A still of the newly-released footage of Ilan Ramon. Photo: IDF Archives at the Ministry of Defense, screenshot

Ilan Ramon — who became the first Israeli astronaut and served a fighter pilot in the Israel Air Force during the 1981 raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak — explained in a video released Tuesday that the story of his mother, a Holocaust survivor, helped inspire him to go out and participate in the army’s most secret and dangerous missions.

The Israel Defense Ministry’s IDF Archives released the rare video 40 years after the Israeli air strike that destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor. During the footage, which was filmed on May 27, 2001, Ramon discusses the feelings he had before the mission, the fear that he would not return from it, and the link between the operation and his mother, a survivor of the Auschwitz extermination camp.

In 2003, Ramon perished in the Columbia space shuttle explosion.

“I want to tie the connection between my origin and what I do today. My mother is a Holocaust survivor, she was at Auschwitz and barely survived it. Before I set out [for the Iraq operation], it was clear to me that there’s a good chance I will stay there,” said the late Ramon in the footage.

During the filmed meeting of senior Israeli Air Force veterans to mark the 20th anniversary of the attack on the Iraqi reactor, Ramon movingly told the story of a Friday afternoon when he returned from his army service and people were yelling and cursing on the street. He said he asked himself, “What am I doing this for? So that people could yell and curse at me? What did I do to them?”

“Then I remembered my mother, my origin 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,” said Ramon.

During the speech, Ramon read out a letter out of a group of Holocaust survivors whom he had asked to send a list of what he should take with him into space when he goes.

“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. Since you will be close to the heavens, open the heavens and let the heavens apologize why they didn’t respond to our cries and I am still asking why,” the letter said.

“This is the connection which helped me and prepared me for the sacrifice I was willing to make,” Ramon explained. “In Israel we are often too focused on our own turf, that we often forget what we have this country for, and perhaps I was given the privilege to be a partner to something which is so significant to the entire Jewish people as this mission that we are talking about.”

The rare footage was recently found as part of a digitization project carried out by the IDF archives in the Defense Ministry, in which tens of thousands of hours of films and coils are converted into digital media to preserve them for future generations. The Defense Ministry also published unseen documents and photos from the Osirak operation.

Watch the full video below: