♪♪ ♪♪ -They were very alone.

They had no money.

-When our co-religionists in Russia were being terrorized, we had to do something.

♪♪ -Here we were, all these little Jewish housewives demonstrating and making a noise.

-We tried to stay within the law, but we were probably on the edge.

♪♪ -Going to Russia, you had to be very careful.

You just didn't know.

Walls had ears.

-I hid the names in a powder case.

-If not this group of women, we all will be dead.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -It's almost 40 years since I have told this story.

My trip to Russia will always be something I will remember.

In one particular house, just when I was leaving, the lady pressed this little ornament into my hand and she said to me, "Remember me, and remember that a bird can fly and a bird is free."

And I have kept that bird ever since.

That is the only thing I brought back from Russia.

And I treasure that little bird.

It didn't really change me as such, but I did come home feeling how privileged I was to be free.

♪♪ I had a nice childhood.

I felt completely accepted.

Our Judaism was very important.

We were a very traditional family.

I never went out on a Friday night.

That was our family night together.

We did a lot of relatives -- all our religious festivals were spent with the family.

It was fine.

Ideal, in fact.

[ Air raid siren wailing ] ♪♪ -Well, I'm a war baby.

I grew up in World War II in London.

Sadly, my mum died during this period, and my brother, my sister, and myself were shifted from place to place.

As kids, it didn't seem so terrible, but... it was.

[ Chuckles ] I was 4 when it broke out and 11 when it ended.

And though we had nothing to do with the Holocaust, what they called the Shoah, we all had this terrible feeling on our backs that we didn't do enough, nobody did enough.

They didn't stop the railroads to Auschwitz, and they didn't stop the big powers that be.

I asked my father why they didn't do more, and he said, "Well, we were trying to fight a war."

That was the answer.

-I was aware of the Holocaust through my aunt.

She actually was in Auschwitz, and when she walked out of the camp, she had no shoes.

And there was a woman at the gates of the camp, and she said to her, "Take my boots, because I won't make it."

♪♪ -Well, I had known about the Holocaust.

That's something you never forget.

And then our co-religionists in Russia were being terrorized, and...then we felt it was the time was right.

We had to do something.

♪♪ -Anti-Semitism has always been a feature of East European societies, not just the Soviet state.

The Soviet Union was officially an atheist state.

Getting rid of religion was supposed to help free people from the shackles of capitalism.

The Soviet Union attempted to sort of convert its people, often forcibly, to atheism, whilst at the same time repressing religious life.

-Meanwhile, on May 14, 1948, the new government headed by David Ben-Gurion is installed in Tel Aviv.

Thus, for the first time since the Roman legion destroyed Jerusalem in the year 70 AD, the Jewish people have a nation of their own.

-The ways in which Soviet Jews reacted to the creation of the new State of Israel in 1948 led the Soviet leadership to believe that the allegiance of Soviet Jews was not to the Soviet Union, but was to Israel, and that, you know, was something that was unacceptable.

Soviet Jews found themselves under increased pressure culturally, politically, socially.

There was the repression of Jewish cultural figures.

If you fell foul of the KGB, a campaign of harassment would begin against you, and eventually you would be arrested on trumped-up charges of treason, anti-Soviet activity, or, you know, some criminal charges.

♪♪ -Raiza Palatnik became the symbol.

She was a librarian, and she committed the crime of wanting to go to Israel.

And she's arrested on trumped-up charges, and somehow, probably a family member... managed to get the message out.

-Raiza was my sister, my teacher, my friend.

The relationship was very close between us.

She was more interested in Judaism.

She would like to study Hebrew.

I was very far from all these things.

♪♪ After school, she decided that she would like to be a librarian, and I think there wasn't a book that she didn't read.

All her life, it was books and books.

♪♪ One day when I came home, I found some people in our apartment, and I asked her, "Who are these people?"

And she said, "These people are planning to go to Israel with me.

We are studying Hebrew."

I said, "If our father will know, he will kill us.

I'm not going with you.

I'm staying here."

She said, "All of us will go at the end."

After a few months, two KGB people came to our house, and they started to search home.

They found a taping machine that she was taping all the things about Israel.

And that's it.

It was enough.

They took her to prison.

♪♪ -One Friday afternoon in May, four kids were having a bath, and my friend Barbara Oberman, who lived just up the road, said, "There's a woman of -- named Raiza Palatnik, and she's been put into prison, and they don't know where she is.

We've got to do something about it."

It was a bit of a -- You know, as I say, "What could I do with four kids in the bath?"

She said, "We want to sit outside the Russian embassy to do something to make our point."

