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- [00:00]
Sophia Donner
This is an I heart podcast.
- [00:02]
Kal Penn
Guaranteed human Amazon Pharmacy presents painful thoughts of course I see my co worker in line at the pharmacy. Can you tell I'm picking up prescription hemorrhoid cream?
- [00:16]
Mimi Nichter
I'm probably standing weird. Why is he smiling?
- [00:19]
Kal Penn
He knows he's going to call me hemorrhoid Lloyd tomorrow. I know it.
- [00:24]
Mimi Nichter
I gotta quit my job. Next time, avoid awkward conversations and get
- [00:29]
Kal Penn
fast free delivery with Amazon Pharmacy.
- [00:31]
Mimi Nichter
Healthcare just got less painful
- [00:36]
Lowe's Announcer
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- [01:00]
Mimi Nichter
Visit your nearby Lowes
- [01:05]
iHeartRadio Announcer
what's up y'?
- [01:05]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
All?
- [01:06]
iHeartRadio Announcer
Summer's got a different tempo. Everything's a little looser, brighter. One plan turns into another. You hear something, you stay a little longer. Next thing you know, you're somewhere you didn't plan to be. It's those in between moments. That's where the ideas hit. Conversations stretch out. Little memories sneak up on you. Sometimes it's just about what's in your hand. That color. That chill. The new Tropical Butterfly Refresher from Starbucks. Guava and Passion Passion fruit flavors with mango pineapple flavored pearls. Yeah, that feels like summer before you even taste it. Funny how one small stop becomes the best part of the day. Start your summer rhythm with Starbucks. Try the new Tropical Butterfly Refresher from Starbucks.
- [01:55]
Kal Penn
Hey everyone, it's Kalpen. I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Hearsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:23]
iHeartRadio Announcer
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
- [02:29]
Mimi Nichter
My parents do not ask any questions about my time in Jordan. Maybe they think they understand what happened from reading the New York Times, listening to Walter Cronkite on the CBS Nightly News, and receiving occasional updates from the State Department and the airlines. Maybe they just want me to rest. Or maybe they don't know how to talk to me about such a delicate topic. We've never discussed anything real we laugh and make light of most matters, even serious ones, keeping pain unspoken and as far as possible from where we sit. We can't joke about the hijacking, so we avoid it.
- [03:11]
Dani Shapiro
That's Mimi Nichter, cultural anthropologist, professor, emerita at University of Arizona's School of Anthropology and author of four books, most recently her first memoir, A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma and and Resilience. Mimi's is a story of a terrifying incident that becomes a secret in its aftermath, and the way a legacy of keeping secrets within a family can form a pattern it takes a lifetime to break. I'm Dani Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
- [04:04]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
Mimi, tell me about the landscape of your childhood in 1950s, 60s Brooklyn.
- [04:11]
Mimi Nichter
Okay. Well, I would say the landscape, it was black and white, and yet the reality is that it was very gray. I'm talking about the internal landscape here. From the time I was about 7, family secrets started early. My mother instructed my older sister and me that if anyone asked how my brother was doing, we should always say he was fine. Now, my brother was eight years older than me, so by the time he was 15, he often stayed in his room when people visited, and he didn't go to see us when we went to see family members. And I didn't really feel comfortable having friends over because of how he sort of slumped on the sofa in his sleeveless undershirt. He would stare into space and laugh to himself. And I didn't understand what was wrong with him. I was quite young, but I knew something was wrong. And, you know, at night I would lay in bed reading a book, my way of escaping the household. And I would hear him through the very thin wall that my room shared with the bathroom, sort of mumbling speech and talking and whispering. And he had this. I figured he had an imaginary audience in there with him. And I'd hear him, like, hissing, like he was talking to snakes. And I was an imaginative little girl, and I couldn't get his sounds out of my head. And yet it scared me that whatever was wrong with him might be waiting for me. That something ran in our family. And I. I never asked my parents, though, why. He hardly smiled and. But he did laugh, and he laughed when nobody was there. And why he. He talked about things that were never going to happen, like swimming the English Channel, for example. I just knew many things were not
- [06:13]
Dani Shapiro
to be talked about.
- [06:15]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
Was he in the world that you and your family lived in in Brooklyn? In your neighborhood, your community, extended family, this was never talked. Did he go to school?
- [06:28]
Mimi Nichter
Yes. I grew up in a religious Jewish family, and he went to a yeshiva with my sister. She was two years younger than he was. And yes, he went to school. And by the time he was 13, the principal told my parents that they should take him to a doctor because something was a little. Was off with him. So he had an early onset schizophrenia. And so he lived in the house. I mean, he was okay until he was maybe 12.
- [07:01]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
Did you have that language? Early onset schizophrenia? Was that.
