Visit with a Survivor

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The small, borrowed apartment in Jerusalem where Anatoli and Avital Shcharansky are staying bears a striking resemblance to the cluttered flats in the Soviet Union where dissidents once congregated. Folders of correspondence and masses of newspaper clippings lie scattered about--some of the detritus of Avital's ceaseless nine-year campaign to rouse world opinion on her husband's behalf. Gifts and congratulatory messages are displayed on every available surface: a silver kiddush cup from a Jewish congregation in New York, a crayon drawing by a child that shows a flourishing green tree and Israeli flag. Floating on the ceiling are big, colorful balloons, some heart shaped, one bearing the inscription in English and Hebrew, WELCOME HOME. In this cheerful new setting, Shcharansky agreed to talk with TIME Associate Editor Patricia Blake. Her report:

Tolya, as his friends call him, comes into the room with his characteristically bouncy gait. A diminutive man, Shcharansky is dwarfed by the strapping sabras who are with him in the apartment to keep the press at bay. "To be so small is a great advantage in camp," he jokes. "The prison clothes you get are always much too large." He flaps his arms and kicks out his feet in mock illustration of how the sleeves and trouser legs flopped over. "When you are put in a freezing-cold punishment cell, as I was for a total of 430 days, the extra material helps a little to keep you warm."

In all, Shcharansky spent 3,255 days in the Gulag, the extensive Soviet penal system, almost completely cut off from external contacts. He had only the faintest sense of his international celebrity. "The method the KGB uses against prisoners is to isolate them fully from the outside world," he explains. What is so terrible about this isolation, he believes, is that it often leads a man to begin compromising himself morally "because he has been cut off" from the system of values he ordinarily lives by.

Shcharansky says he was determined not to let this happen and spent long hours trying to keep his moral balance. He remembers creating the kind of unity among prisoners that he once strived for among Soviet dissidents. "The Soviet authorities hate any kind of solidarity among independent-minded people," he says. "In prison this becomes even clearer than it is in ordinary life. Prisoners are forbidden to write collective letters of protest. You are punished if you write to the authorities on behalf of another prisoner --say a sick man who is not getting any medical attention. The authorities say, 'Look, your letters don't help.' And they are right logically. But there exists another, inner logic: the prisoner who writes such a letter may not save his neighbor in the next cell, but he saves his soul."