On February 11, 1990, four years to the day after my release, the South African government freed Nelson Mandela. He had served twenty-seven years in prison. Over the nearly three decades, some in the West had honored him, others denounced him. Now, it seemed the whole world greeted him enthusiastically.
A few weeks later, I received a phone call from Abe Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League. Since we had met in Moscow during Hanukkah 1974, Abe had been my trusted accomplice. “Mandela knows who you are,” he said excitedly. “He read your book in prison and wants to meet you when he visits America.”
I was curious to meet Mandela too, wondering how he coped during his prison ordeal. I was planning to be in the United States. Abe, who hoped I would help make the case for Israel to Mandela, arranged for me to fly to Los Angeles on Friday, June 29.
When I arrived at the downtown Biltmore Hotel, where Mandela was staying, his wife Winnie told me that her seventy-one-year-old husband, who was being rushed from celebration to celebration and interview to interview, was sleeping. I sympathized, remembering my own exhausting, exhilarating freedom tour. But it was a Friday. With Sabbath approaching, I considered rescheduling. Everything in Los Angeles is too far away from everything else; if Mandela rested too long, I would not make it to my hosts in the suburbs on time. But the wait was worth it. Eventually, I met Mandela, refreshed and expansive, after his nap.
He told me that, in 1988, Helen Suzman, the only South African parliamentarian who had fought stubbornly for the right to visit him in prison, gave him a copy of Fear No Evil. Mandela was in his twenty-fifth year of imprisonment. Glancing at my four-hundred-page prison memoir, he told her, “It’s too thick. I won’t have time to read it all.”
Once he started, though, Mandela said he read the book from cover to cover. “The interrogations were familiar to me,” Mandela told me, “but boy, you really suffered.”
“I suffered?” I asked, surprised. “You suffered three times worse. Twenty-seven years!”
“But,” Mandela replied proudly, “my people were with me. And you were alone.”
I was surprised how agitated his words made me. It felt like he was insulting my partners in crime, the Jewish people. “But my people were with me too,” I proclaimed, equally proudly.
Mandela smiled. “I read your book. It was all in your imagination. My people were with me in real life, all the time.”
We compared notes. While both of us had been stuck in a place called a prison, we were in vastly different institutions. Mandela explained that, during his long stretch on Robben Island, he met regularly with his comrades. They ran their revolutionary struggle from their cells. They received frontline reports, set strategy, made tactical decisions, and sent instructions to the field. He didn’t have to play chess in his head.
Was the world of my struggle only imagined? Was I really that alone? For me, my dialogue with my people in prison was no less real than Mandela’s.
In prison, dreams offer a welcome escape from the depressing reality. Imagination usually helps keep hope alive. But, for political prisoners, these fantasies are risky. If you become too dependent on your dreams, it gives your captors another advantage over you. They know how to smash your delusions. When they undermine you by highlighting how far your imagination is from reality, the inevitable disappointment weakens your resistance even more.
In my mind, I was fiddling on the roof. I wanted to build my own world, with my own visions, that they couldn’t control. But I could not let my dreams or hopes propel me too far from reality.
Once you build an inner world where you control everything, you try to prop it up with whatever scraps of information you can hoard. You replay the interrogations in your mind, analyzing each word and gesture to see if your captors know something you want to know, if they let something significant slip. You find yourself analyzing every interaction you have for hints, for signs of what’s happening, and not, in the outside world.
It was significant, for example, that aside from two informers outed before my arrest, not one of the hundreds of Jewish activists I knew had betrayed me. If anyone had, the KGB would have pitted us against each other in a cross-interrogation, or used inside information gleaned from the informant to trip me up. The absence of any traitors proved to me that what I imagined was true: the movement remained robust and united.
Similarly, I was reassured when they kept pulling back at the last minute, lessening the physical pressures they imposed just enough, whenever my health deteriorated so much that my life was endangered. Their concern about keeping me alive showed that people far beyond my small cell were looking out for me.
When I was not in a punishment cell—where they deprived me of all conversations and reading material—I read the official Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, religiously. I read every line and between the lines. I wanted to see if the movement had attracted any attention or disrupted the dictatorship in any way.
That was why President Reagan’s words condemning the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” were so meaningful for all of us in the Gulag. Here was a Western leader who wasn’t fooled by the Soviet propaganda machine. I later discovered that his American critics condemned his speech as “the worst speech by a president, ever.” They claimed he had escalated world tensions by threatening a fellow superpower. For us prisoners, though, it was a great relief. It proved that the real world was catching on and standing up to the Soviet liars.
Month after month, my mail privileges were violated and no visitors were allowed. Whenever I served in a camp instead of a prison, I was entitled under Soviet law to one three-day meeting with relatives each year. Due to what the authorities called my “bad influence on the others,” I only had two such meetings, limited to one day each time, in my nine years. None were with Avital, of course, but my mother and brother visited. These rare interactions delivered buckets of information I could stockpile and use to feed my imagination for years thereafter.
For decades, my parents, my brother Leonid, and his wife, Raya, lived the life of loyal Soviet citizens. But my arrest turned them into real fighters. Despite being in her seventies, my mother made the long trek to the prison, sometimes in temperatures approaching forty below zero. One time, she had to walk the final miles, crossing a frozen river, only to leave disappointed when, once again, they would not let her see me.
After my mother’s second visit, Major Osin, the head of the camp Perm 35, approached her menacingly. As usual, the prison administration had listened in on our visit. “Be careful not to discuss what you heard from your son,” he said, unashamed at how obvious it was that he had eavesdropped. “It will not improve his situation.”
My short, peppery mother looked up at this tall, mean major towering over her and said quietly, “You have nothing to be afraid of. I will only tell the truth.” At that moment, he shrank and she grew. As soon as she returned to Moscow, she spoke to the reporters waiting for her train.
Did I know about the demonstrations and vigils and lobbying efforts for my release during those nine years? Obviously not. But I saw one protest on videotape, which was enough to fuel my imagination.
Before my trial, as I waded through the fifteen thousand pages the KGB had collected to use against me, I stumbled across some quotations from a film proving my “criminal activity.” It was a 1977 television documentary made by the British network Granada after my arrest, The Man Who Went Too Far.
I demanded to see the film. “Denying me the right to choose my own lawyer forced me to serve as my own defense attorney,” I explained. “I therefore have to understand everything being used against me.”
The KGB refused. I persisted. I refused to sign a statement acknowledging I had reviewed all the evidence. Shortly thereafter, I saw my first VCR when a Japanese machine rolled into the chief interrogator’s office.
