Fear no evil

"They took my Book of Psalms away many times, and when I saw that the conditions of my imprisonment were improving and realized that they intended to release me, I lay down in the snow at the airport and said I wasn't moving until they gave me back my Book of Psalms. They gave it to me. It was the only thing that went with me from prison, and it's always with me. It's my strength," says Jewish Agency head and former Prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky, recalling his release from a Soviet prison 30 years ago.

Sharansky, 68, was not permitted to emigrate from the former Soviet Union to Israel, and served an agonizing nine-year sentence simply for fighting for his right to make aliyah. His heroic and inspiring story is told in his book, "Fear No Evil," a new edition of which is coming out now.

Sitting across from me is a smiling, likeable man, who frankly reveals fascinating details about his youth and his difficult time behind bars. He was born in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, which is where he began his journey to freedom.

"I grew up without knowing anything about our [Jewish] identity," he says. "Not the language, not the tradition, not words like 'Purim' or 'Passover,' not words like 'bar mitzvah' or 'brit milah' [circumcision ceremony]. We knew we were Jews because it was written in our parents' ID cards. When I was a child, my parents' message was clear: 'Because you're Jewish, which is like a disease, you have to be the best in your class. The medicine for you being a Jew is to be the best at your profession, and then you'll manage.'

"We knew we were living under a dictatorship. Outwardly, we behaved as we were expected to, and we only shared our true opinions with the family. We never thought of resisting, fighting for our rights or for freedom, because there was no value in life other than surviving. All that changed after the [1967] Six-Day War. For the Soviet Union, it was a terrible humiliation. They sent money, soldiers and weapons [to the Arabs], and began celebrating, and suddenly the strongest empire in the world was humiliated.

"Condemnations of Israel began, and because I was Jewish, everyone associated me with Israel. I was 19 and studying at a well-known institute in Moscow, which was very hard for Jews to be accepted into. I started wondering why they associated me with Israel and, on the sly, started reading books that Jewish tourists would bring with them. Suddenly, I discovered that if I just made a switch in my thinking, I wouldn't be part of the brutal history of the Soviet empire, but part of my own history that began thousands of years ago, even before the Exodus."

A slave from age 5

In 1968, when he was 20, Sharansky started thinking seriously about making aliyah.

"At that point, another incident occurred. [Nuclear physicist] Andrei Sakharov, who was the No. 1 scientist in the country, wrote a letter to the Soviet leaders in which he warned that without freedom of thought, science and society would not develop. I had thought about a career in science so that I might have more freedom, and then I saw a man who was already at the top who felt he had to tell the truth."

Sakharov's personal example and Sharansky's rediscovery of his Jewish identity prompted him to seek to emigrate to Israel. He started the aliyah process and was consequently fired from his job. Sharansky was not deterred and started taking part in and organizing demonstrations. He quickly became a well-known activist for aliyah by Soviet Jews and later became a spokesman for the Zionist movement and the human rights movement.

His extensive activism prompted the KGB to keep close tabs on him.

"Then the investigations began. My friends took my name out of their phone books. It was as if things were changing for the worse, but suddenly I felt free to say what I thought. The life of a slave, which I began at age 5 when I realized that you need to do what everyone else does, was over," he said.

"I felt free to fight for my rights and later on for the rights of other Jews. Very quickly, I turned from a young activist who organized demonstrations to someone who was organizing contacts with journalists and Jewish groups. I would meet with reporters, and because the KGB was always present, I used codes to let them know when and where the demonstrations would take place, so they could report on them."

The protests stirred the sympathy of the Jewish public worldwide, and the British and U.S. governments began pressuring the Soviet Union to allow Jews to move to Israel. At the same time, the Soviet regime was putting more and more pressure on Sharansky. The KGB eavesdropped on his phone conversations and would often cut the calls off when the conversation took a direction it did not like. Sharansky was also arrested a few times.

Sharansky remembers one detention in particular: "At the age of 26, I decided to be circumcised. We had a protest planned for the next day in Moscow. I didn't want to cancel it so I went to the protest a day after the circumcision, and there I was arrested [and held] for 15 days."

During one of his activities devoted to Israel and Zionism, Sharansky met the woman who would become his wife. The activists had met near a synagogue in Moscow, and Sharansky was trying to convince passersby to donate blood for IDF soldiers.

"Suddenly a young woman named Natasha [now Avital] came by. It was love at first sight. I felt I had to make an impression on her. There was a KGB man standing next to me, and I said to him: 'We're holding a blood drive for the IDF. Would you like to donate-' Either that or something else had an effect and that was where our love story began.

"I was already a refusenik and they weren't allowing me to leave, but she was not known to the authorities. We decided to have a symbolic Jewish wedding ceremony in Moscow. In 1974, a day after I got out of jail, we had the wedding and there were barely enough people for a minyan [prayer quorum]. The next day, she made aliyah. I was sure that a few months later we would be together, but it took 12 years."

Sharansky's dream of making aliyah and reuniting with his wife turned out to be a distant one, and looked almost impossible given his fervent activity on behalf of Jews emigrating to Israel.

"There was an Indian proverb that I liked: 'When you're riding a tiger, the most dangerous thing to do is to stop.' It was clear that the moment I lost international attention, the KGB would make me disappear, because as far as they were concerned I'd already crossed several lines. But I was a free man. And later, in prison, I also felt free."

Simultaneous chess

In 1977, Sharansky was arrested and accused by the Soviet authorities of treason, helping capitalistic countries work against the Soviet Union, and spying for the U.S. -- a crime that could have carried a death sentence.

