had never been told that this had happened. the first time to answer the last part of your question, my sister and i never talked about it.

when 9/11 happened and i want to be clear that 9/11 was different, our hijackers were not some jihadists, they had an internal policy of causing no harm to any hostage and it was different but nonetheless many hijackings in one day from a lot of remembrances that's why my sister and i said to each other i taking about it again it was hard and then after that it took me 15 more years to think about writing a book. >> no reason for that i'm sure. i want to ask youabout your sister . your traveling on the same passport and i didn't even know that and the fact that your joint on passport is poignant. two faces on one travel document. we should talk about hijackers before we go much

further . the popular front for the liberation of palestine, can you explain why they were not on the planes at jordan because that was unclear even at the time . it was unclear to most of you on the flight. just as it was can you tell us about their demands and how they failed to impress those uponthe hostages ? >> this was an important part of my research and one of the wonderful resources at the library . interestingly enough jewish division holds collections of in norma's number of documents published by the institute of palestine study which is a phenomenal set of volumes because it includes every speech, every matter that might have appeared so really along with autobiographies from my captors and interviews, it

helped me understand context i didn't understand at the time and i will say my sister was not that much older than i but seemed to be so politically smart and she grasped so much about our palestinian captors and i feel like she understood it so much betterthan i did . the populist group was founded after the war and that was three years after the palestinianorganization had founded . they were considered themselves, they were a minority but their leadership was drawn from the well-to-do doctors, lawyers, they spoke multiple languages, french german, they recruited membership from much poorer classes. there leadership was an extraordinary class of people . their goal was a single

democratic pluralistic secular state of equal rights for jews muslimsand christians and atheists because they were . even one of their strategies was hijacking and we were among the minority of the plo, most of the leadership including the time didn't approve of evtaking of innocent citizens and eventually they renounced that strategy but they were not all representative of theplo . that took me a long time to figure out. jordan was such a funny nation in 1970. allies of the united states and israel of course jordan and israel were enemies of each other. the popular front made orders in the capital city of clan and picked jordanbecause it was an easy place to make

your strikes in israel . but the jordanians and palestinians population that was a complicated mix. it wasn't jordanians nversus palestinians but i would say most of the population both jordanians and palestinians would not like or approve of thepopular front being in trouble of the city of clan . they made a state within their stand but many of the palestinians who lived in jordan had been displaced since 1948 and then again 1967 as soon as they had settled on the west bank so a complicated set of populations, of allied ships . and the jordan desert of course was a place where we could land and the commandos could be in control of the planes but tanks were surrounding us and you could see them so the army was at war with the popular front.

but we could see the tanks on the right and of course somebody explained that to me as you might say with any of this and one of the women who befriended us saying you see those tanks out there, that's the jordanians and their on our side. it was difficult for me to understand. >> y one line that reverberates throughout the book and i'm going to make a mess of it right now, the friendly people, can youjust tell us, it's such a straight to the heart . >> will start bringing thatup . when we were there during the hijacking one of the commandos took over the pa system and said you're landing in a friendly country friendly people and i remember thinking don't know that i need to get home to my dad. >> everybody was waiting for

us. the thing about writing from memory is you have to drop, every single person italked to and every newspaper article i read somebody quoted that line so all the hostages remember that line so i knew it had been said . v i will say that i had done this before but some of the hostages hadfrightening experiences and their interactions with our o catheters . and they determined people's connection to the state of israel to determine who would be a valuable hostage and at the same time the commandos were quite kind tothe children . my experiences with them were quite positive so for example, there was one day when again when the desert was crying and one of those men stopped by and he said d, don't cry, we have children to and that felt very fatherly to her.

when we were outside the plane for air and exercise, he gave the kids piggyback rides. and i also have a memory of we were in the middle of the desert so along with tanks on the horizon there was a mirage of water. one of the commandos who understood mirages meltdown on the sand and told them why you're seeing water. so not only were they kind to us but my sister and i were interested in the stories uthat they told that were very important to them that the hostages understand their stories. my sister and i are different than many hamerican jews in the 1967 war. we didn't have, we had gone to hebrew school, we didn't

descend from americans or other people they brought with them and we were interested in the stories and we felt sorry for the commandos.. there were also o hold holocaust survivors on the plane and we felt sorry for them as well so as kids, it was like we felt sorry for everyone and wanted to solve everyone's problems but couldn't think of a way for everything to work out for israel palestine. couldn't think of a solution. >> great surprise. >> we wanted to and we felt sad for everybody and not all the jews were seven or empathetic to our captors but son some had grown up in scientist household and were interested in what theywere hearing . >> as we sit here tonight the statue of the little prince

