In an unusual love story, a hopeless optimist recalls surviving Syrian captivity

Leading the Israeli delegation into the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, Efraim Zinger suddenly remembered the Syrian guards who had tortured him when he was their prisoner of war in 1973.

“All the world was watching, the Israeli flag was waving behind me proudly, and I was wondering whether any of them recognized me after 23 years,” recalled Zinger, a former secretary general of the Olympic Committee of Israel.

Zinger, who had spent eight months in captivity following his capture in the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, later learned that the Syrian networks that broadcasted the Atlanta event had paused the transmission when the Israeli delegation marched onto the track in Atlanta.

But the flashback and its timing were typical of how Zinger — much like Israeli society itself — has excelled in multiple areas while carrying an indelible trauma from that war, which has shaped much of his character and worldview.

Zinger, 69, revisits his wartime experience in a Hebrew-language book he published ahead of the war’s 50th anniversary on October 6 this year. The book, titled “Born To Be Free, a Tale in Two Voices about Captivity and Love” is based on diary entries that Zinger smuggled out of prison in Syria. It is also based on entries in a diary that Zinger’s girlfriend, Shoshi, who later became his wife, wrote while he was being held prisoner.

“For whatever reason, I was able to resume my life without too much emotional scarring,” said Zinger, who was beaten in captivity so badly that, during one torture session, his eardrum was torn. Zinger has four children with Shoshi, a retired geography teacher. They built a chicken farm near Netanya while he was completing a Ph.D. in international relations, alongside his longtime service as a promoter and administrator of Israel’s Olympic teams.

“I’ve spent a long time thinking about why the trauma skipped me, yet ravaged the lives of other people who had experienced similar things, including some of my fellow POWs at Mazzeh,” Zinger told The Times of Israel, referencing the notorious prison near Damascus where many Israeli POWs had been tortured.

Part of the reason for Zinger’s resilience may have been Shoshi, with whom he fell in love shortly before falling captive, Zinger said. “When I returned from Syria, she told me a sentence that stuck with me and became my motto: ‘We pick up where we left off.’”

In prison, Zinger kept his sanity by “maintaining dichotomy between myself, the true me, and the prisoner me,” he said. This meant “reminding myself that the guards, they’re doing their job, performing a role. And I needed to perform my role, as well.” Part of that role was not divulging the information he possessed as a soldier serving in the intelligence corps. Zinger held out for a while but knew very little sensitive information as he had been conscripted less than a year before falling captive.

To maintain his own morale, Zinger sometimes sang to himself, including during interrogations. One time, he tapped his foot during questioning in a moment of imprudence that invited a beating. “It was a reminder to better keep separate my two identities: I the prisoner and I the person,” he recalled.

Zinger ended up by accident in the Hermon outpost where he was captured. He had asked to spend the Yom Kippur holiday, when the Syrian and Egyptian armies launched a surprise attack on Israel, in a rear base where Shoshi was slated to remain for the holiday. But upon arriving, he was asked to relieve a soldier whose grandfather had died and take his shift up on the Hermon outpost in the Golan Heights.

As it happened, Syrian commandos invaded during the holiday, finding the bunker outpost where Zinger was serving severely undermanned. Thirteen of the bunker’s defenders were killed. Ten retreated and reunited with rear-line Israeli troops. And 31, including Zinger, were captured after surrendering.

This daring raid on October 7 was one of Syria’s top achievements in the war, in which more than 2,500 Israeli soldiers were killed, the highest death toll after the War of Independence.

Israeli forces turned the tables on the invaders on the battlefield, but the war is widely seen in Israel as an intelligence and leadership failure that jeopardized Israel’s very existence and had far-reaching geopolitical implications. It is also regarded by some as a catalyst for popular distrust in authorities and elites, which is playing out in the judicial overhaul currently polarizing the country.

Before the decision to surrender was made, “It became apparent that there was a good chance we’d try to break out fighting and get killed,” Zinger recalled. “I thought of my parents, both Holocaust survivors for whom I was their only son. I was saddened to think of them having to bury me, the prospect for the family they had started here,” he said.

At no point did Zinger feel guilty for volunteering to be at the base where he was captured. “It was part of my duty. That means that I, and by extension my parents, had been dealt some bad cards. That’s painful. I didn’t blame myself for it,” he said.

It was a worldview that Zinger inherited from his father, Shlomo, who was born in what is now Romania. The Nazis killed two of his seven siblings. He had survived a death march to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Shlomo, a road construction worker, was a Revisionist Zionist who resisted pressures to conform to the hegemony of the Socialist elite headed by David Ben Gurion’s Mapai party.

Shlomo Zinger also spurned compensation money from the German government, believing this was an attempt to absolve their guilt for the Holocaust. Efraim Zinger’s mother, Lotty, survived the war in hiding in what is now Ukraine. She was a doting mother whose life of hardship in Israel and before had resulted in some medical complications and trauma which played a role in her decision to abort a baby who she’d conceived with Shlomo two years prior to Efraim’s birth.