- [07:05]
Dani Shapiro
Were those words you ever heard?
- [07:07]
Mimi Nichter
No, he was not diagnosed because my parents. This was a family secret. And we, my mother and father both felt that they didn't want to talk about it, and they thought actually he might outgrow it. It was some kind of a phase. Mental health was not something that was. I think it was partly. My brother was supposed to be a doctor. That's what my father wanted. And he was very angry. So there was anger in the household for my father when he was home.
- [07:40]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
Tell me a little bit more about sort of the shape of your family. And I'm also curious. Was this Orthodox community in Brooklyn, that kind of area where the whole kind of culture and community is observant?
- [07:53]
Mimi Nichter
I grew up in Flatbush, and there were two kinds of communities joined to live side by side. They are both Italian Catholics and Jews. And I think our family life and many of the Jewish families in our neighborhood revolved around the people we knew from temple. My mother decided that I should go to a. An Orthodox yeshiva because she wanted me to skip first grade. So I did that. And then that was another point, I think that was uncomfortable for me because I went to a school where the girls and boys were from a much more religious background than I was. And so I knew pretty early on that I really didn't fit there. And so even then, if somebody asked me sort of what synagogue was my family belonged to, I couldn't answer because it was not the right synagogue. That would be a sure giveaway that I didn't fit on the exterior. I would say we looking in from the outside, we looked like a happy family. That's not what was going on on the inside. I really didn't know my father very well. My father had a business in Philadelphia, and he would leave Sunday night and walk to the subway station, go into Manhattan and take the train to Philly, where he lived in a rooming house kind of situation. And he'd come home on Friday before Shabbos, and when he was home, he laid around on the couch napping, usually with the newspaper, New York Times covering him. And he was a very religious man. He prayed every day, went to the synagogue. And had he lived in Brooklyn all the time, I'm sure he would have been very active in the temple itself, in some kind of position there. But he wasn't. He didn't have that kind of life. He was busy working. And my mother, I never knew what she did actually, but I knew she had a desk and she had files. So I thought it was important. And those were times when I wasn't able to disturb her. I think what really characterized my mother, she was outgoing and friendly, liked to talk to people. But because she was also very ashamed of Joel, she couldn't have a normal life. She couldn't bring people into the home spontaneously. There was something in her life that she couldn't talk about that she always had to cover up. And I think at that time, during the 50s and 60s, schizophrenia was often blame on the mother's parenting style, her rejection, specifically her rejection of her child during infancy and childhood. And so I think she carried that with her silently. My mother loved music. She had gone to Juilliard and had to drop out to go to work. All her life, music was probably the most important thing to her. Saturdays, she would cocoon herself in her bedroom for the three hours of the Metropolitan Opera. And even when I was really little, like five years old, I wasn't allowed to disturb her. That was just the rule. And sometimes I would go and look through the keyhole of her room and see what she was doing. And she looked like she might be sleeping, but I knew she wasn't sleeping. She was just enjoying this three hour opera. And I think she got a lot of emotional pleasure from that that she couldn't express.
- [11:53]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
So you left the yeshiva and went to a high school in Brooklyn.
- [12:00]
Mimi Nichter
By eighth grade, I was just done. I was done with the whole. The mismatch between what I felt when I was outside of the house and what I felt inside the house. And I mean, I didn't have words for it, but I told my parents I wanted to go to a public high school. And they said, okay. And I think once I got there, it was interesting because even though they were religious themselves, they realized that they had taught us, they had given us a sense of Jewish culture, and now we had a choice. And I think once I got to high school, I would go do things on Saturday at football games and things like that. And temple was kind of to meet boys. So I had already started, I think, at an early age, kind of looking questioning. And oddly enough, I think the. What I took away from the yeshiva from my early age was this idea of questioning. Because we had this very intense sort of Hebrew Talmudic studies. And that kind of thought, that kind of argumentative and deep thinking about things like that, that fascinated me.
- [13:20]
Dani Shapiro
For college, Mimi goes to George Washington University. Close enough to home to be an acceptable choice to her parents. And far enough away that she can reinvent herself, tell a new story in which she's free of the burden of keeping a secret. In fact, she can just get rid of the secret entirely by telling a new story, One in which she doesn't have a mentally ill bro, in which she doesn't have a brother at all.
- [13:48]
Mimi Nichter
I could hide him completely. And so when any new friends asked me, well, how many siblings did you have? I would say one.
- [13:55]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
What did that feel like? Was it fine? Did you feel guilty?