is being installed across from the french consular yservices and i bring this up because threaded through your book in the most intriguing matter are the little prince which is was read to you by your stepfather that summer. so i have two questions, how did that happen and is the little prints now for you a book also about hostages, being hostage inthe desert for six days . >> you for asking that and i have to say salvador mentioned this but it's really special to be talking to you because you're the biographer wand that biography was also important to me and by puzzling out the meaning of the book s. you're absolutely right, in my diary i found the words telling me i prints that

summer before the hijacking that the israeli stepfather had read it to us and by i had read it many times over. then when i'm with one of my fellow hostages who was a 19-year-old woman from brooklyn who was very kind to my sister and me , i met with her while i was writing the book and she gave me accounts she had written while we were ... actually i should say when she got home she wrote out her account and gave it to me. she just handed me her sheet of paper and said apparently i saved it for you for 40 years and in her account i didn't rememberthis , she writes about she and my sister and i are getting by the open door of the airplane one evening talking about the book the little prints.

given all of that of course i reread the book which i had read in decades and if there's anybody who doesn't know it's a story about an aviator who crashes in the desert and the book is about encounters with this strange character he calls the "little prince". there was so much connected to the things i was reading about and in every chapter i quote something and i have a o couple short examples. one is when i write about my sister and i writing about the plight of palestinians i have a line where the little prints says once again without understanding why i felt a queer sense of sorrow that so much describes how i felt 12. another line i love so much when my sister and i arrived i talked to my stepmother about it and what she remembered was we were quite

cheerful. she put it this way, she said no tears, no crying and then there's a line in the "little prince" i quote where the aviator says about the little prince, nothing about juhim gave any indication of a child lost. examples like that for every chapter. my book with the "the little prince" is an enigmatic story . it gave me feelings i wasn't able to describe not only the time but partly when i was writing the book. >> iq. finally you decide after a few years to delve into this miasma of your past.

i can't begin to imagine the intellectual preparation that was required, how did you prepare yourself to go to the national archives and i thought i would set you up to read a little bit . and maybe you could set up that visit back to watch that person on the screen . >> it was hard doing the research was quite difficult . i did have to prepare myself at one point i'll tell this anecdote. i did a lot of messages in the state department and there were tropes of telegrams. and i read through all the ca telegrams that came to september 19 folder and the next folder started in october and all the hostages were hold by october but i opened it and i found something i remembered quite well which was the cheat sheet of paper literature that our captors had given ei out for the hostages to read, and i always remembered the old resource which was something like ladies and

gentlemen, i want to explain why we have done what we done . i scanned the entire document and it took me two years to go back and read it, it was just too much because i remembered sitting on the plane. what you're talking about is a moment and i was always happy to read that passage. when i was in the national archives they had a wonderful researcher there who helped me find the ciatapes . it was kind of rough that the press had filled on the border and turned overto the cia so here's what i remember about it . on a summer day 50 years later i watched the news footage in the norse and national archives. they appeared in haphazard order. there three planes had sat 30 miles, took a couple of hours

and it was early afternoon when they arrived. watching the tapes i see some of what i remember. stands beyond the city's downtown, palm trees reaching to the top . the j for jordan intercontinental space in 1960s style script. the commander holds the megaphone, horns honked. 13 minutes in the tape switches inside of the van, passengers expressing was with caution. a photographerhas expressed his camera into one of the open links . and there we are. i sit impassively and cheek, shielding me partly obscuring me, straight into the lens. curious, responsible, afraid. she twists around to look out the window, planning what to

do , thinking how can i keep them separated? tentatively then i look down to, large cameras and microphones and another reporters handling the camera setting one photo after another. right there before my eyes this is where the girl i've been trying toconjure . despite all the documents, despite all the people i've talked to, many of whom have remembered catherine and me. there's a feeling the hijacking must have happened to someone else . the image of that girl felt more than anything else like a historian given a visual representation of her subject for the firsttime . watching the tape years later i can't believe i was there. >> i'm going to unfortunately

ask a question you're not going to want to hear after that passage, does any of that have anything to do with what you went on to do for a living ? >> i never thought about it if the first person asked me that the first person that asked me was my agent. it's actually a great question. my favorite subject in my in high school, it's a roundabout journey i took an introductory religion class that might have had to do with being brought up in such a secular household. being interested in world religions so i became a religion major i got a masters degree at harvard university. and while i was a student, i had a steady job at the library on women and i found that i loved being deeply

