From: patricia@cco.caltech.edu (Patricia M. Schwarz)
Subject: Re: Russian poetry
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 19:20:29 GMT

Irina Ratushinskaya, zek,  "Grey is the Color of Hope" :
	
	All those norms of human behavior which are inculcated in one
	from the cradle are subjected to deliberate and systematic
	destruction. It's normal to want to be clean? ...Contract scabies
	and skin fungus, live in filth, breathe the stench of the slop
	bucket - then you'll regret your misdemeanors!
	
	Women are prone to modesty? All the more reason to strip them naked
	during searches...A normal person is repelled by coarseness
	and lies? You will encounter such an amount of both that you will
	have to strain all your inner resources to remember that there
	is...another reality...Only by a maximum exertion of will is it
	possible to retain one's former, normal scale of values.
	
Stephanie, rape survivor, "Trauma and Recovery" :

	When Stephanie first told her story, her therapist was horrified
	by the sheer brutality of the rape, which had gone on for over 
	two hours. To Stephanie, the worst part of the ordeal had occurred
	after the assault was over, when the rapists pressured her to say
	that is was the "best sex she'd ever had." Numbly and automatically,
	she had obeyed. She then felt ashamed and disgusted with herself.
	
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, "Night" :

	[The gaurd] began to beat [my father] with an iron bar. At first
	my father crouched under the blows, then he broke in two, like
	a dry tree struck by lightening, and collapsed. I had watched the whole
	scene without moving. I kept quiet. In fact I was thinking
	of how to get farther away so that I would not be hit myself.
	What is more, any anger I felt at the moment was directed, not
	at the [guard], but against my father. I was angry with him, for
	not knowing how to avoid Idek's outbreak. That is what concentration
	camp life made of me.
		
Natan Scharansky, zek, "Fear No Evil" :

	Back in Lefortovo, Socrates and Don Quixote, Ulysses and Gangantua,
	Oedipus and Hamlet, had rushed to my aid. I felt a spiritual
	bond with these figures; their struggles reverberated with my
	own...This mystical feeling of the interconnection of human souls
	was forged in the gloomy prison-camp world when our zeks' solidarity
	was the one weapon we had to oppose the world of evil.
	
Patricia Schwarz, rape and child abuse survivor:

	"Master and Margarita" is a very healing book for me. The image
	of a world so terrible that the Devil appears as Saviour, the
	unspoken solidarity of the characters against the looming powers
	of madness around them, and especially the flight of Margaret
	over Moscow, wrecking the apartment of her lovers' denouncer,
	foiling all hypocrites, reclaiming her innocence by being pure
	and powerful in the naked moonlight - these images soften the
	hard corners of the prison of my soul. This is a holy book for
	me; to try to explain it is almost a crime because the feelings
	are so powerful. I think of Bulgakov, writing against death in
	the middle of the Yezhov Terror, when everyone around him is
	disappearing into the Stalin meat-grinder. I think, "You helped
	free me with your magic spell of words, and I'll honor your
	memory forever!" 
	
	
Boris Pasternak, poet:

	I v pol'noh' smolknut' tvar i plot'
	zaslyshav slux vesennyj
	chto tol'ko-tol'ko raspogod'
	Smert' mozhno budet poborot'
	usiliem voskresenniia.
	
Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor, "Survival in Auschwitz" :

	We have learnt that our personality is fragile, that it is in
	much more danger than our life; and the wise old ones, instead
	of warning us `remember that you must die,' would have done
	much better to remind us of this greater danger that threatens us.
	If from inside the Lager, a message could have seeped out to
	free men, it would have been this: take care not to suffer
	in your own homes that which is inflicted on us here.

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