Ramon was taking part in a meeting of senior IAF veterans to mark the 20th anniversary of the strike. It took place at the home of Iftach Spector and was also attended by Amos Yadlin, Dobbi Yoffe and their families.
In his moving speech, which lasted several minutes, Ramon spoke about the feelings he had before the strike, the fear that he might not return from it and the connection between the operation, his Holocaust-survivor mother and his preparations for a space flight for which he trained during this period.“I want to tie this into what I do today,” he said. “My mother is an Auschwitz survivor who escaped with her shirt on her back. A few days after I left [on the operation], I knew there was a chance that I would not make it back.“I was living in Ramat Chen [a neighborhood in Ramat Gan] at the time... People were yelling and cursing on the street, and I thought, ‘What am I doing this for? So that people could yell and curse at me? What’d I do to them?’“Then I remembered my origins and history and that of the Jewish people, and I thought, ‘There’s no way that I’m going to let that happen again, no matter what happens to me.’ That’s what helped me go on that mission.”Ramon told the crowd a discussion with a group of Holocaust survivors made him realize that “we are only a part of a bigger story. Even as Israelis, we are only a part of the Jewish people.”He asked a group of Holocaust survivors what they thought he should take with him into space when he goes. One of them gave him a letter.“Here is my humble suggestion for you, Ilan, what to take into space: Bring my seven-year-old daughter’s dirty doll that she brought to Auschwitz, which is now sprinkled with her own ashes,” the letter said. “Since you will be close to the heavens, open them and let them apologize for not responding to our prayers. I still ask, ‘Why.’”That is “what prepared me, in a certain sense, for the sacrifice I was willing to make,” Ramon said. “We are so entrenched in our own bubble here in Israel that we forget all the other stuff. I feel I was privileged to be part of a mission that connected me to the entire Jewish nation.”
