‘We came back like humiliated rag dolls’: the shame of captured soldiers

Soldiers taken prisoner in 1973 were stigmatised for returning alive, tortured or not. They tell EETTA PRINCE-GIBSON about their battle for recognition of their trauma.

Uri Ehrenfeld tells his story matter-of-factly, without pathos, and only rarely raises his voice. His face is deeply lined, his voice is raspy. "Other people can't really ever understand," he says slowly. "They can't understand what it meant to fight like that, then to surrender, then to suffer through captivity, and then to be treated as if I were a traitor."

Ehrenfeld was one 301 Israeli soldiers taken prisoner by Syrian and Egyptian forces during the Yom Kippur War. He was held in captivity in Egypt for a month and a half; those who were captured by the Syrians were released some five months later. In both prisons, they were horrifically tortured, physically and mentally.  And when Ehrenfeld and the other Israeli POWs came home, the State of Israel did not know how to help them.

At that time, there was little medical or even theoretical information on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, from which many of the soldiers were suffering. In fact, the disorder was not formally recognised as a condition until 1980.

But the Israeli POWs challenged more than medical expertise. With their captivity, they defied many of Zionism's and Israel's most cherished ethos and myths. Today, 50 years later, some of those myths have been challenged; some have been shattered, while others remain strong. And the POWs are still fighting for recognition and their rights, in both the courts of public opinion and the law.

In its mission to create the new Jew and a nation, Zionism also created myths of strength and courage. The new Jewish man, and especially the new Jewish soldier, was meant to be strong and independent, able to bear the creation and defence of the Jewish State and the rebirth of the entire Jewish people on his shoulders.