Their son still ponders that choice. “I’m choosing my words carefully. Trying not to lay blame or judge but I wonder why couldn’t they, after all they’d been through, muster optimism and rejoice in the creation of life,” he wrote in the book.

Zinger was always an incorrigible optimist, he told The Times of Israel. “I think it’s part of what helped it make it through captivity. I was always looking for the glass half full,” he said.

He did this even outside the outpost, as the Syrian troops marched their prisoners on foot into Syria. Zinger recalls looking back at the outpost, which was still flying an Israeli flag. “I was facing the unknown. I told myself: ‘You have no idea where you’re going and what will happen but one thing is clear: You will see that flag again, flying proudly,’” Zinger wrote in the book.

In prison, his interrogators told him and the other POWs, who were isolated from the outside world, that Syria, which Israeli troops beat back within two weeks of Syria’s incursion into the Golan Heights, had won the war. Tiberias and Haifa were under Syrian occupation and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had been killed in the fighting, the interrogators told Zinger in an attempt to get him to divulge more information. This crude attempt at psychological warfare had limited effect on the prisoners, Zinger recalled.

In Al Mazzeh, Zinger prepared himself for a long haul. “I estimated it would take at least three years until I was released,” he said. He documented his prison experience each day, writing in pages that he had gathered in prison. Ahead of his release, Zinger concealed those pages in his clothes but almost all of the 30 pages he’d written were found in searches by prison guards ahead of the release.

While Efraim, known to his friends as Ziggy, was documenting his captivity, Shoshi was keeping a diary of her own trials back home. The book switches back and forth from her entries to his. It also recalls one letter that Zinger wrote to his family from prison. In it, he asked Shoshi to move on and not wait for him. “I’m happy she ignored that bit,” he wrote in the book.

At Efraim’s home in Kfar Saba, Shoshi wrote, “I found Lotty and Shlomo looking like the walking dead. My own misery is a shadow of theirs.” Shoshi tried to keep the couple’s spirits up and “Lotty clung to me physically, as though she was trying to draw from my knowledge [about Efraim] and strength,” Shoshi recalled, adding that Lotty had stopped eating in the first few days of her son’s captivity.

After his release, Zinger was allowed a weekend at home before being posted to a retreat for three weeks of rehabilitation and intensive questioning by Israeli field security officers, who interviewed captives — and especially intelligence soldiers like Zinger — at length to understand what and how much the enemy has learned from them.

That treatment was traumatic for some soldiers, who were plunged by it back into their captivity traumas. But not to Zinger. “To be honest, it was a welcome retreat from the media circus after our release,” he said of the debriefing sessions at a retreat near Haifa. “Plus, I was bunked up with my old roommate from Al Mazzeh,” he recalled.

To him, the debriefings were a natural consequence of his captivity. “I know some soldiers experienced it differently. To me, I was meeting with my team to hammer out a common strategy. Like a coaching team analyzing a losing game, we needed to look at unpleasantness, including what I’d told the enemy, to get better. But I understood why we’re doing it.”

Zinger, who was an avid basketball and volleyball player before the army, declined an offer to be discharged after his return from captivity and became an army sports instructor instead, completing one of the Israeli army’s most physically demanding training. He entered the course less than three months after returning from Syria, and he had seriously overestimated his ability to regain his stamina and muscle mass, he recalled. “It was a very difficult course and I wasn’t among the top graduates, but I made it,” he said.

The decision was his first introduction to professional sports training and the inception of his career in Israel’s Olympic committee. But it wasn’t the end of his military combat experience.

In 1982, less than a decade after his release, Zinger was called back into reserve service and annexed to a unit that went into Lebanon. This, too, felt natural to him and triggered no thoughts of captivity.

That is, not in Zinger. His wife, Shoshi, however, sprung into action to get him back from Lebanon, also because the Geneva Convention would not apply to him if he fell prisoner again. She made some calls, “And so one day in Lebanon, the deputy division commander showed up to our forward base in a command car and asked Efraim Zinger to step forward because Zinger needed to get his ass back behind the international border ASAP,” Zinger recalled.

Zinger’s captivity story encompasses the history of two generations, his and his parents’, amid the first major trauma in the life of the nation they’d helped build. But, “beyond the questions of character and philosophy and history, this is essentially a love story,” Zinger said, when asked about what he perceives as the book’s essence. “A story of two young people separated by a terrible war and reunited.”

The story has reached a small milestone since it was published, added Zinger, who has eight grandchildren, and a ninth on the way.

“I’m happy to report that on Thursday, we went to the Western Wall with the whole family and celebrated the bar mitzvah of our eldest grandson,” Zinger said.

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