NATAN SHARANSKY
11
were with you , when sometimes on a lucky day you could call your
wife, when you could give an interview, and in the evening switch
on
Voice
of
America,
and give yourself the chance to hear the reaction
of the West to your statement and to our demonstration . You feel iso–
lated , and you realize that the only way to the outer world is through
these K .G .B. guys , that right now nobody can find out what is hap–
pening to you. And you start thinking that maybe you have to com–
promise. When I recognized this problem, I understood that I had to
restore this feeling of togetherness with my friends, and not with the
K.G.B. I had to restore the feeling of the free man I had had all these
years . Then , as in psychotraining, before, during and after inter–
rogation , instead of listening to them, I started to concentrate on the
dearest moments spent with my wife Avital, on how the struggle for
human rights was taking place, and on trying to imagine what these
people were doing now in America, in Israel, in Moscow. When you
try to think only about these things for days on end, at some moment
you get the feeling that, after all, nothing has changed. You were
struggling two miles from this prison in your Moscow apartment.
Now they have moved you to this prison , but your friends continue
their opposition, and you continue to do the same.
It is the same struggle that you continue in a slightly different
situation ; it's only physically different; morally , spiritually, it is the
same . A punishment cell , where you are for hundreds and hundreds
of days , is a very little room, five or six feet by four , very cold, no
warm clothing, three pieces of bread, three cups of water, nothing to
read , nothing to write, dark , cold. The K.G .B. understands how
dangerous this is for them. That is why they constantly try to deprive
you of all your memories, of all contact with people who are dear to
you . They took away my psalmbook. It was very important to me,
because some days before my arrest I had received it with a letter
saying, "I kept this psalmbook with me for more than a year, and
now I feel the time has come for you to have it." Some days after they
arrested me , I demanded that they return it to me. (When my father
died I was reading this psalmbook for the first time in my life , and
understood maybe ten percent of it.) They said "We are obliged
under the law to protect you against harmful influences, such as
religion." These types of influence undermine all of their work. For
years they have been mobilizing hundreds of thousands of K .G .B.
men, interrogators and so on , to destroy a few dozen people who
don't accept this gift from the government.
I remember, after one hundred and ten days of a hunger strike,