"I was constantly warned that if I didn't cooperate, they would execute me. They wanted me to convene a press conference and say that they were right and we [the Zionist activists] were wrong. They tried to give me one of their lawyers, but I refused and they didn't let me choose my own lawyer, so I represented myself.

"The investigation went on for a year and a half. I realized that my goal had to be to remain a free man, because that was what gave my life meaning. I preferred that to being a Soviet slave. My goal was to not allow them to break me and take my freedom away from me. I reminded myself that I was part of a huge historic struggle and of the responsibility I was carrying."

Sharansky spent a year and a half in Lefortovo Prison in Moscow before he was tried, and was subjected to very harsh conditions, aimed at breaking his body and his spirit. His faith in the Zionist idea and his love for Israel gave him strength. Sharansky made sure to inform his interrogators that their mission would not succeed: "I loved to tell my interrogators jokes about Brezhnev, who was a Soviet leader -- there were very funny jokes about him. I laughed at him and the interrogators nearly burst out laughing, but had to express fury. They yelled at me that just for that, I could be executed. I told them, 'You want to laugh and can't. You're in prison, not me.' I had nothing to lose."

At that time, a struggle on Sharansky's behalf began, led by his wife, Avital, who organized protests throughout the world. In July 1978, Sharansky was given a five-day trial, at the end of which he spoke, expressing an unequivocal message: 'To my people, and my wife, I say 'Next year in Jerusalem,' and to the judges I say, 'Your entire role is to announce what has already been decided, so I have nothing to say to you.'"

After those words, Sharansky was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

"They moved me to a prison in the Urals that was part of a hard labor camp. I spent 405 days in solitary confinement in a narrow cell. It was very cold. I was given three glasses of hot water and three slices of bread a day. They wanted to force me to say they were right. One time, I was in solitary for 130 days straight. I fainted. They took me outside and then put me back in solitary. All that time, I reminded myself what my main goal was.

"I also had two things that kept me occupied. I know how to play chess in my mind. That's my hobby. As a child, my dream was to be world chess champion. I knew how to play a number of people simultaneously. In prison, that was important. I played thousands of games of chess in my mind and always won. Their goal was for the prison to erode my intellect while in solitary confinement, but I grew stronger. I had something else. From the time I was a child, people didn't like it when I would sing. A month and a half before I was arrested, I learned the [Hebrew] song 'All the World is a Narrow Bridge, and the Main Thing is Not to Fear.' In solitary confinement, I sang that at a shout. I sang more there than any other place. The guards didn't understand the song and got angry at me."

One Hanukkah while he was in the gulag, a carpenter friend made him a menorah: "I lit candles and two days later, they took the menorah away from me and I started a hunger strike. It turned out that the prison warden wanted an end to the hunger strike because a delegation from Moscow was there. It was the last day of Hanukkah, and he proposed I end the strike. I asked for the menorah back, and because he didn't want me celebrating with the other prisoners, I told him I would celebrate Hanukkah with him. He agreed.

"I told him to cover his head and say 'Amen' at the end [of the blessing over the candles]. I lit the candles, made up a simple Hebrew blessing that the time would come when I would light candles in Jerusalem with my wife and all our enemies would hear our prayers and say 'Amen,' and then he said 'Amen.' It turned into the joke of the camp and they put me in prison for it.

"There's no doubt that without the international attention and my wife's activism -- she recruited all the world leaders -- they would have let me die. For more than a year, they didn't let me write letters and then they showed me a letter from my mother, who was sick. I went on a 110-day hunger strike. I was very close to death. At the last minute, they let me write to my mother. There were times in prison when I thought I could die, but felt that this was my destiny and my freedom."

A zigzag to freedom

During his time in Soviet prison, Sharansky was not with other Prisoners of Zion, but there were occasions when some were in neighboring cells.

"We made contact using Morse code. It was complicated, because I had to watch the door to make sure the guard wasn't approaching and to get the sign that the other Prisoner of Zion had gotten the message. The other side confirmed after every letter. There are long words in Russian. It took me a day to send a message in Morse code.

"The best and most dangerous way to communicate was through the toilet. We removed the water using a rag and put our heads deep in, and that way we could talk. It was better than a cell phone, because there was always reception. There were times at the changing of the [guards'] shifts that were safer. One day, Yosef Mendelevitch, who was also a Prisoner of Zion, sent me a message that according to his calculations, it was Israel's Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers. When we thought it was 11 a.m. in Jerusalem, we stood for a moment of silence.

"In the evening, when the shifts changed, Memorial Day turned into Independence Day. We both gave speeches and said that the day would come when we would celebrate Independence Day in Jerusalem. Since then, I've celebrated many Independence Days and attended many ceremonies as a minister and at the Jewish Agency. I never had such an exciting ceremony [as the one in prison] in my life. It was so powerful in terms of the connection to the entire Jewish people."

Another exciting story relates to the Book of Psalms Sharansky's wife, Avital, gave him before he was imprisoned: "I didn't know most of the words in the book. I didn't understand anything, and it was also in really small print. After they arrested me the Book of Psalms was on the list of my possessions. I asked for it, and three years later they gave it to me, along with a letter [saying] that my father had died. I decided I would try to read [the psalms] until I understood. Because I was a mathematician and had studied logic, I made connections between words. I didn't know where every sentence ended. I made comparisons between all sorts of combinations.

"After 10 days, I understood a sentence: 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me'" (Psalms 23:4).

When he was released in 1986 on the Glienicke Bridge between East and West Germany, the KGB ordered him to walk across the bridge in a straight line. Sharansky, who wanted to resist any order from the Soviet regime, decided to zigzag his way to freedom.