Avi Weiss, a captive from the Yom Kippur War: Young age and loneliness were the characteristics of the captives who suffered from the strongest post-trauma

These parameters are relevant to Gilad Shalit, says Weiss, deputy editor of The Com website and a former police officer and chief of the Acre police force, who says that even the month of torture he spent in the Egyptian prison left a mark on his life to this day, almost 40 years later 

Two important factors, in addition to diet of course, decided whether the POWs would suffer from severe post-trauma or whether they would be able to rebuild their lives, says Avi Weiss, currently deputy editor of a website The COM who deals with news in the fields of IT and communication, and was formerly a senior police officer at the rank of deputy superintendent whose last position in the system was the commander of the National Police School and before that the head of the training department of the Israel Police."

In a conversation with the science website, Weiss says: "The age component is an important component. I witnessed in Egypt that prisoners from the regular service who were captured, their post-trauma was more acute than the one suffered by the reservists (I was a reservist at the time). This is because they were less mature to deal with the difficulties and the isolation and the psychological stresses that are exerted on a captive such as staged executions. There are mental pressures on a prisoner that the younger he is, the less ability to deal with you."
"Two years after I was released, I visited an asylum for the mentally ill and saw that almost all the prisoners who stayed there were irregular, very few reservists reached a state of losing their sanity."

Are all the parameters you mentioned to the detriment of Gilad Shalit?

"Without a doubt, both age and isolation are two parameters that have a very strong influence, of course there are other parameters such as the issue of nutrition, but I have no idea on the subject. I went almost 14 days without food and ten of them without water. This in itself brings a person to a state of near death and madness. It's quite impactful and then when you get food that you're not used to. Today I'm addicted to Paul because that's what we got, I got used to the taste. It affects the taste of the food in a very significant way. For example, among the Arabs it is customary to leave a mustache and I still have it to this day. The captivity affects the appearance and behavior on many parameters of the person's behavior.

Describe the circumstances of your fall and your experiences in captivity?
"I was taken prisoner on October 21, 1973, the day before the ceasefire in the Battle of Missouri (what is known to the public as the Chinese Farm). I was a rifleman in Eric Sharon's division, in those days we were engaged in expanding the bridgehead towards the north to allow the movement of the division and other divisions to the western side of the Suez Canal. We were the ones who physically laid the Galilee Bridge. After the laying of the Galilee Bridge, we were engaged in widening the corridor and this was the battle in which we walked into an Egyptian ambush of the Second Army and in which I was captured. From the area of ​​the Chinese farm I was transferred to Cairo, where I was transferred (as far as I can tell because my eyes were covered except at the end) between three prisons: the one that was used for interrogations, the other was Abasiya prison - a prison for prisoners and for the last few days I was in the hospital of the Egyptian army In it, wounded prisoners were kept because I was injured from the torture."
"I was in captivity for about a month and I returned on the second plane of the wounded captives (on the first the seriously wounded were returned). I came straight to Tel Hashomer, from there to surgeries and recovery and back to life, a process that took several months. In retrospect I know that my return was as a result of the fact that the Third Army was surrounded and the forces reached the 101st kilometer from Cairo so they had an interest in exchanging prisoners. I was replaced by ten thousand Egyptian prisoners who were with us, I knew there were prisoners in Egypt - from the exhaustion and the battles in Sinai during the Yom Kippur War. My MP who was captured two weeks before I met a captive in one of the investigations, it was bizarre to see him because we thought he was killed in battle."

What can you tell about the treatment you received upon your return?
"Today, the systems know how to treat a prisoner who returned, especially after the Night Cities Association was established about 15 years ago, and I was one of its founders. And then very broad studies were done, including by Prof. Zehava Solomon of Uni' Tel Aviv who was and still is today engaged in research in the field of captives, behavior and the treatment of captives. When I came back there was no treatment. On the contrary, those who returned healthy were transferred to an interrogation facility in memory of the continuation of the captivity and caused them additional trauma. Fortunately, I was in a hospital and I came to Zichron when the last of the captives left it, so my investigations in Zichron were very short."

"In any case, there is no such thing as a prisoner returning to the same person because the process of captivity is a process of humiliation and a mental crisis beyond the physical very difficult because a person who is used to controlling life becomes like a cockroach or a cockroach that walks around on the floor that any Egyptian soldier can step on and indeed it is also What they did was beyond torture. Nine of my friends, including a personal friend, were killed in captivity during the torture so it's a process that can drive anyone insane. That is why today's decision that a POW immediately upon his return will be recognized with a 20% post-trauma without the need to present evidence that he was injured because it is already clear today according to all the studies that there is no POW who returns without post-trauma. The subject was also studied before in studies in the US on the POWs who returned from Vietnam and Korea, and from them there are unequivocal findings that the chances of finding a POW without post-trauma are zero."

"After my return, especially after the establishment of the association, I met with the captives who were in Syria, and there it took a much longer time to free them - eight or nine months in Syrian captivity, which is considered much more difficult. We exchanged experiences and saw that it is possible to create a post-traumatic crisis even in a week. The length of time does not matter, but the degree of intensity of the captors towards the captive is what determines the severity. As soon as captives are gathered in a room together, which happened in the war of attrition and in Syria, the effects of captivity are softened and they establish a community. This is completely different from a captive who sits alone like Gilad Shalit in a cell, we were also blindfolded for the entire period. A person who lies alone for 24 hours in a cell can lose a human image quite quickly. A person is a social animal in general, quite clearly."

Did the fact that you later became a man of the law and even the chief of the Acre police have anything to do with captivity?

"I realized that quite a few prisoners have a process of increasing their identification with the state and the desire to contribute more than before. Before I was a pretty wild student and after the captivity the urge to try to contribute and do for the country grew stronger in me, it's a kind of reversal of the way of life. For example, Haifa's chief rabbi Shaar Yeshav, who was a prisoner in Jordan during the War of Independence, became very ultra-Orthodox and cultivated a rabbinical career. I saw mayors who were prisoners, CEOs of companies and in all their conversations they were characterized by the desire to be better than they themselves were before, and I went through such a process. On the other hand, there are those who did not succeed in rehabilitating and they got stuck in the process and they rely on the Ministry of Defense to this day, there are quite a few of them. I became less egoistic and gave more importance to what was happening around me, to contribute to society, things that I saw happened to quite a few prisoners and the motto that accompanied them.

It may be the case with Gilad Shalit as well, it's an individual matter, a process that develops, but I quite noticed this phenomenon, at least for myself I can say that it was an unequivocal change.