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13,000 Jews were driven out of Poland in 1968. Now, some are returning to tell their story.
(JTA) — In March 1968, Rachelle Halpern walked into her university in Szczecin, Poland, and found a group of her classmates gathered around a newspaper. She asked what they were reading about. The answer came: “Zionists.”
Halpern didn’t understand. Who were the Zionists? One classmate said, “The Jews.”
“But I’m a Jew,” said Halpern. Her classmates looked at her in disbelief. She couldn’t be, one said. She had no horns.
Halpern was about to be swept up in a spiral of social and political crises in communist Poland, culminating in a government-sponsored antisemitic campaign that stripped Jews of their jobs, schools and citizenship, forcing some 13,000 to leave the country. Within months, Halpern would find herself renouncing her Polish nationality and leaving everything she knew for a new life in the United States.
At that moment, when her classmates read the word “Zionists” and looked up at her with horror, she felt a shift.
“It sort of evoked a lot of distrust and fear, that somehow there were all these people around that were going to do some harm to the Polish people,” Halpern told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Now 79 years old, Halpern joined a group of Polish emigrants and their children who traveled to Poland in April to unwind the trauma of 1968. Their meeting was organized by the Engaged Memory Consortium, a collection of organizations dedicated to Polish Jewish heritage, and funded by Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It was the first time that the government paid for a trip to reckon with the events of 1968 and invited the Jews whose lives were upended, according to the program’s coordinator, Patrycja Dołowy.
The nine participants came from Sweden, Denmark and the United States. Over eight days, they visited Jewish sites and community groups in Warsaw, Wrocław and Łódź. These three areas hosted the largest groups of Jews who remained in Poland after the Holocaust, where they decided to rebuild — and where their communities were decimated again in 1968. Though the members of the trip had never met, their memories overlapped, patching together a dark open wound in the history of Polish Jews.
It’s a chapter that remains obscure among many Poles and Jewish communities around the world, partly because of a myth that Jewish life was wholly extinguished by the Holocaust, according to Karen Auerbach, a historian of Polish Jews at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“There’s such limited understanding of the fact that there was a Jewish population in Poland after the Second World War, that this doesn’t rise to the surface,” said Auerbach.
The Jewish flight of 1968 started with two words from Władysław Gomułka, then the leader of communist Poland. Days after Israel’s victory over Soviet-supported Arab countries in the Six-Day War of 1967, Gomułka said that Poland would not tolerate a “fifth column” of Polish Jews. The phrase signaled that Jews could be loyal to Israel and treasonous to Poland. Soon after, the communist secret police purged Jews from state and party apparatuses, especially the army.
This campaign exploded after Poland, like other countries across the globe, was rocked by youth uprisings in March 1968. Polish students demonstrated against state censorship and the growing restriction of their civil liberties under Gomułka. Thousands were detained, expelled from universities and dismissed from their jobs in the ensuing government crackdown. Some of the students were Jewish. That became the pretext for Polish authorities to accuse them of “Zionism,” pinning the demonstrations on a global Jewish conspiracy.
The government organized “anti-Zionist” rallies and stoked fear of “Zionists” in official propaganda, avoiding the word “Jew.” Newspapers outed “Zionists” to their neighbors. A new wave of purges expelled thousands of Jews from their jobs and exposed them to antisemitic attacks in their cities and towns. Jews were pressured to leave the country, and when they applied for exit documents, they were forced to renounce their Polish citizenship.
The purges were not only executed by government order, but also by ordinary Polish citizens who took advantage of the campaign and antisemitic sentiment to further their careers, said Dariusz Stola, director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
“It was opening opportunities for many people for advancement,” said Stola. “Say you compete for a position in your institution, and you have a Jewish colleague, why not accuse him of being a hidden Zionist? Or you have some accounts to settle from the past — you don’t like someone — let’s accuse him of Zionism, because the burden of proof he is not is on him.”
By the early 1970s, half the country’s Jews were gone, crushing a community that was tenuously growing back decades after the Holocaust. The campaign effectively ended organized Jewish life in Poland.