First, they showed another Granada film they were using against me, A Calculated Risk. That took me back to 1976, when I told the Refuseniks’ story by sneaking around Moscow with a friendly British camera crew.
Then they inserted the second tape. The film focused on a demonstration demanding my release in front of the Soviet embassy in London. Scanning the crowd, I recognized some of my comrades in arms and some tourists I had met in Moscow. There were also many unfamiliar young people, waving signs with my face on them, shouting slogans demanding my freedom.
My heart started racing. There was Avital, leading the demonstration. She spoke perfect Hebrew and good English. She was determined, resolute, as she marched straight from the heart of London into my prison hell. The film’s twenty or so minutes passed too quickly.
I demanded to see it again.
“What, you liked it?” a KGB investigator sneered. “Once is enough. A prisoner under investigation may not watch television.”
I insisted, “I have the right to understand every word you are using against me.” I kept inventing more reasons: I missed this. I didn’t understand that. What was that English word?
After we had watched it three times, the head of my interrogation team, Colonel Viktor Ivanovich Volodin, exploded. “That’s enough! What do you think, that your fate is in the hands of those people, and not ours? They’re nothing more than students and housewives!”
Thank you, Colonel Volodin. I think you should go down in history with these words. You gave the best possible definition of our army.
The modest London protest of students and housewives, led by Avital, became for me the mother of all demonstrations. It typified the thousands of protests that would take place in my imagined world in the years to come.
Students and housewives. These were the good soldiers who had accompanied me before I entered prison. These were the comrades who continued to be with me in my imagined world. These were the people who never abandoned me in the real world I couldn’t see. I was thinking about them, and so many others, when I used every scrap of evidence I received to convince myself that this imagined world was real. And I was right.
Students and housewives. Well, technically, some were teachers, like Michael Sherbourne, a Russian language instructor. When he estimated in the film that he and I had had thousands of telephone conversations about the human rights situation in the Soviet Union over the years, the KGB quoted him to further prove my criminal activity.
One day, just as the movement was beginning, Michael started calling Refuseniks in Moscow from London. He never stopped until we were freed. He became a human switchboard, connecting us Refuseniks with world Jewry. When I was most involved in the movement, he and I spoke two, three, four times a week.
Michael spent most of his evenings speaking to Refuseniks, taping the calls, transcribing them, and then distributing the transcripts. The more phone calls he made, the more he had to use assumed names and borrowed phones. He reassured us. He put us in touch with one another, playing London matchmaker. He shared our stories with the world.
In my imagined world, Michael continued dialing and chatting and updating. He refused to let any of us feel forgotten and never stopped pressuring the Soviets, who discovered that he wouldn’t let any Refusenik fall between the cracks.
Meanwhile, in the real world I couldn’t see, at the start of my trial in 1978 a British student arrived in Moscow and leased a room in one of the city’s most luxurious—and KGB-protected and watched—hotels, the Metropol. Every night, the one relative allowed to attend my trial, my brother, Leonid, would visit the young student. Using the KGB’s protected phone lines, Michael, in London, would call his young friend at the Metropol. Leonid would then get on the phone and describe the day’s proceedings in detail so Michael could spread news of the trial globally.
Another educator, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of New York, had starred in the KGB’s list of my accomplices. We had met in Moscow in 1975 and became friends when we marched together for miles all over the city one Saturday—Shabbat. It was the first time I had discovered this particular price to being Jewish, the prohibition against driving one day a week. We walked and walked and walked so he could deliver his lecture on Jewish heroism, both spiritual and physical, to different groups of warring Refuseniks.
In my imagination, this popular principal continued leading generations of students from Ramaz, the school at his synagogue, to demonstrations at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, urging the United Nations to act.
In the real world, Rabbi Lookstein had mobilized the students and housewives and lawyers and real estate moguls at his magnificent synagogue, Kehilath Jeshurun, on New York’s Upper East Side. Having calculated the number of Sabbaths in my thirteen-year sentence, every week he publicly posted on East 85th Street how many of the 679 Saturdays I had served and how many I had left. He placed an empty chair on the bimah, the podium, during the High Holidays “to remind the worshipers that as they prayed comfortably Soviet Jews had no such opportunity.”
Like hundreds of other rabbis, he became a fashion plate and a matchmaker. He encouraged congregants to sport cheap metal bracelets engraved with the names of “prisoners of conscience.” And he twinned younger congregants with twelve- and thirteen-year-old Soviet Jewish pen pals who weren’t free to have similar bar or bat mitzvah coming-of-age ceremonies.
Lookstein’s synagogue became a center of braceleting, twinning, lobbying, let-my-people-going, and never-againing. He and his educational staff raised generations of Ramaz students to understand that “saving Soviet Jewry” was as central to their education as math, science, and Bible studies. Reaching out to Jews through the Iron Curtain was as important as getting into the Ivy League.
As for housewives, there were many of them too: Irene Manikovsky from Washington, DC, Lynn Singer from New York, Connie Smukler and Enid Wurtman from Philadelphia, and June Daniels from Des Moines. I had met them when they visited Moscow with their spouses, and they became the Refuseniks’ living phone lines to the world.
In my imagination, they kept visiting and connecting and pressing their representatives in Congress, earning respectable places on the list of my accomplices within my KGB file.
In the real world, some of them so abused the regime’s hospitality that they were banned for life from the Soviet Union. Connie Smukler was detained for twenty-four hours and threatened with a one-way ticket to Siberia. Back home, she and her comrades created an international network of hospitality, hosting the families of prisoners of Zion, who crisscrossed the world, like Avital, going from home to home, town to town, and country to country, advocating for their loved ones’ freedom.
Then there were the students. In 1964, four students from Columbia University initiated the first demonstration for Soviet Jews. From there, they created the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and continued to be enthusiastic partners.
In my imagination, they continued mobilizing at key moments and interrupting Soviet business and cultural delegations who arrived in the United States, refusing to leave Soviet officials alone until the regime let our people go.
In the real world, the leader of the SSSJ from 1982 on, Rabbi Avi Weiss, went on a hunger strike in front of the Soviet consulate in New York, just as I started my hunger strike in Chistopol prison. For years, Rabbi Weiss traveled with Avital all over America, mobilizing support for our cause.