-My kids were at three Jewish schools, and I phoned all the moms that I knew, and we decided to do a 24-hour hunger strike.

-We decided we were going to wear black, and we informed the press that we were 35 35-year-olds who were holding a hunger strike for a 35-year-old Jewess in prison in the Soviet Union.

We called the press.

We phoned them time and time and time again until one of the people answering said to somebody else there, "Oh, it's those 35s again."

And we got a name.

-It made our point.

We got the publicity.

I think we made television, radio, newspapers.

So for us it was a success.

And from then on I was just in.

-The following morning, somebody got a call from Odesa to say that Raiza Palatnik's parents had been called and allowed to see her in prison.

-Well, what do you think we felt like?

We couldn't stop.

There was no way we couldn't carry on.

And that's what we did.

♪♪ -For the third time since its birth as an independent state, Israel is embroiled in a war with the Arab nations that surround it.

-The Six-Day War is a preemptive war launched by Israel against the surrounding Arab states, who they see as gearing up to invade and to crush the State of Israel.

This military buildup by the Arab states involves a lot of Soviet technology.

Tanks, aircraft, missile systems, armaments -- all come from the Soviet Union.

But Israel is hugely successful and ends the threat that they had seen.

-According to the local field commanders here, the Syrians have now been forced to retreat back across the ceasefire lines.

[ Men singing in Hebrew ] -Everything has changed as a result of the Six-Day War, and Soviet Jews start soul searching -- what that means to be Jewish.

Do we have our history?

Do we have our heritage?

What -- What's the meaning?

And most of the Jewish Renaissance we know about is the result of the Six-Day War.

-Jewish people said, "Okay, now's the time.

We've had enough of the oppression, and we've had enough of hiding our Judaism."

And so they would apply for an exit visa.

But as soon as they applied, they were in trouble.

It meant that they were not happy with Russia and something was wrong, and so they were immediately targeted.

As soon as you applied for an exit visa, the next day you were banned from your job, your children may be expelled from school.

Then you had another problem is that if you didn't have a job, you were seen as a parasite, so you had to take some job.

And so you'd have like, you know, top engineers or, you know, brilliant professors, and they were reduced to just sweeping the streets because -- only because -- they'd applied to leave the country and go somewhere else.

So these people that were refused exit visas were called refuseniks.

-Whilst we were still working on Raiza, other cases came along.

[ Telephone ringing ] I came from the world of public relations, and I realized that we had to start something that would be consistent and constant in order to get under the teeth of the Soviet government.

-Because I'd been in the public eye and modeling, I knew the power of a decent picture was worth a thousand words.

We had seen little bits of write ups in the back pages of the paper that nobody looked at, and when we had these wonderful pictures, they were on the front page, so people read about it.

-We dressed in nightdresses, flimsy nightdresses, and sat on a lorry going round Grosvenor Square, around the American Embassy.

-When they saw that it was nice looking women, nicely dressed, walking down Fleet Street in black or walking anywhere, they all joined in, and it grew like Topsy.

-Gradually groups formed all around the country and then started in another country, and so it became international.

And the Irish were wonderful, partly because of the blarney.

♪♪ -Doreen Gainsford was the inspiration for me.

I had at that stage young children, and life was just busy.

But as a community, we found it compelling to -- to just get up and do something and help.

The women formed a very vibrant committee here, and we did a lot of fundraising.

After we did the fundraising, we started to become a little bit more militant and we spent quite a bit of time outside the embassy, either shouting, screaming, placards, whatever we could do.

We felt we had to make the Irish people aware of what was going on.

-We used to meet in people's houses, and we used to discuss tactics and what we could do, and some of them had babies and used to bring their babies along.

Some meetings were in the mornings, other meetings were in the evenings, depending on what we had to do and whether our husbands had been fed and on whether the children were in bed.

All these things had to be taken into account 'cause we were still housewives.

-Most of the time, our demonstrations were done in striped pajamas, so we used to wear these white bathing hats on our heads to show that we had shaved heads.

-Any time there was anything of Russian interest, we used to go, whether it was the concert hall, the RDS, or wherever it may have been.

What we used to do was stand outside and offer a flower to people.

And on the flower was a little message saying that we were representing a person who had been victimized because of his religion or her religion, and some of them had been sent to Siberia or whatever had happened to them.

-The one demonstration that will always be in my mind is the 2nd of June, 1977.

There was I, nine months pregnant in my striped pajamas and my bathing hat, marching up and down with my placard.

And from the Russian embassy, I went straight to the hospital where my daughter was born a few hours later.

So my daughter Susie is my refusenik baby.