Fifty-eight years later, Dołowy guided Polish emigrants and their descendants through cultural institutions that have emerged to preserve Jewish history, culture and communal life since the fall of the Soviet Union, from the Polin Museum in Warsaw to the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź. She also introduced them to Jews, like herself, whose families remained in Poland after 1968.
Rachelle Halpern, right, and other participants in the Miszpucha Foundation trip visit the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. (Adam de Kaminski)
Dołowy is the former head of Warsaw’s Jewish Community Center and the founder of the Miszpucha Foundation. A part of the Engaged Memory Consortium, this foundation aims to strengthen ties between Jews in Poland and Jews who left, particularly those driven out in 1968. Dołowy arranged meetings between the emigrants and Jews who stayed in Poland — artists from the Kultur-Lige network in Wrocław, cultural event organizers for the nonprofit HaKoach in Łódź, and Jews in Warsaw who ranged from academics to entrepreneurs to JCC coordinators.
In 1968, Dołowy’s father was expelled from his university and lost permission to continue his PhD. The question of whether to stay or leave Poland split her parents from their families and friends. Half the Jews they knew chose to leave, dividing what she called the “miszpucha” — the Polish spelling of the Hebrew “mischpacha” and the Yiddish “mishpokhe,” meaning “family.”
Despite this rupture, Dołowy said she rarely saw the antisemitic campaign reflected in Polish history, beyond the hushed stories in Jewish families. Shame and confusion swirled around the events of 1968 for many Jews who considered themselves Polish, but were told by their government and their neighbors that they were not.
“I believe that this generation’s story is still something really silenced,” said Dołowy. “We don’t really talk about 1968, or if we talk about it, we don’t really know the words to describe what actually happened to us, to our community.”
Halpern was 22 when her family left in December 1968 to join a relative in Boston. Despite the Soviet propaganda that said Polish Jews harbored a suspicious bond to Israel, only some 3,000 actually went there. Most of the 13,000 emigrants fled to Sweden, Denmark and the United States, where Cold War-era programs welcomed political refugees from the communist bloc.
Waves of Polish Jewish survivors had migrated to Israel after the Holocaust. But many of those who remained by 1968 were secular and committed to life in Poland, with dwindling ties to Jewish religion, Israel and Zionism, according to Stola. Many were dedicated communists or socialists.
“We know that only a minority of them went to Israel, despite attempts to convince them,” he said.
To obtain exit permits, Halpern and other Jews were forced to declare the intention of going to Israel. Then they received a travel document that rendered them stateless.
“It looked like a regular identity document — a photograph, first name, family name, date of birth,” said Stola. “And the most important part of the document were letters at the bottom of the page saying, ‘The bearer of this document is not a citizen of the Polish People’s Republic.’ To my knowledge, this is the only identity document that says who you are not.”
Halpern gave up her Polish nationality together with her sister in an emigration office. She remembers everything as “gray” — the day, the Polish official and the room with a small window.
“We were looked at as if we were hostile people, enemies,” she said. “We had to stand there, and you had to raise your hand and say that you are renouncing your Polish citizenship. We cried and cried and cried.”
Still, Halpern almost stayed in Poland. Just before her family left Szczecin on an overnight train to Warsaw for the first leg of their journey, she ran away. Seized by fear and anxiety about losing the world she knew, she slept at a friend’s house that night. She woke up in the early hours with the realization that she had nothing left in Poland — no citizenship, no money, no university and no family. She caught up with her parents just before their next train departed from Warsaw to Vienna.
Halpern went to medical school in Boston and made her career as a doctor in California, then Colorado. She did not visit Poland again until 2007, nearly 40 years later.
Other young Jews leapt at the opportunity to leave in 1968. Wladimir Mietek Szpirt, another participant in the Miszpucha Foundation trip, was just starting medical school in Szczecin at 18 years old. He found a hostile environment at the university. When he heard Gomułka threaten the “fifth column,” he decided to apply for asylum in Denmark. For him, leaving the Soviet Union meant the chance to freely study medicine, develop his career and build a stable life.
But Szpirt’s parents were stuck. They lost their jobs as accountants at state institutions, and authorities said they knew too much state information to leave the country. Szpirt emigrated alone, uncertain when he would see his parents again. Nearly two years later, they managed to follow him to Denmark.
Szpirt recently retired from his long career as a doctor in Copenhagen. Like Halpern, he returned in April to the place where the first chapter of his life closed. Now in his later years, Szpirt reflected on growing closest to his origin by leaving it behind.
“In Denmark, I was always accepted as a Pole,” said Szpirt. “The funny thing is that for the first 18 years of my life, I was not accepted as a Pole in Poland. But in Denmark, I became a doctor who was born in Poland. I was not a Jew from Poland.”
Wladimir Mietek Szpirt at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland. (Shira Li Bartov)
Many Jews never went back to Poland after the antisemitic campaign. Eliza Fishenfeld grew up in New York City with parents who fled in 1969 and 1974. The Miszpucha Foundation offered her first trip to Poland as the child of emigrants who were “very angry and very hurt,” she said. They decided not to return.
Fishenfeld lived in a displaced Polish Jewish world in New York. All of her parents’ friends were other Polish Jews affected by 1968, she said. They connected through the network of Jewish schools and camps from their childhood in Poland.
“I know they loved Poland before ‘68, because they told me so many stories about it and they were always so happy, and all their friends were from Poland,” said Fishenfeld. “Our community was the Polish Jewish emigré community.”
Fishenfeld said that arriving in Poland felt like a “homecoming of sorts,” though it was nothing like the communist country her parents remembered. She called them daily to describe the trip, but at their age now, she said they no longer travel.
The campaign didn’t only destroy Jewish communities. It also hollowed out Poland’s cultural and intellectual life, as Jews disappeared from universities, medical schools and hospitals, according Joanna Podolska, the former director of the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź. She said their absence left visible holes in the city.
“We didn’t have so many well-educated people, so it was a difficult moment,” said Podolska. “Young people who could work for the city, for Poland, they became citizens of other countries. They were doctors, filmmakers, advocates, chemists, researchers, artists. Probably, Poland would be much richer as a country — more important — with these people who left.”
Decades after the 1968 campaign, it remains a sensitive subject in Polish politics. From 2015 to 2023, Poland was governed by the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party, which promised to revive Poland’s pride in its past and eradicate what officials called a “pedagogy of shame.”
The narrative stifled research into Poland’s Holocaust history, particularly concerning instances of Polish antisemitism and Polish people who killed Jews or cooperated with the Nazi regime. Poland passed a law in 2018 that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes.
But the government also lashed out at a 2018 exhibition about 1968 in the Polin Museum. The exhibition called “Estranged” closed with a wall of quotes, which combined antisemitic and xenophobic statements from 1968 and 2018. Though the quotes were unattributed, two belonged to members of the ruling party.
The exhibition infuriated government officials, and former culture minister Piotr Gliński accused Stola of imposing “very aggressive politics” on the museum. Stola was pushed out as the director in 2019 despite winning a competition to extend his tenure. (In March, he was reinstated under Poland’s new government, led by centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk.)
Anat Plocker, a historian of Eastern Europe at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, said that Polish officials in 1968 defined a form of antisemitic rhetoric that echoes among Polish nationalist politicians to this day.
“The way they talk about the memory of the Holocaust, Jewish power, questions of who is really behind what’s going on in Poland — it’s really the Jews or it’s really a conspiracy of the West against Poland — all of this discourse became so important in Polish politics in ‘68,” said Plocker. “So what we see is that politicians are repeating, really sometimes word by word, the same phrases that were used against Jews in ’68.”
Eight years after the backlash to “Estranged,” Dołowy said she was proud to have garnered funding from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Miszpucha Foundation trip. She hopes to arrange more trips for 1968 emigrants, so they can share their long-obscured stories while they still have the chance.
“These emigrants from 1968 became the generation of grandparents, so this is actually a very good moment for them to tell the story to be listened to by our children,” said Dołowy.
In 2007, Halpern learned about the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków and went to Poland for the first time since leaving home. She has returned since then to attend the festival and Holocaust commemoration events, but she found that most of the other attendees were also visiting from abroad. “They are not people that are actually being Jews here,” she said.