My imagined world came impressively close to the real world. Sometimes these parallel worlds met. During my prison years, whenever I read newspaper attacks mocking my wife, I was thrilled. Articles satirizing the “travels of that adventurer” or condemning meddlesome Americans for meeting with the wife of a spy electrified me. The blood would rush to my head. My heart would start pounding. Here was one more clue that, maybe, instead of my dreams misleading me and unfairly raising my hopes, they were too cautious and constrained. I started wondering if what was going on in the outside world was even bigger and better than I imagined.
The art student I had married, and then saw whisked off to Israel a few hours later, was quiet and shy. People mistakenly thought that meant she was fragile too. Still, neither Avital nor I imagined that she would spend years leading marches, inspiring hundreds of thousands of people at rallies, and lobbying presidents and prime ministers.
Avital’s first circle of supporters consisted of Rabbi Kook’s followers. Through the I Am My Brother’s Keeper organization, they accompanied her as she traveled. Her second circle was the students and housewives: the growing global network of tourists, phone friends, letter writers and protesters. Beyond that, she learned to work with the Soviet Jewish organizations, despite their turf wars, and with the Israeli government, despite its initial ambivalence.
From the moment of my arrest, Avital rushed into battle with a spirited determination. Every day felt critical to her. Initially, when she encountered people who didn’t share her sense of urgency, it could bring her to tears. On one of her first trips to Washington, DC, she met some of the members of Congress I had met in Moscow. She expected them to understand the imminent danger I faced and act immediately.
Instead, they reacted cautiously. “We don’t know the real circumstances of the arrest,” said one. “We must be careful,” said another. “Let’s take it slow,” said a third.
Frustrated that legislators were so plodding when the danger was so pressing, Avital went into the next room and burst into tears. “There, there, maidele,” Jacob Javits, New York’s senior senator, said as he consoled her, using the endearing Yiddish term for “sweet child.” “I understand. You have such a big job on your shoulders. You will have to grow with the case. But remember this: Don’t just do one hit. Think big.”
Early in the global campaign to keep me alive, we scored a big success. Two months after my arrest, when rumors were flying about me, President Carter pronounced in a press conference that he had “inquired deeply within the State Department and within the CIA as to whether or not Mr. Sharansky has ever had any known relationship in a subversive way or otherwise with the CIA.… The answer,” he declared, “is no.”
This statement marked a major departure for American policy. Presidents usually kept silent about Soviet spying allegations. Denying any one accusation risked implying that others might be guilty.
But the chain of influence had passed the message to Carter that this was a matter of life and death. It started on the street, with Avital supported by students and housewives. Through the legal network of professors Irwin Cotler and Alan Dershowitz, it reached Dershowitz’s former student Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser. Eizenstat convinced the president.
This unprecedented statement, distancing our movement from allegations of spying, wasn’t news to the Soviets. They knew the truth. But Carter’s statement helped neutralize the official Soviet propaganda and the unofficial rumors against me that had been disseminated in the West and in the Jewish community.
Though I was convinced that the Jewish world would not abandon me, I never imagined such a massive global coalition would emerge. I do not believe it would have grown or persisted as it did without Avital’s energy, idealism, and deep faith that all would end well.
Years later, when I met French president François Mitterrand, he said, “You know, over the years, your wife sat in that same chair you’re sitting in many times. She always asked for help and I always did whatever I could. I couldn’t say no to her.” He recalled Avital’s pure faith, how she told everyone that tomorrow might just be the day I would be free and we could start our family. “Frankly, I didn’t believe her,” he admitted. “It was the Soviet Union. We knew what they did to their enemies.”
Mitterrand, like most of the others, had essentially thought, “Whatever gets you through the day.” If this woman needed to believe her delusions to keep mobilized, why not indulge her? “I have to say now,” he confessed, “she was right. She proved it to those of us who had doubts. She never stopped and always believed. I helped, but I didn’t believe.” Mitterrand had belonged to a broad army of good-hearted skeptics, who often found themselves helping more than their rational selves calculated they should.
An American friend in Washington went even further. He said that Avital often claimed that releasing me and other prisoners would be like uncorking a bottle; the system would never survive it. But everyone knew back then that the world was divided into two stable, unshakeable superpowers: the Soviet Union and the United States. Few took her delusion seriously.
One of the first telephone calls Avital made after my arrest was to Israel’s opposition leader, Menachem Begin. Rather than chiding her for the late hour, he thanked her for calling and asked, “How can I help?” Two months later, in May 1977, Begin was elected prime minister after nearly three decades in opposition. He helped however he could.
Yehiel Kadishai, Begin’s personal assistant, once approached the prime minister with an unusual request. Bezeq, Israel’s phone company, had complained that Avital’s international phone bill was too big, and growing. International calls were incredibly expensive then, especially in socialist Israel, which had a phone monopoly. Kadishai asked Begin if the government could pay the bill, which ran into the thousands of shekels.
“No, the government cannot pay the bill,” Begin said. “But I can.” He pulled out his personal checkbook.
Leaders from the opposing party helped as well. Avital met Mitterrand through Shimon Peres, who introduced her to his network of leaders through the Socialist International.
When Prime Minister Begin, President Carter, and President Anwar Sadat signed the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty in March 1979, Begin invited Avital to join the Israeli delegation to Washington. At the formal celebration on the White House lawn, Avital was seated far away from the center, where the three leaders sat surrounded by security guards. Never willing to miss an opportunity, Avital marched toward them and started speaking.
Fortunately, Begin’s Israeli guards recognized her and let her approach. “Menachem, what about my husband’s case?” she asked. There was an awkward pause as everyone looked down, unsure of what to do about this breach of protocol. Sadat, the ever-charming Egyptian, was the first to pop up and welcome her with open arms. He said, “Oh, Mrs. Sharansky, your husband is a real hero in Egypt.”
Naturally, Avital used the Jewish network as much as possible, even though she sometimes encountered resistance there too. During my hunger strike, knowing little and imagining a lot, Avital was desperate. She spent a lot of time abroad, mostly in America. One day, she heard that a top Soviet official would be meeting Margaret Thatcher. In 1980, Thatcher, the British prime minister, had offered to help, telling Avital, “Your predicament exemplifies the great suffering inflicted on those in the Soviet Union who dare to speak their minds.”
Provided with another key phone number from another supporter, Avital called Thatcher’s chief of staff, David Wolfson. When he answered, she started chatting away. “You know,” she said, “my husband is in serious danger. I am flying to London immediately. I want to speak to Mrs. Thatcher tomorrow.”
There was a cold silence on the other end. “My lady, did you look at your watch? Do you know what the time is?” Wolfson asked haughtily. It was after midnight London time.
