Watching Iran’s brutal suppression of protesters has revived memories and fears from her own childhood under the Islamic Republic, Anat Mastor, the head of perfusion for the charity Save a Child’s Heart, told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
Demonstrations broke out across Iran in late December in response to the country’s dire economic condition. The Islamic regime responded with a brutal crackdown, killing and imprisoning thousands for their alleged roles in what Tehran described as “foreign-backed riots.”
“It’s very hard for me to see everything that’s going on there, the violence,” Mastor said, going on to say that what she was seeing resembled the same sort of aggression she witnessed as a child during the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
“I feel the same.... It’s coming back to me again, and it’s very hard to see. They are killing the people there, and almost all of them (the victims) are very young. It’s making me very sad.”
“I hope the war [Operation Roaring Lion] is successful, and the Iranians get their freedom back; they need it. And I hope the country can return to the same beautiful country I remember,” she continued.
“I’m very glad Israel and the US are helping [the Iranian people], but it’s not enough. I think they have to make a move and bring the change... One day, I hope the people of Iran will live with dignity and freedom, and that I will be able to visit again.”
Mastor was only 11 when the Iranian Revolution saw the secular, pluralist country she had grown up in switch to one of Islamist extremism. She departed Iran in 1987, leaving her parents and the life she had known behind to pursue higher education in Israel.
She did so, Mastor said, since the lack of opportunities in her homeland made her realize there was no place for her there as a Jew or as a woman.
“As a Jewish girl, I was required to wear a long black dress and a hijab – a head covering worn by Muslim women,” Mastor recounted. “English classes were canceled, and although I was Jewish, Quran and Islamic religious studies were imposed on us.”
The discrimination and persecution of religious minorities left her fearful, with the anxiety becoming so severe that rumors of incoming violent pogroms led her to go to bed fully dressed and “prepared to run.”
Journey to escape Iran
As a Jew, Mastor was also barred from attending college, which was what eventually led her to decide to escape only months after finishing high school. Her brother had made the same journey five years before she did. Nevertheless, her parents were reluctant to see her go.
“My parents didn’t want me to do it, but I was very stubborn,” Mastor said, as she went on to describe the dangerous journey she took from Tehran to Karachi, Pakistan.
According to Mastor, to reach Israel, she was forced to rely on smugglers, traveling between eight and 10 hours with other families through the mountainous border.
“It was very dangerous, but I was desperate,” she continued. “It was very hard for me to be in the country (Iran) without hope.”
Once in Karachi, she spent months waiting for a visa while the Jewish Agency processed her documents.
In 1987, Mastor finally arrived in Israel and was reunited with her brother, who helped her begin a new life in Kibbutz Be’erot Yitzhak.
Within a year of her arrival, she enrolled in a medical biotechnology course at the Afeka Academic College of Engineering in Tel Aviv, specializing in perfusion. Soon after, Mastor began her internship at Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus in Petah Tikva and started working as a perfusionist at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon.
Working to save children's hearts
Only a few years after her graduation, Mastor joined the newly founded Save a Child’s Heart, where she has helped the organization treat more than 8,000 children from 75 countries, operating a heart-lung machine to keep patients alive while doctors perform surgeries on critical organs.
“I truly love being a perfusionist. Operating the heart-lung machine is a big responsibility, and it feels like part of my DNA. Treating Muslims, Christians, Jews – it doesn’t matter to us. We have treated all of them, even children from Iraq and Afghanistan,” Mastor said, wondering if someday she would also help treat Iranians.
“There is no greater satisfaction than seeing a child leave the operating room healthy,” she added.
Mastor has also made waves in the global medical community by mentoring Sophia Mlanzi Josephat Lukonge, the first female perfusionist in Tanzania; Tigist Tesfaye Hailemariam, the first female perfusionist in Ethiopia; and Felix Kamuchungu, the first perfusionist in Zambia.
While Mastor has found fulfillment in her career and joy as a mother of three, the realities of what she escaped and what she lost have stayed with her.
After leaving Iran, Mastor never saw her father in person again. He died a year after she left, and her mother lived only two years in Israel before passing away after she fled the Islamic Republic in 1999.
“My mother finally escaped Iran by posing as a tourist traveling to Turkey and using the opportunity to flee to Israel,” Mastor said. “She passed away two years later. Although her time in Israel was short, I am grateful that we were able to spend that time together.”