Lt. Col. (Res) Ori Shahak is not soothed by the silence that descends on Israelâ??s cities on the eve of Yom Kippur. He is rattled. The dark days of his imprisonment in Damascus as an Israeli prisoner of war are more likely to return to him in flashes: the heavy steps of the approaching guards, the beatings, the torture, the terrible loneliness of solitary confinement and the way it erodes the health of the mind.
â??There are scars,â? he said, â??and sometimes you forget you have them until they start to bleed.â?
Shahak, a fighter pilot who fought in the Six-Day War and was shot down over Damascus on the second day of the Yom Kippur War, is a father and a grandfather; his daughter is a major in the air force; and he works for the Israel Air Force (IAF) till today, teaching the flight school cadets to fly in a single-engine training plane.
Sitting with him for a long conversation, at times explicit about the cruelties of captivity (and the occasional joys, of which more later), he seemed like so many other pilots, his mind governed by a quick, cool and orderly mechanism. Yet like every POW, he said, he suffers at nights, and while the Ministry of Defense has made significant headway in its treatment of Israeli servicemen and women who were taken captive, it still lags behind the United States, where there is a national POW Day and every POW is granted immediate disability recognition.
Shahak and other Yom Kippur War POWs, including Dr. Itamar Barnea, a fighter pilot and psychologist, and Professor Avi Ohry, a doctor who specializes in rehabilitative medicine, came together in 1998 and founded Erim Balaila (Awake at Night), a non-profit organization that Shahak now heads. Their goal was twofold: to knit together the hundreds of remaining POWs â?? many of whom avoided each other out of a sense of shame â?? and provide them with a sense of community and a support network; and to advocate for better state treatment of POWs.
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