That was why Halpern joined the Miszpucha Foundation trip. She was not interested in rehashing her parents’ Holocaust survival or reliving her own loss in 1968. Instead, she wanted to meet people like Dołowy — the other half of the “miszpucha” who stayed and created new lives.
“I didn’t really want to repeat the story of what happened to my mother, what happened to my father, what happened to the families,” said Halpern. “It was all more walking on people’s destroyed lives. So I wanted to see what is alive.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Donald Trump actually faced a few tough questions on ’60 Minutes.’ So, why does Marine Le Pen get a pass?
Last Sunday, the news show “60 Minutes” hosted an outgoing president of one country and, quite possibly, the incoming president of another. While falsehoods and fatuities flowed from President Donald Trump, his interviewer, Ross Douthat frequently, if futilely, tried to push back. Yet when Marine Le Pen, running for the presidency of France, also fibbed or fudged the truth, her interviewer, Trevor Phillips, did little more than arch an eyebrow.
This split-screen experience was unsettling for a few reasons. First, it reminded us that our president’s famous “weave” reflects a mind that is declining as surely as his poll numbers. A glance at the interview transcript reflects the deepening incoherence of the man who occupies the world’s most powerful office. This made all the most startling the cogency of his reply to a question Douthat posed at the end of the interview: whether he could stop hating his enemies if that was the price to enter heaven. To a flabbergasted Douthat, Trump replied, “I probably cannot do that, no, because I do hate some of my enemies and I always will.”
While no one can say whether Trump is destined for heaven or hell, Le Pen’s remarks in her interview suggest that she will make life hell for those men and women who fail to qualify, in her eyes, as French.
Yet, in his interview, Trevor Phillips, formerly of The (London) Times and a recent Bari Weiss recruit, failed to make this as clear as a Mike Wallace, a Dan Rather, or a Scott Pelley would have. Nattily dressed and well-spoken, Phillips presented a segment on the violence that has “erupted in Paris’ romantic boulevards” where “the scent of warm croissants and fresh baguettes has been overwhelmed by the whiff of tear gas.”
Overwhelmed by the weight of silly clichés, Phillips could not help but add “They used to call Paris la ville de l’amour — the City of Love. But there hasn’t been much amour on show lately.” While Phillips does not state who “they” are — given the hoariness of the clichés, perhaps they asked to remain anonymous — he should think twice about his assertion that there is not much love. Of course, the protestors are expressing their anger towards the government of President Emmanuel Macron, but they are also expressing their deep attachment, even love, to the republican tradition that has made Paris la ville de la révolution.
More important than his potted account of the social upheavals in Paris, however, was Phillips’ problematic interview with Le Pen. “In 2011,” he explained, “Le Pen took over leadership of what was then a fringe movement from her father, a tough army veteran convicted and fined for Holocaust denial and hate speech.” Yet nine years earlier, in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the candidate of this “fringe party” then called the National Front, made it into the second round of the presidential election. Though Le Pen failed to make it into the second round in 2007, that more than 4 million French voted for him suggests that his party and person were hardly fringe. It is also odd that while Phillips noted Le Pen’s Holocaust denialism, he omitted Le Pen’s confession that he had tortured Algerian captives while serving in French Algeria.
No less stunning was Phillips’ description of Marine Le Pen’s decision to banish her father from the party in order “to rid it of its stain of bigotry.” If only it were mere bigotry. The National Front was founded, in part, by former members of the French division of the Waffen SS and sympathizers of the wartime collaborationist regime of Vichy. While the daughter has largely succeeded in removing these elements from the party, which she rebranded as the National Rally, she has not removed the “stain” of antisemitism. Little more than a month ago, the French newspaper Mediapart revealed that Le Pen’s second-in-command, Jordan Bardella, was trafficking in antisemitic bilge even after he joined the party as a teenager.
Time and again, Phillips posed questions but had not adequately prepared for Le Pen’s predictable replies. When he asked, in his opening question, “What is happening in Europe? Has politics here just become more radical?” Le Pen answered that “the extreme left creates chaos. They generate violence against people.” If Phillips had done his due diligence, he would have confronted Le Pen with the recent study by the historian Nicolas Lebourg revealing that while six murders in France since 1986 were “generated” by the extreme left, nearly sixty were “generated” by the extreme right. Phillips might also have mentioned last month’s mass killing and wounding of French Muslims in the town of Trappes by an individual who marinated in the literature of the extreme right.