- [13:59]
Mimi Nichter
I didn't feel guilty about it because I had been trained to not talk about him. I had been trained to hide him. I guess I was a very good learner, I would have to say, looking back, because I had really embodied that to hide what wasn't normal. And that's exactly what I did. And so, no, it's a very interesting question. I'd have to say, from an early age, I knew how to compartmentalize. In my junior year, I had this itching to travel. The first two summers, I had come home and worked in New York City. And after my sophomore year in college, I told my parents that I wanted to do a semester abroad. And I went to London. And then from London, we took a weekend and flew to Paris. And it was just very exciting to be in another country. So my travel bug was really growing. And when I came back from London after Christmas time for second semester, I wanted to go away again. And I knew that my parents would really want me to go to Israel. And I wanted to go to Israel because we thought of Israel at that time as a socialist, very progressive country. I knew about the kibbutz. It was the 60s, and a kibbutz seemed like a very communal and exciting kind of life because both genders worked. I liked the idea of it. And so my parents agreed to send me. And they. Of course, the reason that they agreed was because they thought going to Israel would bring me back into the Jewish fold. I knew it wouldn't do that. I was seeing it as a new travel location. But nonetheless, I did want to go there.
- [15:50]
Dani Shapiro
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. It's 1970. Mimi is 20, living on a kibbutz in Israel, surrounded by young travelers from all over the world. She hitchhikes across the country, takes a side trip to Greece and Rhodes, and tastes a kind of freedom she's never known before. When it's time to come home, she almost misses her flight.
- [16:34]
Mimi Nichter
I'm ready to go home. I'm wearing my green mini dress. I'm the last person to board the plane, almost miss it, get put in first class. I'm thrilled, and I've had a great summer. And now I'm anxious to get home and anxious to get back to my senior year in college. And after a couple of hours of flying, we stopped in Frankfurt for refueling. And as we flew over Brussels, a few minutes, 20 minutes later, the pilot said, eight hours to New York. And then, just then, a man and woman came running down the aisle. And somebody screamed, he has a gun. She has a grenade. And by that time, I was in economy class, and I was sitting on an aisle seat so I could see them. I had no idea where they were going or what they were doing. And they kicked the door of the cockpit, and the pilot opened the door, and they rushed themselves in there. And they made an announcement shortly afterwards that this was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and we shouldn't be afraid. They were taking us to a friendly country. And just then, we felt the plane turn in the air, so much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle, and we didn't know where we were going. I had no idea what was going on. In 1970, this kind of hijacking from a plane like this wasn't happening. There had been hijackings before, but mostly from Miami to Cuba, and those were for money. They wanted ransom money or something like that. So in the beginning, I thought, oh, this is just going to be like a big inconvenience. I'm going to get back to New York late, and that's just going to ruin my plans. It sounds so stupid today. Now, I would say, though, that the older people, some of the very orthodox people on the plane, the dual citizens, dual Israeli American citizens, Holocaust survivors, because this plane was coming from Tel Aviv, they knew. They were worried. So it wasn't just me. I think there was a lot of young people on board, too. It was September 6th, so that was Labor Day weekend that year. And everyone, big families were on the plane. And so there were Some people who understood, but I wasn't one of them. And we flew for another six hours. And they got on the loudspeaker again. We hadn't heard from them for all this time. And then they said, we're taking you to a friendly country. Jordan will be landing soon. We will not harm you. So then the pilot was doing a lot of circling, and my seatmate, Bob was his name, looked out the window and he just said, I don't see anything down there. There's no terminal, there's no lights. It's just like desert. It was just like the sunset when we were landing. So there was still light enough to see. He said, there's no Runway. There's some drums, like, big drums with, like, torches in them. And the pilot, I think, kept circling because he didn't know if he could bring the plane down on the sand. The Pydeckers, they had a gun with them and the grenade, and they. They were forcing him to bring the plane down there. And the man who was sitting at the window didn't speak English, and he had been sleeping the whole time. And he suddenly woke up and he turned to us and he said, new York, because he felt the plane sort of stop. And we just laughed. It was very good to have a moment of laughter amidst this. And it wasn't until that moment when I looked out the window and I saw what was there. And what was there was a group of very, very, I don't know, hundred men in tackies with guns over there, shoulder. That's when I thought, oh, what is this? And what's going to happen next? That was when it began to sink in so slowly for me.
- [20:58]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
You also, you describe a truly terrifying moment in which this was not the only jet that was hijacked. And a second jet is landing and comes very, very close to hitting the jet that you all are on.
- [21:18]
Mimi Nichter
Yes.
- [21:19]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
It felt to me like that was the first moment of terror. Like, visceral. Oh, we could have died. And also now there's this other jet, like, wtf?
