On November 9th, 1978 we boarded an airplane in Moscow’s Sheremetevo airport bound for Vienna Austria, and we hoped, our freedom. Our friends and relatives cried as we said goodbyes, only my father was not crying. He said they should not be grieving for their loss, but rejoicing for our gain. Some how he knew that we were going to a better place, a place were we would be free.

We were the first family allowed to leave which had witnessed the events that led to Ida Nudel's arrest, and following incarceration. For this reason I felt unsettled in my leaving. After all, the woman who had organized the fight for all our releases, who had started this separate women’s movement, was now in a Siberian prison camp. I knew that after a short two week stay in Vienna, we would be moved to Italy. This was the regular procedure, before one was allowed to enter America. I also knew that, there, we would be questioned by the Israeli consulate about all the events regarding Ida's trial and imprisonment. I wanted to be completely prepared for this interview and, I knew, I had to write the whole story down while it was still fresh in my mind. The story of our struggle, my struggle with the Soviet Regime, are captured in these words that are now twenty years old, but ring just as strongly in my heart today as they did then.

This story recounts the events that took place in the course of two turbulent, exciting, unforgettable, empowering weeks in the lives of a small group of ‘ordinary’ women in the Soviet Union of the 1970’s. Twenty years have passed since then. Years that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall , that hated symbol of tyranny. Years that witnessed dramatic changes on the world map . Now there is no such place as the Soviet Union, from whose brutal grip we managed to escape.

The world came to know the names of Anatoly Scharansky and Ida Nudel, who became symbols of Jewish emigration in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

But around the leaders were countless others who remained anonymous, except to the KGB who kept detailed dossiers on them in the secret archives in Lubyanka prison.

My story is about women and their families – refuseniks who were fighting for their right to emigrate to Israel, or America.

Few people knew then, or know now, how this unique Jewish women’s movement decided to openly fight the KGB in the hope that their unity would help their own and other families to emigrate.

It was the courage of despair.

In the beginning of the 1970’s the methods of the KGB were less evident than they had been in the past, but were just as brutal.

We are the last generation who knew the Soviet Union of this time, our lives were a part of it, but our children and grandchildren, raised in freedom, also need to know and remember this history. Upon reflection, I see that it is also for them, that I have written this story.