“I’m sorry. I got confused,” Avital admitted. “But tomorrow I will be in London.”
“Who do you think you are?” Wolfson started shouting. “Appointments are made months in advance. Leaders of countries wait that long and don’t make these kinds of last-minute requests. Do you think the world revolves around you and your husband? You cannot wake people up in the middle of the night just because you have a cause!”
It was the wrong thing to say, in the wrong way. Avital, who is usually so soft-spoken, stopped feeling guilty about disturbing Wolfson. Calmly but firmly, she said, “Yes, in fact the whole world does revolve around this. There are Jews in the Soviet Union who are being held in prison simply for their desire to be Jewish and to come to the Jewish homeland, only a few decades after the Holocaust. We have no choice but to work day and night to fight this.”
Pausing for effect and returning to her more spiritual self, she added, “Who knows. Perhaps this is your role in history right now, to make sure I meet Margaret Thatcher and hasten the end of this tragedy.”
The phone call ended badly. Avital flew to London anyway. When she landed in Heathrow Airport the next day, a limousine Wolfson had sent was waiting to take her to five o’clock tea with Prime Minister Thatcher. Avital and Wolfson apologized to one another. The next day, the Iron Lady, as Thatcher was known, had the Soviet ambassador to Great Britain called in to the Foreign Office and told that the British government objected to the USSR’s treatment of dissidents, including me.
A nine-year emergency runs the risk of becoming routine. Reporters yawn in the face of persistent injustice. Journalists would shrug off Avital’s pleas for yet another “my husband’s unfairly imprisoned” story, snorting, “Is he dead? Is he released? If not, sorry, there’s no story.” That only forced Avital to get more creative.
On International Human Rights Day, December 10, 1984, Avital and eleven other human rights activists were invited to meet President Reagan at the White House. Reagan’s handlers instructed them to shake the president’s hand briefly and move on. By this time, Avital followed Orthodox Judaism’s modesty guidelines, which prohibit men and women who aren’t married to one another from touching.
Ignoring the handlers, and relying on the Jewish permission to break religious law when lives are at stake, Avital grasped Reagan’s hand and wouldn’t release it, saying, “I have to speak to you.” The next day, a moving photograph of the concerned president looking tenderly at the determined wife dominated the front page of the New York Times and many other papers. Reagan’s gesture telegraphed an essential message to the Russians: the president was extremely sympathetic to this cause. And the Russians were noticing.
Just a few weeks later, in January 1985, American officials tried to ban Avital from a tense diplomatic summit between US secretary of state George Shultz and Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. A friend had helped her enter the pressroom about ten minutes before members of the American delegation gave their regular briefing. Journalists seeking a story about tensions during the peace talks pounced. Avital ended up addressing the world about our cause. The Soviet diplomats were furious.
At a meeting that afternoon, the American diplomats were tut-tutting about her disruption. They worried their Soviet colleagues would blame them and view Avital’s plea as an American provocation. Her intrusion particularly offended a representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The officials started suggesting ways to send Avital away as a public punishment that might mollify the Soviets.
Secretary of State Shultz shut down his subordinates. “Hey, wait,” he said. “Don’t touch her. I’d like to think that if my wife were out and I were in the Gulag, she would be commandeering a room to demonstrate for me.”
The US-Soviet negotiations finally resulted in the first summit between the two countries since 1979, also held in Geneva. In November 1985, President Reagan met the new young Soviet leader, whose openness Westerners were praising, Mikhail Gorbachev. Dressed in a prison uniform, Avital tried delivering a letter to Gorbachev’s popular wife, Raisa Gorbachev, taking advantage of all the fanfare surrounding the charismatic couple.
Pressed by the Soviets, the Swiss police detained Avital for two hours. According to other arrested protesters, the officers spent the time yelling at her “abusively.” The letter, which she distributed widely to the press, read, “Dear Mrs. Gorbachev: You are a wife and mother. Permit me to be a wife and mother. Release my husband, my Anatoly.” It added, “Whenever he travels, you want to see your husband when he comes home—so do I.”
At the summit, the president of the United States told the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, “You can keep saying that Sharansky is an American spy, but my people trust that woman. And as long as you keep him and other political prisoners locked up, we will not be able to establish a relationship of trust.”
Three months later, without any of the previous preconditions, I became the first political prisoner Gorbachev released.
It was a long way from the Geneva summit’s fairy-tale mansions where President Reagan demanded my freedom to the nightmarish Ural Mountains labor camp where the Soviet regime had imprisoned me. In the Gulag system, the different penal institutions build a pyramid of deprivations. From the labor camps, to the prisons, to the labor camps’ prisons, to the punishment cells, you get more isolation, less mail, fewer visits from loved ones, increasingly limited exposure to fresh air, and reduced nutrition. There were eighteen so-called diets. These were the levels of rations, from 1a down to 9b, which was the punishment-cell special: three pieces of bread and three cups of hot water a day. In November 1985, when Reagan and Gorbachev finally met for the first US-Soviet summit in eight years, I was once again on the lowest level, the punishment cell.
A few weeks later, I started experiencing unprecedented disruptions in the Gulag’s never-ending prison routine. My captors took me straight out of the punishment cell to the hospital, yanking me from the 9b diet to 1a overnight, skipping the sixteen levels in between. They were suddenly generous in their portions, serving me foods I had almost forgotten about, like eggs. They started injecting me with vitamins and glucose, as if I were a racehorse, clearly trying to strengthen me. They let me walk outside for two hours a day so I could rediscover fresh air, snow, and sunshine after being deprived of nature for so long.
Even the smallest deviations from totalitarian monotony trigger a prisoner’s imagination, usually raising false hopes. But these dramatic violations of the rules cried out for explanation.
Nine years of confinement train you to limit your mental meanderings, or risk depression when your hopes are dashed yet again. So I told myself, “They must be preparing me for some meeting with higher-ups.”
The clearest sign that something was up came when the barber skipped me. The barbers came regularly to shave our heads so we would look like walking skeletons. They never missed any of us. Obviously, the powers that be didn’t want me looking like a prisoner anymore. That was the most convincing proof that they wanted to parade me before someone, somewhere.
The miracles accumulate. Events that exceed my wildest dreams start coming true. A three-car convoy with sirens blaring drives me away from the labor camp. We whiz through the villages and forests until we arrive at the nearest airport. We board a passenger jet large enough to carry more than one hundred passengers, but it’s only for me and four KGB escorts. We land in Moscow. We then return to my alma mater, Lefortovo prison.