- [21:31]
Mimi Nichter
I couldn't actually see that close. I was on the other side of the plane. And so I heard everyone talking and, like, screaming and, like, sort of turned. And I began to realize that this was a lot more serious. What really, I think, took me into reality was slightly after that the second plane landed when somebody came on the plane, a woman without a gun, speak in English, and she explained again that they were from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and that they were going to hand out landing cards which seemed kind of normal. And they would be collecting them and our passports. And in a short time they handed out the cards. And then the couple across the aisle from me who were ultra Orthodox, she took out four passports, two for her and two for her, for her husband. One was American, one was Israeli. Then she took out the nail clippers and she and her husband began to clip the pages of the Israeli passport up. They stuffed the little pieces into a throw up bag that they had on planes then and shoved it in between the seats. But the pictures and the identification page, they swallowed. And that's when I turned to my seatmate Bob again and whispered, did you see that? Why did they do that? And he explained to me, also whispering, that if they found out that they were also Israelis, we don't know what would happen to them. We didn't know that at the time, but now I know that they actually hijacked four planes at the same time, all flying over Europe. Two of them came to where we were, which is called Dawson's Field, a very remote area of Jordan, middle of the desert. And then the other planes, one was an El Al plane, and they already had marshals, air marshals there. And one of the hijackers was killed on the plane, and the other one was taken in custody when they landed in London. And another plane was redirected to Cairo. And they told the pilots that the plane would blow up. And so they just had enough time. As soon as they landed in Cairo, the people were able to evacuate through the chutes just moments before the plane was blown up. During the week that we were there, on the third day, they hijacked a third plane. And they did that because the demands that they had, which were for the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel jails and in jails in Europe, they had targeted those countries where they were holding their prisoners. They wired the planes that we were sitting on and they brought the third plane down because their demands had not been met by foreign countries, particularly by the United States. They wanted us to put the pressure on Israel to release these people who were in their jails. And when that didn't happen, they threatened to blow us up inside the plane and they also hijacked the third plane.
- [24:49]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
Were you age 20, aware of the fact that the plane was wired at that point?
- [24:59]
Mimi Nichter
Yes, because there were people on the plane who had been in the army, Americans, and they could see what they were doing. And occasionally we were taken off the plane so they could go through the plane and see what was there. And that's why I was kept for much longer than most other people, because when they went through the overhead bins, they found a lot of things to incriminate people. And one of the things they found for me was an Israeli army shirt that had been given to me as a gull and wick present from a friend who had just gotten out of the army. You know, we had no idea they'd be going through our luggage. Then they took us off one day and they went through the other things that were in our actual luggage, checked in luggage. So they took the things, many things, and found many things. And it was based on that that they decided who they should keep.
- [25:52]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
And you were very much somebody that they decided that they wanted to keep.
- [25:57]
Mimi Nichter
I was. And they interrogated me twice at gunpoint, as well as a few other young people who they decided to keep because of also incriminating evidence. They had things from Israel.
- [26:11]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
So they decided that you were Israeli, that you were an Israeli citizen, and also that you had been in the army.
- [26:19]
Mimi Nichter
Yes.
- [26:20]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
And then later that you were married to an Israeli soldier and you were both in the army.
- [26:26]
Mimi Nichter
Yes. That was the second interrogation. After I denied everything during the first interrogation, but was so scared. I mean, being interrogated at gunpoint, the only thing I could think was, well, they haven't killed anybody yet, so maybe they won't kill me. And then during the second interrogation, which was a day or two later, that's when they started asking me about my husband, where was I? Where did we fight in the west bank and our Golan Heights? And they started asking me these very specific questions. I was like, no, no. They viewed me as something I was absolutely not. I was a 20 year old myself, anti imperialist, anti Vietnam war protester against the American government. And yet to them I was a representative not only as an Israeli soldier, but also an American. They thought I was Israeli, but also American. So I felt very othered. There was no way that they could understand what I was saying or really listen. They just couldn't listen to me.
- [27:32]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
How did you keep yourself remotely in one piece during that period of time? This went on ultimately for you for 21 days?
- [27:43]
Mimi Nichter
Yes, it did. I focused on other things. I was used to, like almost disassociating. It wasn't that I could really disassociate from that because we were all on the plane for six days without running water, electricity, no flushing toilets. In the beginning it was a full plane of passengers with many young children on board. So it was really very, very difficult. But we and When I say we, myself and another woman got together to help pass the time for the children. And we began. What was it like, a summer camp. We called it a summer camp. And one of the women who joined us was also very good with singing. And we sang instead of leaving on a jet plane, which was a popular song at the time, John Denver. We sung Living on a jet Plane and just things like that. And some of the kids had games like Mad Libs. We had pack of cards. And so we would just play with those kids and just pass a little bit of time that way until the Palestinians would tell us not to be there anymore. And when we started laughing, then they didn't want us to spend too much time doing that. We tried to entertain others. And of course, later on, I think myself and the other four women who were held with me, out of the 31 who were held when everyone else was released, we engaged in gendered work there, too. We cooked because they would just give us some food. And we were very happy to be able to cook something because we had very little food when we were on the plane. And now we didn't have much more, but we did have something so we could do that. We also engaged in gallows humor when it got really bad.