♪♪ ♪♪ -We have been trying for one hour to contact these two women and some other women in the Soviet Union.

-I was often amazed at the changes that took place in lovely, lovely girls.

They suddenly developed strength.

And I think it was the realization that if you speak, somebody hears you.

To publicize the fact that Jews were being harassed, thrown into prison, that was our job.

Quickly we realized it was essential we acquired updated information.

-There was a group in Israel called Nativ, which means "pathway."

This in turn was a branch of Mossad LeAliyah Bet.

Mossad LeAliyah Bet helped Jews get out of Nazi Europe 1939, 1940, and bring them to Palestine.

Nativ became a branch of this for people that wanted to get out of the Soviet Union.

-When Nativ heard about the 35s and vice versa, it was a marriage made in heaven.

-Nativ was a part of the Intelligence Community of Israel, founded in 1952, and the idea was to get in touch with Soviet Jews in order to find out whether there is any intention by Soviet Jews to come to Israel.

We got to the conclusion that they would leave if it would be possible, and that is why Nativ started a campaign for the right of the Jews to leave, which was not so simple for a secretive organization like Nativ.

On the one hand, Nativ were in touch with the Jewish activists in the Soviet Union to gather information and to supply information, and people took a lot of risks.

On the other hand, ran a public campaign in the West.

We started to send people to England, France, Italy, the United States, Argentina, and the Nativ representative in Britain was a very resourceful man by the name of Ijo Rager.

-Rager was technically a diplomat at the Israel Embassy, but he had been appointed specifically to help the Soviet Jewry Campaign.

He had been a newspaperman.

He understood public relations.

He understood that the 35s could be an important weapon in publicizing the cause of Soviet Jewry and helping the refuseniks.

My connection with Rager was I was the chair of the university's Committee for Soviet Jewry, accumulating the latest news about the refuseniks.

And my job was to go down there every Monday morning -- they had an office in Golders Green -- and to fill them in on the latest developments and to describe what the latest problems were for the refuseniks.

-Ijo pushed us.

We were this group of women trying to do something, and he gave us a bit more insight and gave you different ideas and told you about all the people who were in prison.

Nothing ever, ever came through the embassy.

Somebody made a call to Doreen, and then Doreen made a call to us, and we were very quickly motivated.

And that's how it worked.

♪♪ -We had a demonstration purely to highlight how Soviet Jews were being treated and they were only fit to sweep the streets, and it proved to be one of the best demonstrations we did.

I mean, outside the Bolshoi every night, we didn't disrupt it, but we were outside every single night.

And we had minicab drivers dressing up in tutus, which was a great sight to see.

-We weren't aggressive.

You know, we were very decent ladies and we tried to stay within the law, but we were probably on the edge.

-One of our demos was at the Highgate Cemetery.

There was a delegation visiting, and we hid behind the tombstones with white sheets over our heads.

And as the delegation appeared, so we rose out from behind the tombs.

It was hysterical, and it made every paper.

-The other way of doing it was to make sure that the Soviet ambassador was followed wherever he went.

-We all knew that the ambassador was going to a photographic exhibition, and we were trying to get the release of a particular man.

And I walked down Bond Street, and there's a wonderful milliner there who had this beautiful hat in the window.

And I went in and I said, "Loan me that hat for two hours."

And I explained to them that I was worried about this man.

And he said, "With pleasure, take the hat."

And I waltzed in in this magnificent hat.

The ambassador came up to me and said, "Who are you?"

And I pulled out the picture of this gentleman and he was absolutely shocked.

-One of our major demos was at Portsmouth when the Soviet fleet came in, and we had a flotilla of little boats with slogans.

It was fun, but it was serious and it kept us all together because we realized that we were doing something and we were getting somewhere.

♪♪ -So it definitely was that feeling.

Here we were, all these little Jewish housewives going about our daily lives, and all of a sudden they're in this campaign and they're demonstrating and they're making a noise.

-"Where's your mom?"

"Mom's out on a demonstration."

"Again?

How many demonstrations can you be on?"

But that was it.

That's what we decided upon.

And those few of us who felt very dedicated were always ready to go out.

-It disrupted family life.

There's no way to say it didn't.

And unfortunately, quite a few of the girls got divorced.

They suddenly found they had a voice and they were real people, not just "have a cup of tea" people.

♪♪ -Anybody important or any celebrity who gets involved can only be good for the campaign.

-One of the first people who became involved was Laurence Olivier, and we went to him on behalf of the Panovs.

The Panovs were dancers, and they applied to go to Israel.

And when they applied to go to Israel, their jobs were taken away from them.