I spend a few days in the KGB’s Moscow jail, with no explanation of course. Then, one morning they replace my prison garb with civilian clothes, many sizes too large for my still-underweight body. The only non-civilian touch is a drawstring to keep my pants up. Prisoners aren’t permitted belts or shoelaces.
It’s all happening abruptly and harshly, steeped in the usual KGB silence. All I have to do is watch the dream unfold and remember to protest now and then, so I don’t passively accept the KGB’s script. As usual, the Soviets’ brutishness makes it easy. I keep protesting whenever they insist I leave everything behind, including my book of Psalms, a special gift from Avital I had received a few days before my arrest. I had spent weeks in hunger strikes and punishment cells because I insisted on keeping this gift, which she managed to send to me via Jewish tourist airmail from Jerusalem. Since then, my regular meetings with King David, the psalm writer, had entertained me, soothed me, and improved my Hebrew. This was no time for us to break up.
So I throw myself down in the snow and shout loudly, wherever I am, to make sure my one made-in-Israel possession keeps traveling with me. I note how quick they are to cave in, to smooth things along.
Like the locks in a canal that lift passing boats from lower water levels to higher ones, I climb to freedom in stages. A second, even larger airplane takes off, again with just five of us. I still refuse to believe that it’s happening, really happening. Yet, judging by the sun, I see we are flying west. I start calculating just when we might fly across the border.
As we cross, the leader of the four KGB men comes from behind the curtain at the front of the airplane. He informs me stiffly that, by special decision of the Soviet government, due to misbehavior, I am being stripped of my Soviet citizenship and exiled from the Soviet Union.
Now I cannot deceive myself anymore. I surrender to the realization: I am free.
He had made a statement, so I make one too, even though he tries to cut me off, saying, “We don’t need your statement.” Still, I insist on saying our truth, expressing the hope that freedom will soon come to the many others I am leaving behind.
Finally, after nine years, I can turn to King David for praise, not just comfort. I read the psalm that I had chosen years ago, back when my release was still an impossible dream. It’s Psalm 30, a song of thanksgiving at the chanukkat habayit, the dedication of the house of David: “O Lord, you have brought up my soul from the grave. You have kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit.”
We land in East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic, a city of bridges and that infamous wall dividing East from West. Berlin strikes me as an odd place for a Jew to get his freedom.
“You see that car, Anatoly Borisovich? Go straight to it and don’t make any turns,” one escort says calmly, expecting to stay out of camera view and in the warm cabin of the plane as I walk out into the February freeze. “Is it agreed?”
“Agreed?” I am still in KGB world, and therefore cannot agree. “Since when do I make agreements with the KGB?” I ask. “You know that I never agree with the KGB about anything. If you tell me to go straight, I will go crooked.”
“You see, you are not serious. We cannot deal with you,” he snaps, as the minders mumbled among themselves. As a result, two of them get out of the plane first and flank me on either side. As promised, I zigzag across the tarmac, from the Russian airplane to an East German car. As I lurch left, then right, the TV cameras are rolling and the KGB agents are yelling at me to straighten out. One flustered cameraman ends up banging into the window of the waiting car as he films.
The next day, in the final stage of my release, I am driven onto the subzero, snow-covered Glienicke bridge. I am then escorted to freedom by the tall American ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany, Richard Burt.
I don’t need to zigzag here. I am no longer in KGB hands. Besides, I have a more pressing worry: those big pants and that flimsy drawstring. I ask Ambassador Burt, “Where is the border, exactly?” He points to a four-inch line the Germans had kindly cleared of snow. As I mark my entry to freedom, I jump with joy—and the string pops. I enter the free world just barely catching my pants before they fall down.
Somewhere in the Frankfurt Airport, I enter some godforsaken room. There, I see the same girl I had taken to the Moscow airport twelve years ago, a few hours after our wedding. I had promised my new wife we would reunite soon. Now, trying to control my tears, I say to her in Hebrew, “Silchi li she’icharti kzat”—sorry I’m a little late. I am living inside my dream, and not resisting it. I just keep clutching Avital because I fear the dream will stop. Holding her hand will prevent me from waking up back in the punishment cell.
The small airplane Israel sent lands at Ben-Gurion Airport, just outside Tel Aviv. The door opens. “Here’s our prime minister, Shimon Peres,” Avital says, making introductions. “And here’s our foreign minister, Yitzhak Shamir. And here are the two chief rabbis…”
Soon I would talk to President Ronald Reagan by telephone, and after that his secretary of state, George Shultz. I thank them for all they did, and remind them the struggle continues.
“How could you have been so calm?” people ask me today after watching videos of those conversations. By then, nothing could ruffle me. I was living my dreams. If, at the moment, I had been told that the next phone call was coming from King David himself, it would have made as much sense as everything else. After all, wouldn’t it have been natural for me to compare notes with my comrade in arms, after we spent all that time together?
I had run out of the ability to be surprised. I had moved straight from hell to paradise in a flash. A day that had started in the hands of my captors ended at the Western Wall in the hands of thousands of dancing, cheering, singing Jews celebrating our reunion. “It was just one long day,” Avital sighed later that night, in our new home in Jerusalem. “I arrived in Israel in the morning. You arrived in the evening. It was just one very, very long day in between.”
From a life of a few daily macro decisions—yes or no, surrender or resist—my life became filled with micro decisions. I found myself having to make thousands of the most mundane choices, big and small: Tea or coffee? A white shirt or a blue one? In the beginning, it irritated me. “Why do I have to think about all this?” I grumbled. I pawned off as many of these little choices as I could onto my wife. Gradually, freedom spoiled me enough to enjoy these options, to choose my morning coffee, my afternoon tea, a favorite shirt.
The landscape of Israel, the light of Israel, became part of my life very naturally. In one of her first letters from Israel, Avital, with her artist’s eye, said the light there was different, so bright while Moscow was so gray. She was not giving a weather report. She was bathing in the light of old-new Jerusalem—and the lightness of freedom.
After a week of nonstop meetings, interviews, and hugging and high-fiving on the streets of Jerusalem whenever we walked out of our new home, Avital and I escaped up north to Safed.
The morning after we arrived in this mystical city and looked out from our balcony and heard birds chirping, I felt like we had arrived in the Garden of Eden, paradise itself. The almond trees were blooming, and the canopies of white and pink flowers looked like our own personal escort—custom-made signs of my homecoming. Today, whenever I hear the classic Zionist children’s song “Hashkediya Porachat” (the almond tree is blooming) for the Tu B’shvat Arbor Day holiday, and every winter when those trees bloom, Avital and I delight in this symbol of our reunion.
