In September 1970, 12-year-old Martha Hodes and her 13-year-old sister were flying to New York from Israel when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked their plane. Two other planes were hijacked by the same armed group and all three were forced to land in the Jordanian desert, where the passengers and crew were held unaware of their fate.
It was a horrific international incident – and Hodes has spent the last fifty years suppressing her fear and anxiety at what she had experienced. Hodes is a historian and decides to investigate why she was so determined to block out what happened so many years ago.
In his new book, My Abduction: A Personal Story of Forgetting and Remembering, she reconstructs the events of her ordeal by digging through historical archives, press reports and interviews with other hostages, including her sister, to understand her own amnesia in a deeply moving story about how trauma can rewrite our memories.