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.
Michel’s mother remarried after the war and she swiftly changed her son’s distinctly Jewish surname to the more neutral one of his stepfather, Cojot, to protect him from any future holocausts. Michel grew up and was, by all outward appearances, successful and content: by the 1960s he was working in a high-powered job in Paris, which is when my father met him, and he got married and had three children, Olivier, Stephane and Yael. But inside, Michel was crushed with guilt about not having been with his father the day he was arrested. He became consumed with the idea that the way to avenge his father’s murder was to kill the man responsible for his arrest: Klaus Barbie, who was the head of the local Gestapo in Lyon and directly responsible for the deaths of 14,000 people.
Michel knew Barbie was hiding in Bolivia, and so in 1975 he went there, stopping off on the way in Mexico to buy a gun. He tracked Barbie down, posing as a journalist, and carefully learned his daily routine, what time he went to which cafe, who he hung out with. One day he followed him and pointed the gun at Barbie’s back. It was the perfect moment to shoot him – but his hand dropped. He couldn’t do it. He had, in his eyes, failed his father again.
Michel flew back to France and had a nervous collapse. His marriage ended and he was deeply depressed. The following year, he took his oldest son, Olivier, to Tel Aviv and on 27 June they headed back to Paris, on Air France flight 139. The plane that was hijacked.
Once the plane was diverted to Uganda, and the hostages moved to a disused airport building, Michel cannily developed what could almost be described as a relationship with Wilfried Böse, the main hijacker. Over many hours, they debated politics, and Michel helped to persuade the terrorists to release the first group of hostages, including his son. Michel himself was released a few days later with the second group, and when he got back to Paris he told agents from the Mossad everything he had carefully committed to memory: the layout of the terrorists’ compound, what their daily habits were, where the remaining hostages slept. In his critically acclaimed 2015 book about the Entebbe rescue, Operation Thunderbolt, historian Saul David details precisely how invaluable Michel’s information was to the rescue mission. Had it not been for Michel, the IDF’s then chief of staff, Motta Gur, said, “many more hostages and soldiers would have died”. Michel had not been able to avenge the Jews killed by Barbie, but he was able to save almost all the hostages in the plane. And while he hadn’t been able to save his father, he had saved his son. Michel then wrote an account of his failed assassination of Barbie in Le Point magazine and testified at Barbie’s eventual trial in 1987 in Lyon, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Barbie died in jail four years later. The circle was closed.
Michel’s health improved after Entebbe, but even then he had a sadness about him. I remember thinking as a child that when his mouth smiled his eyes looked like he was about to cry. At the time, in my childish way, I put that down to his divorce, being too young to understand words such as “hijack” and “Holocaust”. Michel died in 1999, which is when I read his autobiography, Namesake (full disclosure: he thanks my father, Ron Freeman, in it). But it wasn’t until I saw Boaz Dvir’s very moving forthcoming documentary about him, Cojot, that I truly understood Michel’s life, and perhaps the message of it: Hollywood action movies are all very well, but true heroes walk among us.