In February 1986, the history I had desperately wanted to join since 1967 became a part of my everyday life. I was steeped in it wherever I wandered. King David had had to work hard, overcoming a gap of thousands of years, to reach me through his psalms. Now, by choosing to live in Jerusalem, the City of David, I had made my former companion an old neighbor. I visited the Valley of Elah, where a young David fought Goliath, and remembered the looming, unclothed statue in my apartment growing up.
Given a chance to touch Jewish history at its most intimate, I got a special tour of the vast, two-thousand-year-old tunnels beside the Western Wall. I stopped at the spot closest to where the holy of holies, the center of the Temple, once stood. This was not only where so many Jews for so long wished they could be. This was where Avital had prayed for me occasionally, having been given special access by the Western Wall rabbi at the height of my hunger strike and during other dark moments of that four-thousand-day-long day.
Shortly after arriving in Israel, Avital had started living a fully traditional Jewish life. Her faith gave her great strength over the years. My movement toward traditional observance was slower. This gap in our outward observance began to fuel much speculation. Many couldn’t imagine how we would overcome our differences. The silly debate started in the newspapers: What will happen first? the gossips snickered. Will Natan put on a kippah, or will Avital take off her head covering—and will they divorce? Of course, this was ridiculous to us. We didn’t feel endangered by our differences. How could variations in religious ritual prevent us from staying together when the KGB couldn’t tear us apart?
But, like crazed soccer fans, people were rooting for me to join their team and wear their uniform: stay bareheaded with the seculars, accept the simple black kippah of the ultra-Orthodox, or find the right mix of color, material, and size that would ally me with one slice or another of the Religious Zionist community.
Irritated by all the leering at my bald head, I put on the green Israeli military cap, which had a flimsy brim in front. I got my first one from an American visiting Moscow, who gave it to me along with the thrilling compliment that we young Jewish activists seemed as brave as Israeli soldiers. That hat stuck to my head. It remains affixed to this day. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stopped producing such caps long ago. So the latest hats that look closest to the original say on the lining, “Made in China.”
On my first Saturday together with Avital, I was invited for a special VIP sightseeing tour in Jerusalem. Avital said nothing, but clearly preferred that I not violate the Sabbath. I skipped the tour without hesitation. The most important thing to me was shalom bayit, a happy, tranquil home. I would defer to Avital when it came to choosing our future children’s schools and educational paths.
I soon understood what a treasure the Sabbath was in our life, and I started complaining that we didn’t have two every week. Adjusting to the sheer volume of Jewish prayers took a bit more work. Here, too, it was easy in prison: knowing no prayers, I could invent them for myself and say whatever I wanted, keeping it short. Now, I had no excuse; I had to follow the lengthy text.
But the most profound change was that this new freedom truly liberated me to live comfortably with my identity. Suddenly, in Israel, I wasn’t a Jewish doublethinker anymore. In my past life, being Jewish had always been an effort. Whether it was a burden, a birthright, or a passport to pride, it made me stand out. I was often self-conscious that, as a Jew, I represented the Jewish people, even when doing the most trivial things in public.
I discovered that many of my friends in America shared this Jewish doublethinking burden, but it was different in Israel. There, I didn’t represent the Jews. I didn’t speak for them. I simply lived like one of them, with my family. Now I could relax and be myself.
Like all immigrants, I was uprooted. I had left part of myself in Russia. While becoming accustomed to technological surprises—such as record players in most people’s cars, called CD players, and telephones in diplomats’ and politicians’ vehicles—there were cultural adjustments too. As I listened to the news in Hebrew, I understood more day by day, but I also understood that I would never express myself in Hebrew as I did in Russian.
To this day, whenever I open a new book or go to the theater, I feel a pang. I miss that excitement, that sense of anticipation, that comes from encountering a work of art that flirts with dissent, that’s passing on a hidden message or subtly trying to defy the authorities. By contrast, everything in Israel is open, direct, and often lacking sophistication. And whenever I lick an ice-cream cone, I miss the tastes and smells of my childhood.
Within minutes of my liberation, the Americans told me that their agreement with the Soviets included granting exit visas to my closest relatives. But by the summer, the Soviets were procrastinating, refusing to release my mother; my brother, Leonid; his wife, Raya; and their two sons: Boris, who was one, and Aleksandr, who was fifteen. The authorities hoped to use my concern for my family to bully me into silence. But I knew I couldn’t bargain with gangsters.
In July, I called David Shipler of the New York Times. David had stood by my mother and brother during the difficult days of my trial, and subsequently, as a reporter and a sympathetic ear. I told him the Soviets were breaking their commitment. “They could play with me; I have years ahead of me,” I said. “But my mother is of such an age that I cannot permit them to play this game too long.”
David published my words, and within weeks my seventy-seven-year-old mother was on her way, along with Leonid and his family. Leonid lived in Israel for a few years, then found work in the United States. Today, he and Raya split their time between Des Moines and Pasadena (where their children and grandchildren live) and Eilat (where they prefer to live). My mother settled in Jerusalem and lived near us as a proud mother and grandmother for another sixteen years. Both our daughters blossomed in her lap until they outgrew it.
Yet, with all this excitement, with all these adjustments to paradise, we didn’t forget for a moment that the struggle had to continue for those left behind.
It was time to end this chapter of my life, when the borders between my imagination and reality kept blurring. For some time, that imagined world of Jewish unity continued to shape my real life. The best example of this was the historic march on Washington to free Soviet Jewry on December 6, 1987. That mass demonstration would be the last big public act of our global struggle to tear down the Iron Curtain.
Avital and I were slowly comparing notes about our experiences during our “minus twelve,” the long years apart. We didn’t need to do it all at once; we had our whole lives ahead. We continue to uncover new stories to this day.
Just a few weeks after my liberation, the doctors delivered great news: Avital was pregnant. We were overjoyed, and quite relieved. We had feared that by the time I was free it would be too late for us to have a family. But the news came with a health warning. Avital was bedridden for most of the pregnancy. The doctor’s demands at least fulfilled one of Avital’s desires. She was retiring. She was no longer interested in playing the public role our fate had imposed on her. “Now you are my spokesman,” she told me.