Finally, when Le Pen made the jaw-dropping claim that “discrimination does not exist in France” and, moreover, is “the least racist country in the world,” Phillips did, in fact, raise an eyebrow while repeating her words. But it would have been more effective, perhaps, to raise the findings of various organizations, like the Defenseur des droits, which concluded in 2024 that the “perceived origin” of a job applicant weighs more than any other factor in hiring decisions in France.
As for his lack of follow-up questions to Le Pen’s assertion that France is the world’s least racist country, Phillips’ professional malfeasance was made fully manifest. In every presidential campaign, Le Pen has committed to establishing the law of national priority, which in effect would constitutionalize a racist agenda. Based on the extreme rightwing hobbyhorse of the “great replacement” — namely, that France’s white population is deliberately being replaced by third world immigrants — the law will limit employment opportunities, social and housing benefits to French citizens. Such a law not only runs counter to the laws of the European Union, but also to the humanist and universalist grounding of France’s constitution.
Phillips failed to contest this claim. Ironically, he closed the interview with Le Pen’s assurance that “French people have got to know me.” If only Phillips had done so, as well.
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Israel’s parliament sworn in as leaders scramble to form a government
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israel’s 26th Knesset, or parliament, was sworn in on Tuesday, even as national elections two weeks ago produced no clear winner or indication of who will be Israel’s next prime minister.
On Sunday, President Isaac Herzog officially tasked former IDF chief and political novice Gadi Eisenkot with forming the government after a majority of newly elected lawmakers said they would prefer him as prime minister.
Incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost his parliamentary majority in the vote, even though his party, Likud, remained the largest of those entering the Knesset with 27 seats in the 120-member parliament.
Netanyahu has called on Eisenkot to join him in forming a national unity government, but in his ceremonial toast in the Knesset on Tuesday he ended up pushing Eisenkot’s change bloc even further away from the idea of a unity government under his leadership by casting suspicions on all of their potential partners in a future government.
Eisenkot and his bloc of four parties – his own Yashar Party, B’Yachad headed by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, and the Democrats led by Yair Golan – have campaigned on a promise to change the current government and the prime minister. Following Netanyahu’s speech, Eisenkot said in a statement that now he was even more certain that change was needed.
Eisenkot’s bloc garnered 48 seats in the election, and since then has drawn additional support from the two Arab parties, which together hold 19, and an expression of support from United Torah Judaism, an ultra-Orthodox party previously aligned with Netanyahu. The extra support gives him a shaky majority in the Knesset.
Eisenkot has reiterated that any party, including Likud, is welcome to join him as long as they embrace his four conditions: Recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, acceptance of the values of the Declaration of Independence, mandatory military or civilian service for all, and recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Ilana Shpaizman, a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that even though a new government has not yet been formed, “the Knesset can act on everything.”
“The Knesset can do oversight, the same thing as it did before; it can also pass legislation… but only private legislation and not government legislation,” she said, adding that the current government under Netanyahu will continue to function until it is replaced, just without the majority it had previously.
Shpaizman added that even if Eisenkot does not succeed in forming a government, and the country goes to another election, the Knesset sworn in on Tuesday will have at least six months to legislate as it chooses.
“This is a lot of time to legislate, so this is very important, and especially things like the finance committee, which can control the budgetary transitions of the government,” she pointed out.
Opening the Knesset swearing-in ceremony, Herzog called on the new Knesset members to “do everything possible to avoid another round of elections.”
“The people who chose you long for routine, security and tranquility,” the president said, outlining many of the challenges that Israel has faced over the past three years.
“The people you represent here yearn to see an outstretched hand that will bring unity to the nation and hope,” Herzog said. “A people that carries within it pain, devotion, and sacrifice longs to see you translate those strengths into cooperation, into unifying dialogue, and into listening.”