- [29:33]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
So there are these waves of passengers being either taken away or what appeared to be released were no longer on the plane until it was U5. Why was it U5?
- [29:47]
Mimi Nichter
Basically, they suspected of being Israeli soldiers. Actually, one of the women was originally from Sudan, Sudanese Jew, and she spoke fluent Arabic. And so they thought she was a spy. So that's why they held us.
- [30:10]
Dani Shapiro
Another acute, unfathomable moment. Mimi is no longer on the plane. She is herded onto the tarmac and then onto an old bus. Through the windows, she can see the three empty jets lined up in the distance. One of the members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine issues a strange Open your mouths and block your ears because it'll go better that way. A moment later, she understands why. One by one, the planes explode, fire blooming into the sky, metal collapsing in on itself. In a landscape already saturated with fear, this becomes a new kind of rupture.
- [30:56]
Mimi Nichter
That was a very surreal moment to watch three jets blown up and to see the pieces just flying into the air. You know, the seats and the windows and just hurtling through the sky and the black smoke that comes almost immediately from the explosion of these massive jets. And at the same time, I'm watching this, and the sound is so loud and booming and this earth is shaking. And I'm afraid that this small old bus that we're sitting in is going to somehow flip over or that a piece of the planes that are being blown up is going to fly right into our bus or break the windows of the bus, hit us, or will catch fire also, because we were that close to it and we couldn't really block the sound. And my eyes were burning. I was shaking. The bus was shaking. And at the same time, I was relieved. I was so relieved that I wasn't on the plane. And yet I didn't understand. Right after this happened, as soon as it became more ash, some of the Palestinians jumped on top of one of the. Of the engines that was still intact. Just a small piece of the three planes was intact, and they jumped on top, and they were holding their guns and their hands up high and cheering. And I watched this, and I. It was almost like watching children cheering at a game. They were so proud of themselves for what they had done. And I kind of understood their happiness. But of course, my happiness was about something else. My happiness was about was my relief at not having been blown up and how close we had come in that moment to being dead. And I didn't know it was coming next, which got us even closer to almost being dead. But that was such a profound moment. It's really seared in my mind. Even though I never talked about this, what happened, I could always see it in my mind, and I never told anybody about it. It was just an image. It didn't even have words. It was just that black smoke rising up. And we could see it as we left the desert and started, you know, making our way towards the city and along some of the path, some of the road. When we finally reached a road, there were people, Palestinian refugees, on either side of the road. They had seen this black smoke for miles and miles, and they knew what the Popular Front, the most radical of the Palestinian groups at that time, what they had done. And they were cheering, they were so excited because it was such a strength, and they were victorious over the Western imperialists. And we were just sitting there trying to hide, because even though the buses were moving, still, it was so frightening.
- [34:02]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
And what was it that happened next that brought you even closer to death than that?
- [34:09]
Mimi Nichter
Then we learned we were really their hostages. And we were a small group of hostages. We were taken to a small apartment in Amman. So eventually there were 31 people with us. And the first day or two were actually wonderful because we could sleep now, laying down, even though there was nothing on the floor, but just to be able to sleep horizontally, but rather than vertically. We've been sitting on a plane for six days. We could walk a little bit, and there was water there. Not a shower or anything like that, but there was a tap with water. We could. We asked them for some things like toothbrushes and toothpaste. And they gave us some. And we were able to brush our teeth. We hadn't been able to do that. We were able to wash our hands. And we could make a cup of tea if we wanted to. But, of course, there was cholera in the region. So we had to be very careful about boiling our water and things like that. And that just lasted for two days. And then there was a war that broke out between the Palestinians and King Hussein and his army, the army of Jordan. Because he didn't want this going on. There were more Palestinians in Jordan at the time than Jordanians. He didn't want to be seen like this in the world. To have these terrorists taking planes and blowing them up and all this, take hostages. And so he wanted to get rid of them. And so a civil war broke out in Amman. And there was bombing. And we could hear. Because we didn't want to go near the windows. We didn't want anybody to see us. We could hear explosions. We could hear the whistling of bombs. Well, one of the guys that we were held with was a soldier, American soldier. And he told us where to hide, where to go to lie down, to crouch down in case a bomb hit the house. And one day, the house next door was blown up. And we were so close to our death. Even the person who was collecting water for us. Because immediately when the war broke out, there was no water anymore. And someone had to go and get us water. Just a little bit of water. Like one cup a day. We had at that point, or not even that much. He went to get us water, and he never came back. And we asked what happened to him. And we found out he died along the way. Got blown up. And so this death was all around us. And it was just a miracle that death was so close to us that they released us. Because if they lost us, then they lost everything.