Passing the baton to me, she happily vanished from the TV screens and newspaper headlines. But she kept sharing the key lessons she had learned as a reluctant activist. We both knew the fight had to continue. Avital and her allies had long refused to limit their cause to saving her husband, a few dozen prisoners of Zion, or even a few thousand Refuseniks. Seeking the exodus of an entire people, they started speaking about four hundred thousand Jews impatiently waiting for visas to go to Israel. That number represented all the Jews who had requested that the Israeli government send invitations to emigrate, minus those who had already left. That number proved that the fight for Soviet Jewry was a grand historical struggle for freedom. Only a big, broad, and ambitious campaign would work.
That sweeping vision, she informed me, had become the latest wedge issue separating her activist friends from the leaders of the organized Jewish community and the representatives of the Israeli government. We called them the Establishment.
Instinctively cautious and fearful of making the problem seem too daunting, the Establishment leaders opposed this “irresponsible” inflation of the numbers. They preferred to speak at most about thirty thousand Jews they believed had already applied to go to Israel. Israel’s diplomats stuck to that number too.
Avital reported that one insider had dissented: Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations since 1984, Benjamin Netanyahu. At his previous posting in Washington, Bibi had become Avital’s main strategic adviser in dealing with the American government. He was the only Israeli official in the United States ready to ignore the Liaison Office’s marching orders.
“Wow,” I interrupted her. “Does he have any connection to Yoni Netanyahu?”—the hero of Entebbe whose portrait was hanging in my room when I was arrested. Working with Yoni’s brother felt like yet another miracle, magically closing the circle between my old world and my new one.
Many like to forget this now, but back when he was Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Netanyahu was the toast of New York—and of American Jewry. The New York Times praised him in 1985 “for his ability to speak spontaneously” with great “passion,” while hailing “his effective use of sarcasm to make a point.” Beyond his eloquence was real cleverness. Avital explained to me that shortly after President Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative—popularly known as Star Wars—in 1983, Bibi figured out how to use it for our cause. Star Wars unnerved the Soviets. They feared it threw off their strategic standoff with America.
Bibi advised Avital that she had an opportunity to help the Soviets realize that the way they were treating the Refuseniks only fed American distrust of the Soviet Union, which then strengthened support for Star Wars. This argument truly made it in the Soviets’ best interest to treat Soviet Jews more humanely. Supplementing Avital’s already extensive contact list, Bibi helped her use whatever levers in Washington and New York were possible to deliver that message clearly.
Avital also recalled complaining to Bibi in 1985 about the Establishment’s resistance to any discussion regarding the four hundred thousand Jews.
“But what do you believe is true?” Bibi asked.
“We are sure that four hundred thousand is the minimum number of Jews who want to leave. It’s probably higher,” she replied.
“Then go with your truth,” he encouraged her. “Let’s put this figure into circulation. Don’t give up!”
Bibi introduced Avital to influential lobbyists, especially Marvin Josephson and his National PAC. Together, Josephson and Avital met with key congressional leaders, speaking about the four hundred thousand Jews who needed help. They urged legislators to pass a resolution affirming that what President Reagan called “real friendship” and “real peace” with the Soviet Union depended on our people being freed.
The result was S. J. Res. 161 of the Ninety-Ninth Congress. This joint resolution, which became law on August 6, 1985, called for my release, along with the release of Yosef Begun and all “prisoners of conscience.” It singled out long-term Refuseniks, including Vladimir Slepak and Ida Nudel, both in their fifteenth year of waiting. The original resolution also called for releasing the heart-tugging, epoch-making number of four hundred thousand Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate.
Yet, somehow, when the resolution passed both the House of Representatives and the Senate and insiders reconciled the two texts, our magic number vanished. Instead, there was a vague call for “thousands of Jews who wish to emigrate.” The Establishment had intervened.
Now, it was my turn to lead the fight for the four hundred thousand. Before I flew to the United States, Avital detailed the constant tensions between the different Jewish organizations. “Everybody is going to want you to join their organization,” she warned. “But don’t join anyone. Stay independent. And understand, our first allies are the students”—best represented by the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry—“and the housewives”—best represented by the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews (UCSJ) and the Thirty-Five, a women’s organization in England and Canada.
“You need these grassroots activists to get things started,” Avital explained. “Still, the Establishment”—best represented by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry—“wields the real power. The Establishment will be the last to join. But when they finally step in and take the credit, then you will know you have won.”
That’s exactly what happened—eventually.
Before my trip, I spoke to David Makovsky, the head of the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS), who had organized many demonstrations supporting Avital. David told me that people were feeling confused, unsure whether to continue pressing the increasingly popular Mikhail Gorbachev. Elie Wiesel had advised the students: Take matters in your own hands. Don’t wait for the Establishment. Go to Washington. March, lobby, protest. No one will do it for you.
I arrived in New York in May 1986 to thank and to spur. In every meeting—with the president, other politicians, journalists, professors, students, Jewish leaders, and thousands of Americans—I expressed my gratitude, then called for renewed efforts to save the four hundred thousand.
During a reception New York mayor Ed Koch hosted for dozens of Jewish leaders, I had my eureka moment. Thinking about the four hundred thousand, and anticipating that Gorbachev would eventually visit Washington as US-Soviet relations continued to improve, I just blurted it out. “Four hundred thousand Soviet Jews are waiting for us to act,” I said. “When Mikhail Gorbachev visits the White House, let’s have four hundred thousand American Jews march on Washington shouting ‘Let my people go.’”
I didn’t mean four hundred thousand protesters literally. And there was no summit planned yet. I was trying to illustrate the magnitude of the Soviet Jewish problem. But the minute I said it, I liked it. The picture of hundreds of thousands of Jews, marching on Washington, demanding that the Soviet leaders free hundreds of thousands of Jews, came straight from my prison memory bank, from the imagined world that had sustained me for nine years. That’s how a quick quip became an action plan.
“Natan, the Establishment organizations will do nothing,” Wiesel warned me when we conferred the next day. “Don’t waste your energy on them. Go to the students.”
The Establishment’s first reaction confirmed Wiesel and Avital’s warnings. The leaders lectured me. They insisted it was irresponsible to speak about four hundred thousand Soviet Jews without proof. And it was irresponsible to speak about four hundred thousand American Jews. “How many Jews live in Washington?” they asked. “It’s not New York.”
What if the leaders’ summit fell during the winter? Experts from the National Conference on Soviet Jewry estimated a maximum of eighteen thousand marchers. We would all look foolish. Besides, it was irresponsible to endanger American Jews by having them sound like warmongers. Gorbachev had dazzled Americans as an agent of change. Even Democrats were starting to applaud Reagan, the Republican right-winger, for giving peace a chance.