He added: “I ask of you: be measured toward one another. Reach out a hand for compromise, even between rivals. Look upon one another with generosity. There is much work to be done here, and it requires the ability and experience found in every part of this House.”
Before the swearing-in ceremony, each of the 11 elected parties held its first faction meeting in the Knesset. Eisenkot took the opportunity to announce that his bloc had reached agreements on nominations for key Knesset positions.
Former minister and incoming MK Matan Kahana from Yashar is slated to be the next Knesset speaker, a powerful position that sets the Knesset plenum’s daily agenda. MK Roy Folkman, also from Yashar, will be nominated as chairman of the Arrangements Committee, which is responsible for organizing the Knesset’s work at the beginning of its term.
In addition, Liberman will take over as chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, and MK Liran Avisar Ben-Horin from B’Yachad, will be nominated head of the Finance Committee, another powerful role.
As soon as the swearing-in ceremony concluded, Eisenkot’s party announced that it had submitted a series of bills that would reverse some of the more controversial laws passed by the previous government, including those relating to the judicial overhaul plan.
In addition, a bill was submitted calling for the establishment of a State Commission of Inquiry to investigate Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and how it was allowed to happen.
Of the 120 Knesset members sworn in on Tuesday, 46 are new to the parliament and roughly one in ten members has buried a loved one lost to terror or war, including Eisenkot whose son and two nephews were killed in combat.
According to statistics shared by Herzog in his speech, the most veteran Member of Knesset is Netanyahu, who has served in 15 Knessets since 1988, while MK Yonatan Shalev, a member of B’Yachad, is the youngest MK. At 24 years old, Shalev breaks a 66-year-old record.
In addition, the 5050 Initiative of the Centers for Social Justice, an Israeli non-profit, said in a statement that the new Knesset would set “an all-time record for the number of women serving in the Knesset: 33.”
“Today is a very good day for democracy because the new Knesset is being sworn in,” Shpaizman said. “It means that the election was fair and was peaceful.”
“I think the previous Knesset got to a point where the trust in it as an institution was the lowest ever, so it is a very good thing that new people are entering, new people who come in good faith from both sides who want to bring change and to make Israel better,” she added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Evan Gershkovich survived the terrors of prison in Putin’s Russia. Not every journalist was equally lucky.
This Cursed Beautiful Land
By Evan Gershkovich
Crown, 432 pages, $34
In Evan Gershkovich’s memoir This Cursed Beautiful Land, the Wall Street Journal reporter relives his ordeal to give readers a firsthand account of how Russia’s prisons and its repressive legal system operate under Putin’s wartime regime.
Gershkovich survived 491 days in the Russian prison system and was released as part of the largest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War. His story echoes the way in which Dostoevsky escaped death by firing squad at the last minute. Tsar Nicholas I had already commuted his death sentence to four years of hard labor in Siberia, followed by military service, but ordered the execution to be staged anyway, right up until the soldiers took aim (one of the men condemned along with Dostoevsky lost his mind as а result). In July 2024, after a closed trial, Gershkovich was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 16 years, only to be freed less than two weeks later.
In February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine, Gershkovich was at a high point in his career. He had just joined The Wall Street Journal and, he writes, “was itching to get into the action.” Russia can be especially cruel to this kind of daring.
Gershkovich calls his work as a foreign correspondent a kind of “voyeurism” — and his time in captivity “the ultimate voyeurism” — and admits that he was addicted to the adrenaline. The notion that he was being tailed by Russia’s security service felt energizing. The more action happened around him, the more alive he felt.
In his memoir, he describes how the Russian authorities’ attitude toward reporters for foreign media outlets changed drastically. For years, he writes, the unspoken rule was that foreign reporters could cover topics Russian journalists couldn’t, and would be safe doing so. After Russia’s invasion, the government passed a whole raft of new laws against free speech; independent Russian journalists had three options: go underground and work anonymously (and many are still doing exactly that despite all the personal risks), leave the country, or go to prison.