- [36:42]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
So ultimately, that was the reason for your release?
- [36:45]
Mimi Nichter
Yes, because they never got what they wanted. Right. They didn't get the people released from the prisons.
- [36:54]
Dani Shapiro
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. After 21 days, Mimi and her fellow hostages are finally heading home. They're flown to Cyprus, then Rome, where they meet with President Nixon. Then New York, where She's reunited with her parents and sister at jfk. It's an emotional reunion, of course, but as soon as the family returns home, it's clear that the entire ordeal is now meant to be in the rearview mirror. Rosh Hashanah is the next day, and Mimi can't imagine going to synagogue, being in public, facing all the questions about what she's been through. When her mother returns from synagogue, she asks Mimi if she's feeling better now, as if being held hostage for three weeks might be like a head cold she's gotten over. But this is nothing new. After all, whenever Mimi's mom has called her in college, instead of saying hello, when Mimi answers, she has always said, is everything under control?
- [38:12]
Mimi Nichter
When I first came home, my mother, she wanted to talk about it, and my father didn't either. I mean, they didn't have the. They didn't know what questions to ask. And very much there was an idea that when you came home, you just moved forward. There was no PTSD concept yet. That didn't happen until the 80s. And when soldiers came home from war, they just went home and they were supposed to adjust. And like that, I was supposed to adjust also. And I think there was this other overlay of us being a very hidden family, you know, master of secrets. And so I should just, you know, kind of put on a strong face that was important, appear that everything was under control, and go about adjusting to life.
- [39:06]
Dani Shapiro
Now her mother has a solution. Well, sort of a quick jaunt might be just the thing. A getaway to the sunny Caribbean, a clean slate, an escape.
- [39:18]
Mimi Nichter
My mother came into my room, probably on the second day I was home. I'd be right after Rosh Hashanah. She was thinking about it that she might take me to the Virgin Islands, because that was a place where I could relax before I went back to college. And I. I was very reluctant that I tried to be a good daughter and respectful of her. And I thought she also needs a break because she's been the one managing this and really dealing with this trauma herself of almost losing her daughter. And so I said, yeah, okay, we go for a long weekend. And unfortunately, when we got there, there was a hurricane after a day. And I was right back where I was. Kind of now it was the weather that was out of control. And after a day of being in the water and truly enjoying it, I had to stay inside. And when I got to the airport, I realized I was out of my mind to be at an airport so close in time to what had just happened to me. But I thought it could be a moment of closeness when I could tell my mother what I felt and what had happened and my fear, But I couldn't. You really have a sense of what you could talk to people about and what you can't. And so we left pretty quickly. After the storm finished in, the airport opened up again. And then as soon as I got back to New York, as soon as I could, I went back to college. And that was really tough because my friends were anti war activists, and they thought that my experience, which they had sort of been following a little bit in the newspaper and things like that. I don't know how much they knew, but they knew that I'd been held by Palestinian terrorists. And they just thought that was kind of far out. And they really romanticized it. And so these were radical people that I was with. And so almost like, by extension, I was now really cool. And I was really overcome with this. How can I deal with this naive view that's such a romantic and inaccurate view of what had actually occurred to me? How could I possibly explain the fear? And actually, I'd already compartmentalized it because I hadn't talked to my parents about it. And it was very difficult for me when I came back to college. But in a sense, my compartmentalization skills came in handy because I was able to sort of talk about it or somehow avert death, hiding from people. So now I was literally hiding.
- [42:03]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
So was that part of the coping mechanism, that feeling of basically being told, wow, what happened to you is a really cool story, and it being sort of objectifying in a certain way?
- [42:14]
Mimi Nichter
Absolutely. It is objectifying. It was something that was so not cool in any way. It was not a story. It was a terrifying story. And maybe my friends weren't old enough. And, you know, the only person who really took me in was Mark. He happens to be my husband now, but he really didn't ask me very much about it. And he just offered me food because I'd lost so much weight, like 25 pounds, during that experience. And during that time, I was sort of reorienting myself. I mean, I really couldn't concentrate in classes.
- [42:56]
Dani Shapiro
But Mimi does get through with the excellent coping skills that have helped her all along. She and Mark eventually marry and have two boys. She earns a doctorate, advances in her career, becomes a professor, speaker, author. And during this whole span of years, she doesn't speak of the hijacking. She pushes it away. And many people close to her know nothing about it. But we know what Happens when secrets are buried. As a guest on this podcast said several seasons back, when you bury a secret, you bury it alive.