involved in people's personal papers and daily lives and i looked that that more than the abstractions of religion so that was my journey from english major to religion major to the story and getting my phd in history i have never put the hijacking into that narrative and i don't know how it fits but i'm not all dismissingthe fact that it does fit in there . >> now another million-dollar question. we've always had first and foremost diary stories because bethat's the heart of the matter that's presumably theunvarnished truth . so does this make you read a story or write any different? and in your research you've come upagainst some untruths about the whole ordeal . one is that the popular front detained only the jewish in 2020 caused gets the story

wrong so where does that information lead you as a historian and how you stwrite history if you can'ttrust the memories . >> first of all historians all know that memory is unreliable. people are sworn to tell the truth, you still know it's based on memory. that didn't surprise me but as my own documents for my sources, it was in a way shocking that memory could be so unreliable. i knew that certainly from writing a book about lincoln because one of the things i did is the lincoln assassination twas so wildly off i decided when i wrote the book i would only use forces that happened within weeks and months of the assassination so that just made it so real to me. how unreliable sources can be. then this was a very

important one to me. one of the enduring parts was that our captors really send all the non-jews away and detained only jews on the plane . that's not what happened but to be fair what happened was very confusing to the hostages so i have empathy for the misunderstanding. one evening where the captors went out certain people from our plane were committed to leave. everybody was asked that was left was not jewish that was clear but the same time there were many jews that were detained that same night jews from the other plane were permitted to go on. there was a group of about 50 hostages and about two thirds of them were non-jews. it was complicated because that night when only jews

left are playing the people that were left were not jewish but the people on the plane were jews. that was confusing and plfrightening to people so i think that myth grew from that moment that memory which was hard to erase. but i constantly came upon hostages giving interviews saying after that evening when that happened our captors never distinguished between jews and non- jews ma again and again, our captors were human beings and some of them made strategic mistakes. by asking the hostages argue jewish which was a way to determine if you are a hostage, that was a poor choice of questions because it was frightening to many of the jews on the plane so very confusing , complicated

nuanced kind of situation but it was important to me in the book that i do this to clear the object of our captors. >> an audience member wants to know have you thought about your next book project? no pressure and thinking about going back to work or writing more memoirs ? >> i always take a long time between projects so i'm not feeling pressure about that. it's been such an interesting experience writing about my own memories and writing about 20th century history so part of me longs to go back to the 20th century where my captors arealive and i can read their documents . where i feel history has a certain amount of trouble over that so i will go back to the 19th century .

another part is talking to my friends from my past has been very important . i tiny part of me thought about writing fiction and my agent said don't do that. >> she's not here tonight, is she?e? >> there's a way in which everybody wants to write a novel and i don't know if i have enough time in my life i might stay in the 19th century and write something more . >> y,do you think this shape away you document? >> there's nothing i didn't know about reading documents but bwhat i didn't know is how clear it was especially about what i left out of my diary because in the 19th century people wrote letters in so much detail. when i was researching this book i drunk up those details but i knew that people were

admitting their letters but now i know more than i had before. i only knew because i was the person whoraced back from the record . >> you can anticipate the next audience question, what was the most difficult thing toread to leave out of the book ? >> this comes from my experience with my editor and with friends who read the first draft of the book. of course bruce my beloved husband who read a draft and all those people said to me your writing too much about other people and not enough about yourself . one of my friends gave me this piece of advice and he said tell us the reactions of a people before you come to your self and then my other friend said i got worried

when you disappeared from the script.so i think i wanted to tell a multifaceted story with my experience and everybody th else's experience and i realized over time that i needed to center my own experience and overall although that was the right thing to do it washard for me to say goodbye to all those other places . >> what have you done with your diary and have you gone back to it so cyclically? >> i have many other diaries. is it because you're such a reliable diarist? >> i kept a diary and then i stopped. i had my beloved husband who i could talk to every evening instead of writing and i think that's part of why a lot of us if we have

empathetic partners or friends stop writing in diaries so i have this long run of diaries and i spent time reading them rsespecially from my teenage and college years, there's all kinds of interesting things in their. they are in a box and i talked to my other historians who say save my diaries and when we are gone do we burn them and throw them out before we go for once i'm gone somebody else could throw them out, finewith me . my friends joke about the paper which sends an utter shiver down my spine. those are important to me now but i don't know what their feet will be. >> i heard george tenet had e kept a very from the age of 12 till the age of 100.