An ‘undesirable’ journalist
For my part, I tried to stay in Russia for as long as I could. I worked anonymously as a reporter for the investigative outlet Proekt, the first Russian media outlet labeled an “undesirable organization” (this status means that anyone who takes part in its work can be prosecuted and face up to four years in prison). While all my colleagues had already been forced to leave the country, I stayed to report from the inside of Russia on the corruption inside Putin’s inner circle and among the elites that supported the bloodbath in Ukraine. I also reported on the human and economic cost of the war for other Russian banned media.
As a volunteer, I tried to help Ukrainian war refugees, collecting and driving donated clothes, medications, hygiene products and other essentials in the temporary shelters, where people were forced to live with no money and no way to rent housing or find proper work.
On Feb. 4, 2023, I found my name on a Moscow court’s website: An administrative case had been opened against me for “discrediting” the Russian army. The evidence, I learned later, was an interview I had given to TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV channel, which was banned by the authorities. I had gone on air to encourage more people to help refugees, and I talked about my anti-war tattoo, which I got as a reminder that “love and friendship are stronger than war” – those very words discredited the Russian army, according to the case files. A second such case led to a criminal charge that could have resulted in up to five years in prison. I knew I had done enough as a journalist to be charged under a whole range of other articles, including treason. By 5 a.m. the next day, I was in Tbilisi, Georgia. Less than two months later, Gershkovich was arrested.
‘How could I be so naive?’
Gershkovich writes that he believed he “had a responsibility to carry out since Russian citizens could no longer do the kind of reporting he could” and that the Russian authorities would more likely expel than arrest him: “The fact that I didn’t have a Russian passport gave me added confidence,” he says.
In early 2023, the WSJ reporter was working on several stories at once, including one on whether Russia’s war machine could sustain a long war, and another on Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin caterer-turned-warlord, whose Wagner Group had been recruiting prisoners into its ranks and posed a threat to the state’s monopoly on violence.
Gershkovich’s arrest in March 2023 officially marked the end of the period when foreign reporters could consider themselves immune. In wartime, they are seen as enemy spies and potential pawns in hostage diplomacy. As FSB (Putin’s trusted security service and the successor to the Soviet-era KGB) investigator Dmitry Sapunkov told Gershkovich, if they hadn’t gathered enough evidence to arrest him, they would have simply “poisoned” him: “In every country there are enemies that need to be put in prison or be eliminated,” an FSB investigator said.
That was no idle threat: Putin’s regime has a long history of poisoning its enemies. Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, was poisoned twice — the second time fatally, in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle.
The FSB alleged that Gershkovich had been gathering classified information “on instructions from the CIA” about Uralvagonzavod, a major Russian defense plant that manufactures and repairs military equipment.
According to Gershkovich, union activist Pavel Sergienya had told him that he might be able to get information about the factory’s projects. They met at a steakhouse in Yekaterinburg, an industrial city in the Urals, and Sergienya showed Gershkovich notes about the increase in tank production. Moments later, a group of men in balaclavas descended on Gershkovich, handcuffed him, pulled a black sack over his head and forced him into a van. He tried to explain that he was a journalist, but one of them cut him off: “What would your government think if our journalists were working on this kind of article in your country?” they asked.
At the closed trial, as Gershkovich describes it, Sergienya, the prosecution’s key witness, testified that he had begun cooperating with the security service before meeting Gershkovich. In September 2025, the independent Russian media Mediazona identified Sergienya, a Uralvagonzavod employee and representative of the trade union Solidarity, as an FSB provocateur: He was also a key figure in the “terrorism” case against Andrei Vogel, a 65-year-old opposition activist from Nizhny Tagil.
Gershkovich berated himself for trusting Sergienya. “How did I not see it? How could I be so naive?” he asked himself. “‘’You can’t tell the story if you’re dead,’ a colleague had once told me,” he writes, “and now I thought of a coda: You can’t tell the story if you’re in prison either.”
Fortunately, he managed to tell it.
‘A valuable commodity’
Gershkovich is the son of Jewish immigrants who left the Soviet Union in the 1970s. His great-grandfather vanished after he was arrested in 1937, during Stalin’s Great Terror.