- [43:32]
Mimi Nichter
For many years, how I dealt with this was I put it inside and I think the image of a box is a strong one for me because eventually when I decided to talk about it, I did find a box and I opened it. But I think this was at least 25 years or more after my hijacking. And occasionally, if there was something big happen in the world, I would say something like, oh, I was once a hijack. And people would get so interested that I put it back and say, oh, yeah, I was held for a while. It was clear that I didn't want to talk about it. But one time I got a phone call. I was in the middle of research project in the US and I got a phone call from a former high school classmate who is Now a researcher, PhD researcher and writing a book on international terrorism. And he had seen my name in some of the, you know, literature that he was reading as a passenger. And he called me and wanted to interview me. And I just said, well, I don't. I have to think about it. I'll let you know. And I really didn't think I could do it. At that moment, I was in my office and I was sitting around with my co researchers and other anthropologists. We were doing a very big study with adolescent girls, talking about body image and dieting. And I felt like as I'm thinking about it, I thought, oh, this guy just wants to interview me. And my whole career is about interviewing people and asking them at that point about girls, about body image. I mean, nothing could be more kind of well embodied is one word, but just something that was so fraught and so many people have problems with their body and how they feel about themselves. And yet here I was, a researcher about to say no to this guy, and I realized I better do this interview. So he flew out and we had an interview. And then afterwards, I really suffered when the story came out, even though he knew a lot about it already. And it wasn't so much about my personal sort of fright, but it was more about getting the facts right. For him, it was very difficult. I'd have a headache, I'd feel sick, I'd feel so drained and saddened. And so that's how I really stopped talking about it even more. And then there was also. This is even before this had happened. A few years after the hijacking, I joined a law case. And in that law case, they really laughed at Some of the things that had happened to me. Oh, you lost £25. Any woman in America would be happy to lose that weight. And, you know, you thought you. You didn't get your period for a long time after this hijacking, but, you know, now you're pregnant, so that's not a problem. And I was so demeaned by it and so upset by some gendered measures. I was now just fine. I wasn't finished. And I realized that these seeds of trauma were inside me. And given the right sort of weather and the right kind of watering, the right kind of situation could just grow and be big again. And so I had to kind of put them aside. These sort of little things that happened through my life made me realize I had to keep this sort of under wraps. And finally, I was in a yoga intensive, and I'd been practicing every day for a couple of months. And one day, in a very intense pose, camel pose, where you're very wide open, holding onto your heels from a kind of kneeling position, something flew out of my body and flew out of my stomach area. And afterwards, it was one of those moments where like a. Did that happen? What just happened? But something happened. And right after the class, I knew it was from my hijacking.
- [47:25]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
You described it as a. Like a blue ball of light.
- [47:28]
Mimi Nichter
Yes, it was a blue ball of light that came flying out of my body. And by this time, I had spent years working in India and in the Philippines, and I had seen a lot of healers working on people's bodies with their hands and taking out things from people's bodies, or so they said. So this idea of something emerging from the body and things inside the body that can cause unhealed trauma lodged in the body was not something that was really that foreign for me. And when this happened right afterwards, I just felt so much lighter, and I just knew that it was from my hijacking this actually happened. When I went home, I realized that that was the day that I had gotten released from the hijacking, that I
- [48:15]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
had been brought home, that it was an anniversary of that day.
- [48:18]
Mimi Nichter
Yeah. And then it was still a while before I had the wherewithal to actually start writing about it.
- [48:26]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
The body knows. I mean, the body even knows dates.
- [48:29]
Mimi Nichter
Yes.
- [48:30]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
You also write about speaking with one of your yoga teachers about this experience with this ball of energy that, like, just emerges and it's as real to you as anything that you've ever seen. And she says that we. We human beings need to feel the full range of our feelings. And then she says, by not giving voice to your feelings, you ignored the wisdom of the body. Grief is woven into the fabric of our lives. We cannot hide from it. And I just thought that was beautiful and true and wise and profound, and really feels like that was the moment after which a kind of deeper healing was possible for you.
- [49:17]
Mimi Nichter
Yes, it really was. Because I think until then, I was, in some way, I had already opened up to the experience, and it was beginning to sort of come out. It had already burst out, but now it was a long time to be able to write it, but didn't really understand the experience. And for a long time, I thought maybe it had something to do with those poses. And I wanted to know more about how yoga affected the body. And what she said was so profound, as you said, because it just made it much bigger. And it really brought it back to all the feelings that I couldn't have. And I couldn't have them because, you know, I was really socialized into this silence and not being able to express feelings, not being able to ask questions and not being able to be. Be real and just about the whole range of things. And I think I just carry that really to an extreme. I was ready to hear what she said when she told me, I was ready to hear it. And I think that's always something important when you hear wisdom. You have to be ready to accept it.