>> how many languages did you have to know? >> great question. one of the places to research was the international red cross archives . i scanned them, i do have a working knowledge of french so i was able to translate them myself the help of a translation line and with the help of scholars who spoke french, there were also documents in german. i don't speak well enough german anyway but i also use translation programs. many of the tapes i listen to arabic speaking in that and i don't speak arabic anyway but i was fortunate to be able to higher graduate students in nyu sothere were so many different dialects that i had

to find a graduate student familiar with palestinian dialects and they came into my office and i played the tape translated it with our rust process because there was somuch noise on the tape but they were incredibly helpful to me . i am grateful i was able to do that but my only reading is only with english so i had to use other resources otherwise. >> one other question that hangs over the readers mind is what you did all day . and re very hazy about it only at the end of the book do you mention the tranquilizer. tell us about that do you have any physical memory of having taken? >> i asked fellow hostages what did we do all day and the answer i get is i can't

remember. the more i did research i have no memory of what we did but in the opening pages of the book i reread your interviews quickly gathered a what we did when we read whatever was on the plane. we talked, we played guessing games, people came around and we celebrated. we sang songs, one of the numbers that summer was peter paul andmary . we sang leaving on a jetplane . it's actually funny. that's a great question. we sang leaving on a jet plane and one of the lines sis don't know when i'll be back again. we sang it laughing, we thought it was so funny and now when i hear the song makes me quite sad because i

remember this 12-year-old girl trying to be happy and wanting her parents not to worry about her. we did all of those things. but utwe didn't have a lot of memory of it . i didn't have a memory of things like how hot it was for cold it was at night and there were no phones so we didn't know if the world even knew about us and the e press was holed up in a hotel in oman and reporters with come to talk to our captors at one point a reporter asked for the crew member asked the reporter we don't know what's going on in the world and the reporter said you are the news, you are the only news but there's no way anybody would have known what was happening to us so we were in

isolated situation that made it feel very unfamiliar day-to-day. >> you had no sense at all. >> i can't let you off without mentioning the harris, have you thought about how differently she felt e? >> elsa harris is a historian columbia university and elsa and i didn't know this about each other . david knew both of us and is the one who informed us, alice had been on one of the other hijacked planes that was foiled in the air and she had been sptraveling coming back from her time in israel. when alice and i came together for coffee to tell each other our stories, she

was aghast that i hadbeen held hostage for a week . i in turn was aghast at what she had gone through because of what happened in that plane was the hijacking was foiled because the captain had put the plane into a nosedive . passengers had been a stopover and hijackers stood up so he took the plane into a nosedive to m.keep them off balance and then they fell and people restrained them but what happened was there was also one guard on the plane who shot one of the hijackers . and it was in the row ahead of alice and her six-year-old daughter. her experience is she thought she was crashing, blood everywhere and alice's daughter i read about this in the book turned to her and said you mean i'm never going to see my daddy again.

i was aghast although alice was sold in 24 hours. one thing alice did was she talked to her daughter about the hijacking when they got home and that's something my parents told me not to bring up. i admire that very muchabout alice that she made sure it wasn't something that was everything is okay now . >> one of the things most ve startling about the book is how no anger there is on any level. i was going to ask but one of the members asked the question was if it were in your power would you grant the hijackers amnesty and if not what would you consider to be a fitting punishment? >> i should also say our hijackers were never apprehended. i'm getting a signal we

need to wrap up. it's not within my power. i repeat again the strategy of hijacking was notfavored by members of the plo so they were a minority . something called stockholm og syndrome which is not a medically recognized situation was named after hostages who were connected to their captors and didn't want to be released, not true about anybody in the desert so we did want to go home but we also empathized with them and when my sister got home she said there was no resentment and i felt that was very interesting. my father said he felt sorry for and empathized with them but not their strategy or their tactics. >> when she's talking about

her memoir, it would qualify as a history memoir so she found her experiences as part of a larger set of events. we combine that with the march of social progress but what did you want the reader to take away? >> in many ways my model for other historians or other writers, they were the people i emulated. many of them were former fellows i have to say. eva chin, her wonderful book that is just out. he has a wonderful book about fatherland. edward paul writing about his ancestors .

and of course there's a book called stage true so all of these were people who were writing at the sametime i was for before . where you want to read your own life as a historian or scholar to understand more than your memories and one of the things my editor said to me is on memoir is just i remember but you want to do something different. here's how it fits in with all of this deep research, other people's memories, captives, captors, all the resources i drew upon to tell only my story but tell it in the truest possible way. >> i don't think we can do better than that. it is for sale by the door. holidays are coming. marthais here to sign for you . thank you for coming.