Among Russian journalists there is a shared understanding: In prison, you are of no use as a journalist; you become a burden and source of constant pain for your loved ones. Gershkovich shares similar thoughts from Lefortovo prison, where he is consumed with doubts about whether he’ll ever be swapped. He realizes that he might never again see his mother, who managed to provide him with kosher food (ahead of the start of Passover) even though he was “in a prison cell in the country she had chosen to leave.” “In that moment, I felt like I had done something unspeakably cruel,” he writes.
Gershkovich quotes Vasily Grossman on how an oppressive regime can dwarf a person: “Only people who never felt such force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it.” The WSJ reporter couldn’t be absolutely certain an exchange would ever happen or how many years he might have to spend in the prison cell; he was aware of the fate of Paul Whelan, a former US marine, convicted of espionage (charges he denied) and waiting for a swap since 2018.
In his small cell, the reporter is caught in the grip of a thousand-eyed Leviathan that keeps peering in at him: “With time, I would learn to recognize the eyes of each guard checking in on me, six times an hour, more than a hundred times a day.” Yet Gershkovich manages to reveal the human faces behind the function they play in the repressive system; he even makes conversation with his FSB investigator about the corruption of the Russian political system.
To protect the identities of his cellmates, he merges them into a composite character he calls “Seryoga,” who was accused of running an illegal weapons shop and had admitted his guilt. “On the outside, we would never have been friends,” Gershkovich writes. “But here, in these circumstances, we got along and he made me laugh.”
Seryoga, who considers himself an alpha male, tries to educate Gershkovich about the proper way to enter a cell (or khata in Russian prison jargon, which is also the Ukrainian word for a house): Never step over the threshold without wiping your feet on the rag by the door (hygiene is essential; as Seryoga put it, “we shit where we eat”), and be ready for the first questions: “What’s the trouble?” or “Is everything even in your life?” Both phrases mean “What are you in for?” That is, which article of the Russian Criminal Code were you charged under? The “uneven” articles, the so-called 130s, cover sex crimes such as rape and child sexual abuse. They automatically put a prisoner at the very bottom rung of the prison: Most likely, he will eat last and be subjected to sexual violence.
Seryoga also teaches his American cellmate the saying at the heart of the prison brotherhood in Russia: “From the soul, soulfully, into the soul. Hugged you, picked you up, and put you back down.” Gershkovich already knew the phrase “from the soul” when he was on the outside. It is shorthand for “thanks” — a vivid example of how prison slang has seeped into the Russian language and culture.
Gershkovich understood that in state custody he was seen as a “valuable commodity,” and that he hadn’t faced any real FSB interrogations: no beatings, no electrocutions, no waterboarding, no stringing up, no harassment. “They want to present a humane face to the world. They took a journalist who they know will write about the experience, so in the meantime they will treat him well,” he remembers thinking.
Gershkovich was kept safe because he was seen as leverage to secure the release of Vadim Krasikov, an FSB assassin, convicted for life in Germany of shooting dead an exiled Chechen rebel commander in a Berlin park in August 2019. In the last part of the memoir, Gershkovich that he felt “guilty” that because of him Krasikov was now free, and Putin was able to show the security services that if they committed to executing dangerous operations for him, he would have heir back.
Not every journalist swallowed up by Russia’s repressive machine is as lucky as Gershkovich. Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was tortured to death in Russian custody. When her body was returned to Ukraine, her eyeballs, brain and part of her larynx were missing.
Another brick in the wall
Gershkovich calls Russia both “cursed and beautiful” and the country undoubtedly means a great deal to him. It’s where he found love (his girlfriend, Maria, is a well-known Russian journalist), made close friends, and did some very good reporting.
A Russian journalist would never tell an FSB interrogator that “people will rally in their support,” as Gershkovich did, but fortunately, he turned out to be absolutely right.
His defense lawyers, Tanya, Maria and Andrei, went through every procedural step, even though they knew a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion. “What’s the point?” Gershkovich once asked them.
“One day all of this will come crumbling down,” Andrei told him. “Right now, we’re trying to preserve some semblance of a foundation from which to rebuild.” The stubborn work of the lawyers was a powerful form of a protest — perhaps the only one possible, without being locked away, in a dictatorship.
Maybe Gershkovich’s book will be one of the bricks in that rebuilding, too.
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