Natan Sharansky Then and Now

1953

On Purim, told that Stalin died,
Natan, aged five, learned “Be safe – learn to look mournful
when antisemites who’re like Stalin die or lied,
and don’t make comments that are scornful!”

1986

The KGB told him to walk a line that’s straight,
instead of which he zigged and then he zagged,
but never changed his not ungainly gait,
or let his mouth by Reds be gagged.

On 11/7/24, Natan Sharansky, interviewed by Rabbi Abraham Cooper at The Museum of Tolerance, said that when his father told the five-year-old Natan about the death of Stalin he added that while should be extremely happy about Stalin’s death he should look as mournful as all his teachers and schoolfriends would be. Sharansky added that this is how he managed to survive in the gulag for many, many years.

Steven Erlanger in the NYT, February 2, 2005, discussed Natan Sharansky’s book “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror”:

 Mr. Sharansky’s collaborator on the book, Ron Dermer, is amused by the new attention. “For years Sharansky has been almost a broken record in Israeli political discourse,” he said. “But now people are finally listening, for some reason. He hoped for some echo in the United States to the book. But that the president should be one of the first Americans to read it is something we couldn’t ever expect.” The difference now, Mr. Dermer surmised, is the impact of Sept. 11, 2001. The attack by Al Qaeda provoked a realization that “the status quo is no longer good enough,” he said. What connects Mr. Bush and Mr. Sharansky, he said, was “deep faith in the universality of freedom and its transformative power.” When he was freed, in an exchange of prisoners with the United States, Mr. Sharansky walked to freedom alone across the Glienicke Bridge, from East Germany to the west. He was ordered to walk straight across; a refusenik to the end, he zigzagged. He is zigzagging still.

Natan Sharansky left the Soviet Union on February 11, 1986, following a straight line, called the Glienicke Bridge.

On 2/13/16 The Times of Israel published this article by his daughter, Rachel Sharansky Danziger:

Thirty years ago today, my father, Natan Sharansky, crossed a bridge.

The bridge was Glienicke Bridge, of Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies” fame. When my father walked onto it he was a prisoner in the Soviet block, though a free man in spirit. He found freedom on the day he stopped hiding his opinions. He earned freedom as he fought for his right to be a Jew in Israel, and for his fellow Russians’ human rights. He preserved it as the KGB imprisoned his body, trying and failing to force him to recant.

After nine years of imprisonment, my father stepped off Glienicke Bridge, and became a free man in body as well.