- [50:37]
Dani Shapiro
Mimi soon accepts something else, an invitation. It's during the pandemic, another time rife with fear and uncertainty, when Mimi is contacted by one of the former hostages. It's the 50th anniversary of the hijacking, and there's going to be a gathering over Zoom.
- [50:57]
Mimi Nichter
That was the first time I saw these people in so many years. I saw that there was such a range of ways that this impacted people. It was only the people who were children at the time who I felt may have walked away unscathed, but yet they saw something that happened to their parents. But for most of us who are the people who are held in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, it was just a range of things that happened that we carried. But we all carried the trauma in different ways. Some people never flew again. Some people like myself, didn't talk about it. They just put it aside. Some people moved to Israel because they felt they had to. This was their calling. Other people couldn't get off their couch for months. So it was really fascinating for me to see how each of us is impacted by trauma in a very different way, but we still all carried it.
- [51:58]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
You Know, it makes me think about something I've thought about a lot, which is that it's not so much what happens to us as when it happens. And when it comes to secrets. It's not so much the secrets that are kept, but when they're revealed. And it struck me earlier in our conversation when you were talking about the Holocaust survivors and the older people on the plane, like they knew, they had the knowledge that bad things could happen in their bones. They carried that knowledge. And coming full circle, talking about the people who were very small children on a flight, who very well may not have carried, you know, the imprint, or at least sort of the conscious imprint of the danger that they were in. But as you said, then they grow up with parents who did fully have that imprint.
- [52:52]
Mimi Nichter
Yeah.
- [52:53]
Interviewer (possibly Dani Shapiro)
So you and Mark have been married for a long time. You have. You have two grown sons. You've written this book, and it's come out. And when your parents died, you inherit the care of Joel. So where does all this, if you can somehow tie this together, kind of sit with you in your life now? Where do you hold all of that?
- [53:20]
Mimi Nichter
Well, that's a big question, isn't it? First, I'll answer the part about my brother. Well, he has passed. But when my parents passed, my sister and I became his caretakers. And I think we. By that time, we realized he was a person living with a disability and we loved him. And I just. I felt the pain. And even though he's not here now, I still feel that pain of what his life or our life have been. If we didn't have to make him a secret, we didn't have to be ashamed of him. I mean, really, why did we have to be ashamed of him? Why couldn't we just have loved him and realized what he was living through himself? I think the world is in a better place now in terms of mental health. But I feel like for him, I carried the secret. He had to be a secret and ashamed from my mother's whole life, my father's whole life, they never spoke of his mental illness. They were definitely in the closet about him. It was very, very painful. And I think I've realized that. What a difficult position that is. And how many people like myself were socialized, particularly women, to speak about things that weren't, quote, unquote, normal and how the world has changed and how we need to change and how we need to talk about things, because unhealed trauma can manifest in all sorts of ways. And I think going back to what we were discussing in terms of the range of emotions that I limited myself with feeling joy. You know that if you have allowed yourself to feel pain and sadness, of trauma, of secrets, your range of emotions is very limited. And that's not the way we want to move through the world.
- [55:27]
Dani Shapiro
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartradio. Molly Zakur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is 1-888-SECRET-0. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram nywriter. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir, Inheritance.
- [56:18]
iHeartRadio Announcer
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- [56:20]
Mimi Nichter
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
- [56:23]
Grainger Announcer
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- [56:26]
Kal Penn
Hey everyone, it's Kal Penn. I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast Hearsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcast.
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Sophia Donner
This is Sophia Donner from OK Storytime this Summer. Find your next obsession on Prime Video and listen. We're not saying you need another obsession, but there could be a lot worse ones. Steamy romance, addictive love stories, and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice, so why not watch them a third time off campus? L the Love Hypothesis and more Slow Burns Second Chances Chemistry you can feel through the screen and it makes you wish you were actually in that movie. We've got binge worthy series can't miss movies perfect for when you're ignoring your own problems or procrastinating as one does. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime.
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Grainger Announcer
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Dietz and Watson Announcer
Hey did you know Dietzen Watson has been family owned for over 85 years? To us, that means it's more than a business. It's personal. We make our premium meats and cheeses the right way, even if it's slower or inconvenient or hard, because that's how you get the highest quality. If it's not good enough for our family, it's not good enough for yours. And while others cut corners, we keep raising the bar. So if you see the Dietz and Watson name, you'll know every slice has my family's seal of approval. Dietz and Watson. It's a family thing. Since 1939.
- [58:31]
Sophia Donner
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.