“They moved me to the back seat and in order for me to be under their control, he hit me in the head with the gun and I bled a lot” he added and said “drops of blood started to fall from my face, blood fell on my clothes and then I said ‘OK I’m in their hands now’ and come We’ll see where we go from here.”
“Put a mask on my face”
The kidnappers drove with Benedek to a remote part of the city, hid his face and took his belongings. “In the middle, people changed and took me to some rather poor and simple part of the city – I didn’t see the way. They told me, ‘This is our area, everyone is here with us, here you have nothing to do.'”
The kidnappers led Benedek around a field and put him in an abandoned house. “To my surprise, I get out of the car covered in blood, and I see in front of me a typical Brazilian field with children playing soccer. They lead me around the field to such a destroyed house, put my head down and put me in a room. They put me in a chair and immediately take off my shoes and put something on me so that I don’t I can move my hands, they put a mask over my face so I can’t see.”
Benedek stayed in the closed room for long hours. Now, he talks about the psychological pressure they put on him and the fear of the worst. “I understood from them that killing me is a problem for them. On the other hand, I saw people with drugs, strong and when they aim a gun at your head then any mistake can end in death. Even when they are nervous – nervousness, drugs, stress and a gun don’t go together. And I realized that I was under mind control real”.
“What can I do to get out of the story”
“It’s important to be calm,” Benedek emphasizes. “To be in control of myself, to do what I can to get out of this story and not start being too heroic or too smart and think about what I can do. I started thinking about what I should say, what I shouldn’t say to them. They want to take a person for a few Hours before anyone realizes that he is missing, to take as much money as possible from him in a short time without anyone realizing that this person is gone.”
“I think people need to understand that just as you don’t walk around the street with 100,000 shekels in your pocket, your phone sometimes has more than that. They immediately checked to see if I had cryptocurrency apps and such,” he explains. “If they saw that I had such coins, they would take them from me immediately. The cell phone is a wallet, a safe for everything. They behaved violently because of that they wanted to make bank transfers. It’s not anti-Semitism or Iran, they just wanted money – that’s all.”
After nearly 20 very difficult hours, Benedek was released and left the apartment to which he was forcibly rushed. The Brazilian police assisted the family in conducting negotiations with the kidnappers, and together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the head of the Nahal Sorek Regional Council Shai Reichner and neighbors from the settlement of Yad Binyamin who made great efforts – managed to free him. “I want to say thank you to each and every one who helped, whether it’s in prayers or actions both in Brazil and in Israel,” Benedek said. “If there is one positive thing in this whole story, it is how many people my life was important to. It gives us strength to continue life and do good things.”