NATAN SHARANSKY
9
must feel yourself really a free man. I was not a free man during the
first twenty years of my life. I was, like many others , an absolutely
assimilated Soviet Jew. Like all my generation, I didn't know
anything about my Jewishness. I didn't know the simplest words,
like Hanukkah, Shabbat, Yom Kippur. And I tried to exist as a loyal
Soviet citizen of the system with doublethink, to say one thing and to
do another. But, of course, I knew that I was a Jew because there
were cards identifying yourself and your parents as Jews, which
means that there is, and that you are a victim of, anti-Semitism. But
the only sense you have of your Jewishness is negative . Hence the
desire to become free means somehow to get rid of your Jewishness.
You try to become free and you cannot. The turning point for me
was 1967, when, after the Six-Day War and the new anti-Israel at–
mosphere which filled the Soviet official press, you suddenly saw
many anti-Semites treat you with the same hatred but with much
more respect. And you suddenly realized that, whether you wanted
to be or not, for these people you are connected with the state of
Israel and with those Jews who live in Israel or in other countries.
And you can repeat a thousand times that you are Russian because
your language is Russian and your literature and your culture is
Russian, but for them you are aJew. You must understand that the
state of Israel is struggling at this moment not only for its right to ex–
ist, but also for your dignity. And then when you tum back on your
history , your past, your culture, your language, then you suddenly
feel enough strength to say the truth and to feel yourself free. And
only after you feel yourself free, only after you are ready to speak
openly about yourself, your friends, and your people, do you have
enough courage and force and justification to speak about the rights
of other people . That was my conclusion, my feeling, at the moment
of my arrest.
As I said, before my arrest, for three years I was an official
spokesman of our movement. What this means is that virtually every
day I was meeting with the foreign press, with politicians, with
numerous American tourists, including many Jews from New York
who were bringing us information and books in Hebrew and trying
to get information from us . As a rule, as all the activity was open, I
was accompanied by K .G.B. men , by "tails" as we called them. Day
and night, every eight hours the cars of the K.G.B. men replaced
each other, and they accompanied me openly, listening in on my
calls when I was going to meet correspondents and observing me
