There’s one hero of Entebbe who deserves his own film. I remember him well

The forthcoming film Entebbe, starring Daniel Brühl and Rosamund Pike, will introduce a new generation to the story of how an Air France flight in 1976 from Tel Aviv was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the German Revolutionary Cells. There is one central figure who isn’t in the film, but should be.

Michel Cojot-Goldberg was one of my father’s oldest friends, and he was on that flight with his then 12-year-old son, Olivier. Fluent in multiple languages, Michel acted as the translator for Uganda’s president Idi Amin, as the go-between for the hijackers and the passengers, and became a central figure in the eventual rescue. But I can understand why the film-makers left him out, because Michel’s story is so incredible it requires its own movie.

Born Michel Goldberg in Paris, he managed to escape with his parents to France’s unoccupied zone during the war. One day his father had to go to Lyon and wanted to bring his beloved five-year-old son with him. But there was snow on the ground and Michel’s mother worried about him catching a cold, so he stayed home with her. This snow saved Michel’s life, because it was on that trip that his father was captured and deported. He managed to escape from the train but was recaptured within a few days and sent to Auschwitz, where he was killed.

Source: theguardian