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Campaigning for Dissidents

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Campaigning for Dissidents Chapter 4 Campaigning for dissidents Reading about injustice does not leave you cold when you have grown up in an environment where righteousness is a central theme and the affects of the Second World War and, in particular, Nazi terror are a daily subject of conversation even 30 years after the war ended. Two of my uncles had been in the camps, only one of them had returned and he had been marked for life. The more I became interested in the repression of the dissidents in the Soviet Union, the stronger I had the urge to do something about it. In 1977, I started collecting signatures under petitions addressed to Brezhnev, calling on him to release the political prisoners. My first “case” was that of Sergei Kovalyov, a biologist who had been an editor of the important samizdat publication Chronicle of Current Events and who had been arrested in Vilnius in 1974. He had been sentenced to seven years of camp and three years of exile. With homemade petitions I went from door to door, ringing doorbells and asking people to sign. What one can now hardly imagine was that without exception, people were afraid to put a signature, out of fear that if the Soviets would come they would be listed as one to be arrested. They purposely wrote their names illegibly, or just put a cross instead Trial against Sergei of a signature. I sent the packages of Kovalyov: Andrei Sakharov in signatures to the Soviet Embassy; a drop front of the court building in in the ocean, of course. Vilnius, 1974. At the end of 1977, Vladimir Bukovsky asked me if I was willing to establish a European branch of the Podrabinek Fund, an opportunity that I took with both hands. Podrabinek had been arrested that year because of his membership of the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes and was in jail awaiting his trial. The case of Podrabinek opened for me the door to the issue of political abuse of psychiatry. After having read a multitude of books about Nazi camps and having subsequently read a pile of literature on Soviet camps, I thought I 42 On Dissidents and Madness could imagine life in camps. However, the idea that while being a political prisoner you would be locked up with dangerous madmen was beyond my imagination. I knew nothing about psychiatry, for me was anybody with a psychiatric illness a “lunatic” and, hence, dangerous. Not very subtle, but for me psychiatry was an unknown and undiscovered area and thus scary. I found some archaic literature about psychiatry at the home of a psychiatrist’s family where I was babysitting and my interest was aroused. I decided to concentrate on political prisoners who had wound up in psychiatric hospitals, and the Podrabinek Fund was a nice introduction into the field. Bukovsky Foundation After the summer of 1979, I moved to Amsterdam in order to commence my studies. I joined the Bukovsky Foundation, a small organization with whom I had established contact in the months preceding my move and which was directed by Henk Wolzak. The foundation had its offices on the Van Woustraat in the Dutch capital, just around the corner from the famous Albert Cuyp market, at Henk Wolzak’s home residence. Amsterdam was a turbulent city in those years. Everywhere squatters had occupied empty buildings and regularly battles took place in the Amsterdam streets between riot police and the squatters. Henk Wolzak was a bit of a strange character. Born in 1940 and with only a limited education, he had developed himself to being a freelance journalist for newspapers like Het Parool and Trouw. Although the claimed to have studied history and theology, this was more fantasy than reality: he had attended some university lectures, but had never registered himself as a student. He spoke three words of German and English, which in no way hindered him in orienting Demonstration for the release of Vladimir Bukovsky. Henk Wolzak is on the left. In front of him a counter demonstration by a member of a pro- Soviet organization. His board reads: “In the Soviet Union the counter revolution does not have a chance”..
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