Some sneered, “With all due respect”—that killer American phrase that always means an attack is imminent—“what do you understand about American politics, the Jewish community, or organizing protests here?” Nevertheless, I persisted, month after month, meeting after meeting.
Trying to save me, Morris Abram offered a compromise. This exemplary community leader, who chaired the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, promised to get all one hundred senators standing on the Capitol steps, demanding freedom for Soviet Jewry.
Another invaluable ally and new close friend, Rabbi Avi Weiss, stepped in. As leader of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, he warned me, “Don’t expect anything from the Establishment. Even if they say they will do it, they cannot do it.” Instead, he offered to find one hundred rabbis to chain themselves to the Russian embassy whenever Gorbachev visited, ready to be arrested for the cause. But I didn’t want one hundred of anything. I envisioned a mass rally echoing my prison dreams.
In the middle of the summer of 1987, I once again checked in with David Makovsky about our progress. “Nothing’s happening,” he reported. The Establishment still opposed a mass march. The US-Soviet summit remained unscheduled. Students were distracted, with many working at Jewish summer camps. “Nobody’s talking about it,” he said. “If you want this to happen, you have to come to America and speak constantly about it here.”
That August, Avital, our ten-month-old daughter Rachel, and I moved to New York. By October, they had returned home. I stayed through early December, when Gorbachev finally visited Washington.
I traveled from one place to another, visiting thirty-two Jewish communities in total. In each city, I would brief the leaders, give interviews to reporters, meet with the editorial boards of newspapers, address two or three synagogues, and recruit as many students as possible.
To avoid the organizational trap Avital warned against, we had an independent operation. Two former top policy aides to Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, Ari Weiss and Jack Lew, who had both helped Avital, volunteered. Using their Washington network, we found a base: Van Ness Feldman, the new law firm founded by some of Senator Henry Jackson’s former aides. For months, a rotation of high-powered chaperones accompanied me: Ari, Jack, David Makovsky, and his brother, Michael Makovsky, a student at the time.
My message to the Jewish communities was simple: now is your moment to change history. “We’ve come so far,” I said. I listed Americans’ many shared achievements in championing Soviet Jewry. “This march is the last push,” I pleaded.
Wherever I spoke, the rank-and-file Jews were excited about a mass demonstration in Washington. Nobody echoed the leaders’ objections. I knew the Jewish people’s strength, their enthusiasm, their determination. Now I experienced it as I traveled from community to community, campus to campus. Everyone seemed as committed and mobilized as I had dreamed them to be.
As “Gorby fever” started building in America that fall, the skeptics became even more skittish. “We cannot appear to oppose this new détente with the Soviets. It’s too popular,” they said. “And we cannot cross Ronald Reagan after he has been so helpful.”
Ronald Reagan? The Reagan who had made my day in prison in 1983, when he called the Soviet Union “the evil empire”? The Reagan whose precious words we had passed from one prisoner to another by tapping it in Morse code or whispering it through our “toilet telephones,” sticking our heads deep into the bowls so neighbors could hear us through the pipes? Impossible. The Reagan who presided over my imagined prison world could not oppose this march for freedom.
In Avital and my absolutist world of struggle, there were no barriers, walls, protocols, or niceties that could stop us. So we went straight to the president of the United States in late September. We thanked him jointly for his help and asked him what he thought of a march, whenever a summit materialized. Trying to ease into the conversation, because so many had warned that he would be offended, we reassured him that any protests against Gorbachev would not be opposing American policy but Soviet oppression.
“Why would someone think I want to be friends with a person who keeps his own people in prison?” Reagan asked. “You do whatever you have to do, and I will do what I have to do.”
“Reagan wants this demonstration.” I told the Jewish leaders. But Morris Abram remained skeptical. In October, when the president announced Gorbachev’s visit, Abram turned to Secretary of State George Shultz.
“Do you really want this rally?” Abram asked, as Shultz later told me.
“Not only do we want it,” Shultz replied, “I want it to be the first thing that Gorbachev sees on every TV screen in America when he arrives for the summit!”
Finally, I got the call. In late October, as the Americans and Soviets were finalizing the December date, I heard that the Establishment was in. The head of the American Jewish Committee’s Washington office, and longtime advocate for Soviet Jewry, David Harris, would run the operation.
As Avital had predicted, the impact was immediate. When I spoke at a university the next day, everything had changed. I was no longer a lonely prophet but a recruiting sergeant. Representatives of the Jewish Federations and the Hillels—the Jewish student centers—appeared. There were buses to sign up for and tasks to volunteer for. Overnight, I had been integrated into an extraordinary logistical operation. And, yes, as Avital had warned, they mobilized, strategized, advertised, fundraised, spent generously—and took the credit.
But it worked. They chartered planes, rented buses, and secured parking lots. On the day of the demonstration, airplanes landed from Los Angeles, Miami, and Toronto. Trains pulled in from Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Overnight buses arrived from Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Thousands of private cars scrambled for parking.
The marchers came from different organizations, different synagogues, different corners of North America, and different political perspectives. Our cause continued to be a rare issue uniting Republicans and Democrats in Reagan’s polarized Washington.
In all, 250,000 Americans, in an operation of military precision throbbing with hippie happiness, braved the Washington cold to shout “Let my people go.” The protest matched the size of Martin Luther King’s legendary 1963 civil rights march on Washington. Once again, my prison-shaped delusions had come true.
To be honest, there were too many speakers. Most spoke far longer than was necessary. But it didn’t matter. Standing on the podium, looking into this sea of solidarity, I felt like I could touch those sweet feelings of Jewish unity and sense the impending victory.
The skeptics were wrong about the weather. Rain threatened but never came, until the rally ended and people started dispersing. As the freezing rain started pouring down, three of us remained on the huge makeshift podium on Washington’s vast, rapidly emptying Mall. It could have been an awkward moment. I watched Morris Abram, the head of the Establishment, look hesitantly at one of his rivals, Pamela Cohen, the head of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews.
Suddenly, all three of us shouted, “We did it!” We started slapping each other on the back. Hugging, we danced a little hora. We had made it, together.
It was still one year before the last prisoners of Zion and Refuseniks were released. It was still two years before the Berlin Wall fell. It was still four years before the Soviet Union collapsed. But we knew that the war was won. Finally, in December 1987, I faced a new challenge: to start real life again. It was time to become Israeli.