Hijacking survivor Millie Hodes dies at 85

by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

For family and friends of Mildred Hodes, the last 21 years of her life were a gift, full of reminders of what might have been had a cell of Palestinian hijackers not had a change of whatever stood in for their hearts.

“Millie” Hodes, who died at age 85 on July 16 at her home in Springfield, was a passenger aboard the cruise ship Achille Lauro in October 1985, when four Palestinian gunmen took control of the ship and killed her friend and fellow passenger Leon Klinghoffer. By all accounts, Hodes was next on the terrorists’ list of victims, until fate intervened.

Hodes and her husband, Frank, now 86, were on the ship with a group of relatives and friends from New Jersey, enjoying a Mediterranean cruise.

Frank missed the drama. He and a group of other passengers had chosen to go ashore at Alexandria, Egypt, to see the sites and to travel by land to Port Said, where they would rejoin the ship. Millie wasn’t feeling well and so stayed behind with her sister-in-law, Viola Meskin of Union, and their close friends Marilyn and Leon Klinghoffer. Leon, who had suffered a stroke, was confined to a wheelchair.

The gunmen isolated the Americans from the other passengers and ordered them up on deck, while they tried to strike a bargain — the lives of the passengers in return for the release of 50 Palestinians held in Israeli custody. When they couldn’t get Klinghoffer’s wheelchair up to the deck, they shot him and tossed him and his chair into the ocean.

Apparently, the hijackers, holding the Americans’ passports, next opened the one on top. It happened to be Millie Hodes’, and they told the captain she would be their next victim. He pleaded for her life. The hijackers finally gave up their effort and surrendered, in return for a pledge of safe passage. As they were being flown away on an Egyptian airliner, United States Navy planes forced the plane to land in Italy. There the four men were tried and jailed.

According to her daughter, Carol Hodes of Old Bridge, Millie Hodes found out about her lucky escape a few days later when, flying back to the United States on an army transport, she read an account of the hijacking in a copy of the armed forces’ Stars and Stripes newspaper.

The story also said she was spared because she pleaded for her life, a version she and other passengers always denied but which nonetheless took on a life of its own and was repeated in other accounts of the incident over the years.

Aside from her indignation over that false report, Hodes was merely bemused by all the media attention and remained stoical about the hijacking experience itself. “My mother wasn’t all that sturdy, but she handled the whole thing pretty well,” Carol Hodes said. The hijacking was made into a television and a feature movie as well as a controversial opera that many critics described as overly sympathetic to the hijackers.

The couple joined various law- suits over the years attempting to hold the Palestine Liberation Organization responsible for the attack. The PLO would eventually agree to settle a lawsuit brought by the Klinghoffer family, but admitted no wrongdoing.

Carol’s brother, Steven Hodes, who lives in Lincroft with his wife and two children, wrote a poem which he read at the July 18 service at King Solomon Cemetery in Clifton.

He described his mother as a loving woman who “stared death in the face over twenty years before, on the high seas…. And rarely spoke of it again.”

Carol Hodes said the event had one definite effect on her parents. “They had traveled to Asia and to Europe, but my mother was never all that much into travel, and after that — apart from going to Canada — they didn’t leave the country again.”

Born in Newark, Millie Hodes lived in Irvington, Newark, and Union before moving to Springfield in 1956.

She was a member of the B’nai B’rith Ladies League and Senior League of Temple Beth Ahm, as well as a member of the Springfield Hadassah and the Twigs of Overlook Hospital in Summit.

She suffered from heart disease and dementia for the past year. Frank lost his sister Pearl Appel of Maplewood, two months ago, and then caught pneumonia. He recovered enough to return home just a few days before his wife died.

In her eulogy at the funeral, arranged by Menorah Chapels at Millburn, Union, her daughter said: “Maybe my mother was waiting for him to come home and share her final days before she passed away. We choose to think so, for so strong was their bond that it would be appropriate that she would not be at peace until she was sure he was well…. My mother was truly a woman of valor, something she proved many times during her long and much loved life.”