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War and Lack of Inner Peace Mussa Shimrich was born in Damascus and spent his childhood there. In 1963, at the age of 11, he moved with his family to Israel, settling in Holon. But he never lost his feel for Arabic, which to this day, Shimrich says, he reads and writes better than Hebrew. Because of his language skills, Shimrich was singled out in the 10th grade to transfer to a military boarding school in Kfar Sava. He was being prepared for a career in military intelligence and felt that he had found his calling. In the IDF Shimrich was posted primarily on the Golan Heights, monitoring the Syrian army. Shimrich today doesn’t use the name Mussa; all know him as Moshe. In fact, he hasn’t been called Mussa since he left Syria with his family. Except, that is, for one interlude of eight months when he returned to the country of his birth — most unwillingly. Along with 64 other soldiers captured on the Golan Heights in the tense early days of the Yom Kippur War, Shimrich was taken back to Syria as a prisoner of war, to spend eight months in Al-Mazeh prison outside Damascus. Because of his Arabic, Mussa, as both his interrogators and fellow captives called him, became the spokesman for the group, negotiating with their captors for more food, some water, a towel to clean a soldier’s suppurating wounds. Despite his greater contact with them, or perhaps because of it, the Syrians hated Shimrich with a special vengeance. As an intelligence officer, he was singled out for extra beatings, solitary confinement, and tortures beyond the ordinary allotment meted out to all the prisoners. Over the course of eight months in the Syrian jail, Shimrich lost nearly 35 kg. And this despite the fact that he didn’t tell them he was originally Syrian, for which his captors might have wreaked even greater revenge on him or on his remaining family in Damascus; instead he concocted a story of a childhood in Lebanon. Shimrich lives today in a neighborhood the streets of which are named for David Elazar and Moshe Dayan, the chief of staff and defense minister, respectively, on whose watch Israel was taken by surprise in 1973. At 46, Shimrich is a portly man who suffers from severe diabetes. Other of his ailments are less visible. Like many of the Yom Kippur War POWs, Shimrich’s ordeal left him with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a grab bag of physical and emotional disorders. For the last 10 years he has been unable to sleep more than two hours a night; anxious and restless, his body simply tenses up. During the day his fatigue takes hold and he can not concentrate or work. Even before that, Shimrich had difficulty holding a job, a hardship common to former POWs; he has passed through 19 work places in the last 25 years. Now, talk of peace with Syria is in the air again. Just let me into a room with Syrian President Hafez Assad, says Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and we’ll come out quickly with an agreement. Despite his experiences, Shimrich believes it is probably possible to reach peace with Syria but — given the special vehemence of Syrian hatred for Jews and Israel — he recommends phasing any territorial transfers over at least a decade, in case the process doesn’t take hold. If there is peace, Shimrich would eagerly return to Damascus to search out his roots. It is, in fact, one of his life’s ambitions. ’One of the nicest things of my life would be to go back,’ he says, ’but I don’t know if I’ll live to see the day.’ The physical after-effects of Shimrich’s captivity are so common among former POWs that the national support group they formed a year ago was named ’Awake at Night.’ The group has some 350-400 members from all of Israel’s wars. The majority, some 250, were taken prisoner in the Yom Kippur War. The Jerusalem chapter of the group meets every few weeks; other chapters are being formed now in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and points south. Only within the group have former POWs finally been able to discuss and deal with their experiences, according to Uri Ehrenfeld, coordinator of the Jerusalem chapter. The only reason he agreed to be interviewed, Ehrenfeld says, is to publicize the group’s activities to those in need of its services. ’It’s like coming out of the closet to expose yourself,’ says Ehrenfeld, 45, who spent 21Ś2 months as a POW in Egypt. ’People really feel they can open up inside the group.’ Only in recent years have the army and Defense Ministry recognized Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a real psychological and physiological impairment, and begun to offer the POWs appropriate treatment. Yet it remains uncomfortable for them to disclose their experiences, or their problems, to society at large, Ehrenfeld says. ’Israeli society doesn’t like failure, only stories of heroism,’ he says. ’We live on the myth of Masada and King David to this day. As soon as you have to deal with things that are less pretty they push it under the carpet immediately.’ Each year around Yom Kippur, the media gets interested in the story; sometimes the television channels offer some kind of special on prisoners of war, Ehrenfeld says. Then the story disappears again. ’Society only deals with it for one day,’ Ehrenfeld says. ’But we live all year.’ It is a curious thing that the country that ostensibly won the Yom Kippur War and those who lost it have such radically different interpretations of events. Egypt and Syria, which launched a furious and coordinated surprise attack against Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish year, lodged some impressive gains during the first days of the war, crossing the Suez Canal in the South and sending tanks rumbling toward Lake Kinneret in the North. In the Egyptian military museum in Cairo — where the catastrophe of the Six Day War somehow escapes mention — the Yom Kippur War is presented without shame as one of the great military victories of all time. It’s unclear how the war is presented in Syria, which denies entry to anyone whose passport suggests he has set foot on Israeli soil. The war ended, however, with the Egyptian and Syrian forces in disarray, Israeli tanks only miles from Cairo and Damascus, the tatters of the Egyptian Third Army hostage and starving, and the Soviet Union, the Arabs’ patron, threatening to join the fray with its nuclear weapons. By most objective factors — and especially given the fact that Israel had been surprised — the war represents a tremendous military accomplishment for the Jewish state. In Israel, however, more than a quarter-century later, the Yom Kippur War remains one of the country’s greatest traumas, slayer of the myth of the invincible sabra. The reason lies in the euphoria generated by Israel’s stunning victory in the Six Day War, when the country swung in less than a week from the brink of annihilation to the novelty of empire. The IDF could do no wrong, it was believed, and had little to fear from the Arabs, who were seen as impotent, if malevolent, brigands. This was the atmosphere in which the generation of Mussa Shimrich, Uri Ehrenfeld and Arik Avneri came of age. In their late teens or early 20s, the three were among the regular troops caught by the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. Their experiences, in war and subsequently in captivity, would mark them for the rest of their lives. Ehrenfeld, then 19, was a paratrooper in the Mezach outpost, the southermost point of the Bar-Lev Line that protected Israel’s hold on the Suez Canal. When the Egyptians launched their attack on October 6, Mezach quickly was cut off from the rest of the Sinai. For a week the Israeli soldiers held out, with little food or sleep. On October 13, the order came to surrender to the Red Cross, which delivered them to the Egyptians. Eventually 250 prisoners were gathered in Cairo’s Abisiyya Prison, where each Israeli was held in solitary confinement. It was to be 21Ś2 months of unending torture, psychological as well as physical. Injured all over his body from the fighting — today he is considered 87% disabled — Ehrenfeld was denied medical treatment. Soon, though, the Egyptians were to add to his sufferings. Like the other prisoners, he was interrogated frequently and given starvation rations of food and water. He was beaten mercilessly and had his fingernails pulled out with pliers. Yet it was on the psychological level that the Egyptians really distinguished themselves as torturers. Deprived of water, Ehrenfeld was forced to sit within hearing range of a bubbling tap. He was also fed a steady diet of misinformation about the conquest of Tel Aviv and the destruction of Israel; given the dire state of the war at the time he was taken captive, the information did not seem outlandish. At other times the Egyptians would pretend that Israeli commandos were storming the prison to rescue the POWs; when it turned out to be a joke, the prisoners’ morale plunged. Told he was to be executed, Ehrenfeld was blindfolded, marched to the prison yard, and placed against a wall, where a guard fired just to the side of his head. One of his comrades died when he moved slightly during the mock execution. The tortures continued almost day and night for the 21Ś2 months, until an exchange of prisoners could be arranged. In Syria they went on for eight months. Arik Avneri was born in Jerusalem and lived through the shelling of the city in the Six Day War. The experience, catching Avneri at the impressionable age of 14, left him with a feeling of heroism, an almost pleasurable memory. A few years later Avneri enlisted and was stationed in the Sinai Desert with the air force. Three days before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, however, he was sent to the Hermon outpost in the Golan. There was little to do, Avneri remembers, and few took seriously the threat of impending war that intelligence men like Shimrich were sending back to headquarters. At least a week before hostilities began, military intelligence officers on the Golan knew war was imminent, Shimrich says; they noted the Russian military advisers being evacuated with their families, the change in missile batteries from defensive to offensive, the cancellation of Syrian officers’ vacations, the infiltration of three divisions into the area. ’We, the little guys [in intelligence], knew there was going to be war,’ Shimrich says today. ’They blame it on the intelligence units, that we didn’t warn them, but that’s bullshit. One day the truth will come out. That’s what hurts the most, knowing that we did our job right.’ The intelligence reports were ignored. The Hermon outpost was woefully undefended, with maybe a dozen soldiers — several of whom didn’t even have weapons, Avneri says — and some intelligence officers. They concerned themselves mainly with keeping the place tidy, Avneri says. He did not feel alarmed. When the Syrians began shelling the Hermon outpost, Avneri was reminded of his teenage experience of the Six Day War in Jerusalem, he says. It was almost like a war game. ’We were still living with the euphoria of the Six Day War,’ Avneri says. ’We had a very very strong feeling of power, that at the slightest problem the IDF would come in and save us.’ They radioed for Israeli forces to shell the Syrians. To no avail. They asked the IDF to rescue them. To no avail. The whole front is in trouble, they were told, not just you. Within the first two days of fighting, 250 crack Syrian commandos landed at the Hermon post, and it fell. Avneri, Shimrich, and some two dozen others were taken captive, their hands bound with telephone cord, and marched barefoot some 15 kilometers to a Syrian police training school. The soldiers of the mighty IDF had fallen into the abyss. ’It’s complete degradation,’ Avneri says. ’You have this image of yourself as a fighter and then you realize you’re really a zero: Your eyes and hands are bound, you’re dying of thirst, you’re injured and bleeding and you’re being beaten. You realize that your gods were not so great after all.’ After a week of torture and interrogations at the police school, the captives were taken to Al-Mazeh. Most, including Avneri, were put in small common rooms in which up to 40 men were crammed. Some who were believed to have a wealth of information, like intelligence officer Shimrich, were put in tiny isolation cells with no light. ’I didn’t know night or day, nothing but total hunger,’ Shimrich says. All, however, were tortured. Shimrich recalls electric shocks to his body, including the genitals, which left him twitching and shaking. They were beaten on the soles of their feet; the Syrians then rubbed salt water on the wounds to make them sting. Israeli bodies became ashtrays for stubbing out Syrian cigarettes. Heaters were used to cause boils and blisters on the skin. Fingernails and teeth were pulled out. Captives were suspended from a tire and whipped. Only midway through his eight-month captivity was Shimrich, still suffering from festering war wounds, allowed his first bath. From an intelligence standpoint, Shimrich says, the most crucial period was the first 48 hours, after which the Israeli army would have time to change codes and data of which he had knowledge. But Avneri thinks the extraction of information was peripheral to the Syrians’ purpose in torturing the Israelis: ’What they really wanted to know was how to break the Israeli soldier.’ In a sense, the Syrians were venting their frustration over humiliating defeats in two previous wars, trying to slay with each blow of their fists the image of the invincible Israeli soldier. Yet it was so ingrained, Avneri says, that when after 10 days the Syrians first untied the prisoners’ hands and eyes, a whole cluster of guards stood with weapons drawn over the feeble and wretched prisoners, fearing the Israelis — injured, lice-bitten, wasted by diarrhea — might have some supernatural powers. Avneri, 47, a Jerusalem psychologist who often counsels former POWs, says the prisoners developed small defenses against the torture that allowed them to cling to their sanity. They would attempt to count days to maintain some memory of the normal order of the universe. Blindfolded and bound, they would try to touch hands, seeking the reassurance of human contact. Those in isolation might exchange knocks on the walls of their cells, reminding each other that the world still existed. In the Egyptian prison, Avneri says, prisoners were able to inscribe minute signs on a piece of gum stuck to the wall. Shimrich, who was in isolation for much of the time, would often press on his own wounds, focusing on the phsyical pain to stave off mental breakdown. In the common cell, Avneri maintained his sanity by cultivating a scientific detachment reminiscent of Victor Frankl in the Nazi concentration camps. It was in the Syrian prison, in fact, observing the aggressive group dynamics among the miserable Israelis, that Avneri made the choice to become a psychologist. It took a full eight months for the Israeli prisoners to be released from Syria. At the airport they were given a rousing welcome. When he saw the signs saying ’Welcome back, Israeli heroes,’ Avneri says, ’I was sure a sports team had returned. Society saw the return of the captives as the end of the trauma of the Yom Kippur War.’ For the returnees themselves, however, it was the beginning of a life-long ordeal. The army took them on an enforced vacation where they were thoroughly debriefed; in the documentary, Awake at Night (Heroes Cry at Night, in English), which was instrumental in heightening public awareness of the former POWs plight, some refer to it as a second internment. Shimrich says the IDF interrogated him over a year and a half to find out what information might have been squeezed out of him by the Syrians, who had proposed that he continue as their spy in Israel. ’Of course the country has to be concerned about its security, but not to the point of burning us out,’ Shimrich says. Released early from the army, his planned career in military intelligence over, Shimrich felt he had lost everything. Avneri says Israel had other priorities than the released prisoners. ’The country was busy with 3,000 dead and thousands of wounded. They didn’t know how to take care of us, and we were too weak to ask for help,’ he says. ’So each of us entered his own private captivity.’ Once the army’s initial interest in the returnees faded, Shimrich and others say, they were more or less neglected. Their physical and psychological problems were not taken seriously or addressed with the proper care. Follow-up care is especially important for those who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, symptoms of which may not appear for years after the event that caused it, Avneri says. According to one study (attributed in the film to Yuval Neria), at least 40 percent of the Yom Kippur War prisoners suffer from some form of PTSD. Symptoms include sleeplessness, flashbacks, tension and nervousness, paranoia, panic attacks, concentration problems, social and emotional detachment, relationship difficulties, inability to hold a job. It’s a sea of after-effects into which each sufferer dips, Avneri says, like the cable television packages that each viewer designs for himself. Ehrenfeld, for example, says that to this day he has a problem with hunger that is more imaginary than real; he is forever anxious that he does not have enough food stored at home. PTSD has been known since World War I — when it was called ’shellshock’ or ’trench neurosis’ — but it was only after the Vietnam War that the condition received wide recognition. Israeli mental health care professionals are among the world leaders in treating PTSD because of the country’s unfortunate security situation, according to psychiatrist Ilan Kutz. The condition became increasingly common here after the Lebanon War, he says. ’One of the problems with events that cause trauma is that they shatter totally the concept of reality the way we know it. People who have been through such an event often can’t fully grasp it and respond with mental shock that may later develop into PTSD,’ Kutz says. ’Being a prisoner of war exposes a person to an intense and continuing state of threat, but even more than that, torture is a first-class shatterer of one’s belief in the human image as well as one’s belief in one’s self. Torture is just a matter of threshold and everyone has a threshold, so eventually you’re forced to see yourself in a way you’d rather not. ’If you have been broken in your own eyes it’s very difficult to get back what used to constitute your image of yourself and the world, suddenly the world has changed.’ Former POWs charge that the army and Defense Ministry were slow to recognize PTSD as a valid medical condition, and Shimrich is even considering suing the army’s Rehabilitation Department for damages of NIS 1.5 million per prisoner. ’I don’t want to be made to feel like a cheater, I just want to get what’s coming to us,’ Shimrich says. ’We went through the greatest trauma soldiers can go through, and they treat us as if we’re second-class.’ The Defense Ministry declined to comment. Uri Ehrenfeld has not been back to Egypt since he was released from prison, despite two decades of peace. Now, however, he is trying to find sponsors to bring the group of former POWs to the Sinai outposts where they were captured and the Abassiya Prison where they were held. ’We all feel the need to close the circle by going back there,’ he says. Rather than pushing political opinions to the Left or the Right, Avneri says, the prison experience generally strengthened each prisoner’s pre-existing politics. All three of the former POWs interviewed for this story spoke positively of the possibility of reaching peace with the Arabs. ’The fact that people aren’t dying on the Egyptian border anymore is enough,’ Ehrenfeld says. Even if peace proves to be temporary, ’it has saved a lot of lives. I’m not one of those people who believe in the holiness of a piece of land. What’s holy is the life of a human being.’ Shimrich says it will take even longer to achieve real peace with Syria than with Egypt, which has taken great pains to avoid normalization with Israel over the past two decades. Hatred of Israel and Jews is even more deeply ingrained in the Syrian psyche, says Shimrich, who grew up there. As an example, he mentions Syrian methods of teaching arithmetic. They don’t ask children, he says, ’if you have four apples and eat one, how many are left,’ but rather ’if you have four Jews and you slaughter three, how many are left?’ ’The Syrians have a real problem [with Jews],’ he says. ’They’re taught that Jews are like animals, that they have no right to exist on earth. It will take generations to undo that. ’In my opinion it’s good to make peace,’ he adds, ’and even to give back land, but in stages. We need to see what their reaction is and what kind of peace they’re willing to give us in return.’ At the time of his captivity — traversing Syrian territory, seeing the hate in the eyes of children shouting ’Death to the Jews!’ - Avneri didn’t believe the two countries could ever make peace. Now, he said, he does. One of the reasons for his change of heart was a visit he made to Egypt, where he was deeply affected by a photograph he took at Sadat’s tomb with a smiling Egyptian soldier. ’I saw that it is possible for people’s opinions to change,’ he says. Like Shimrich, Avneri says he, too, would probably travel to Syria if it ever made peace with Israel. More recently, he and other former POWs, together with their families, last month visited the Hermon outpost where they were taken captive a quarter-century ago. Avneri was profoundly moved on the visit — by the fact that his six-year-old daughter was most preoccupied with the popsicle a soldier had given her that was melting on her hand. ’I saw in that the continuation of life, ’ Avneri says. ’That was the beautiful part, to realize that above and beyond everything, life goes on.’
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