♪♪ Once you're chucked out of your work as an artist, your life is finished.

So we had to work very hard so that they got out.

And they got out.

Then came the prisoner luncheon, where we asked Ingrid Bergman, an international film star, and she was again happy to be doing what she did.

-Golda Meir was another one.

She was visiting London, and we were invited to meet her at a private house.

She was dressed in black and stood up and she said, "I have to applaud these women in black," and she said that she was proud to be one of us.

-In August 1975, at Helsinki, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed a new international agreement.

-The Soviet Union was susceptible to pressure because it began to suffer from economic problems in the 1970s.

And so, for economic reasons in particular, the Soviet Union committed themselves to Helsinki Final Act.

Whilst recognizing the territorial division of Europe, it also committed states to upholding some human rights norms.

-The Helsinki Agreement was a tool against the Soviet Union in order to demand those who want to practice religion should be allowed to, and those who want to leave should be allowed to, and that's the basic human right.

-The Soviet Union will respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion for all.

[ Radio playing indistinctly ] ♪♪ -I used to listen to the broadcasts in English, and one day I hear a broadcast from Israel.

He's telling an interesting story.

They say that new groups of Jewish youth in Moscow get together to celebrate Jewish holidays, there are circles to learn Jewish history, and most unexpectedly, there are circles to learn Hebrew.

And I felt an urge to find these circles... and I started to learn.

♪♪ The KGB had a Jewish department, and its role was exactly to prevent that to happen.

♪♪ I will give you one example of the most trivial thing the KGB did.

A person goes along the street.

Just out of blue, a black car emerges.

You go along the street, they follow you.

You stop, they would stop.

You enter the building, they would wait for you there.

The message -- "We are here."

♪♪ -At that time, 1970s, early 1980s, people thought those who wanted to emigrate as traitors.

So if some Jews wanted to emigrate, a lot of non-Jewish people thought that all the Jews wanted to emigrate.

So all the Jews became sort of traitors of the Soviet Union.

Many Jews didn't have any problems with the Soviet regime.

They were quite successful.

But the Jews who were surveilled, they were probably involved in underground activities, anti-Soviet activities, or they were probably involved in organizing immigration of Soviet Jews abroad.

♪♪ -By 1984, I am in immediate danger, and indeed I was arrested several months later.

Conditions in the punishment cells are so harsh they expect me to break down during the first days.

Two and a half months inside the hunger strike, Margaret Thatcher requested information about my health.

What's the connection?

Definitely somebody like 35s helped.

Otherwise, no chance that Margaret Thatcher would get interested in individual cases like me.

[ Telephone ringing ] -7010.

Michael Sherbourne speaking.

-We had a marvelous guy who was a teacher and he spoke Russian, and he devoted his life to phoning the Soviet Union.

-Michael used to phone up and get first-hand information, pass it over, and we'd spread it for everyone to use.

For us, it was a lifeline, and for many of the refuseniks.

-It was a network, and he had a long list of people.

We could say to him, "Michael, phone so-and-so and check that so-and-so happened to so-and-so."

And when he phoned, another piece of information came through at the same time.

-He could find out almost anything.

And we knew many times the other side, as it were, told lies and said nothing was wrong when we knew they were in jail or something, because Michael knew.

♪♪ -The KGB often listened in on these conversations.

There was one occasion when someone spoke and finished the conversation.

Five minutes later, picked up the phone and heard a recording of his conversation coming back to him.

There you go.

-I was told to phone Colin Shindler, and he had a list of the first refuseniks.

And then, of course, there was this question of how are we going to talk to them?

What are we going to do?

Because as soon as the KGB found out who was an activist, they immediately cut off their telephones, and then they cut off the mail as well so we couldn't even write.

So then the refuseniks would go out at 2:00 in the morning to the post office and phone us from there.

And we didn't say, "How's the weather?"

or "How are you?"

We just said, "Talk."

And it was like, "They've just arrested so-and-so," and then they cut them, they cut the phone, because they were listening, the KGB.

So Colin had this list of major activists, and on Friday night we said a prayer for them and we sent things.

So when people were going, it was a question of whether somebody would take something.

♪♪ -The visit started with the travel companies who set up cheap weekends, 'cause that opened the facility for people to have short trips to the Soviet Union on good prices.

-We had a constant stream of visitors going in with items that were requested by the refuseniks who had contact with the prisons, and it made life easier for many of them.

-These families were absolutely penniless, especially the refuseniks that had no jobs.

They were really, really poor.

And so the suitcases would have been full of clothing, things like jeans, things like expensive cameras, and even I think a computer that was brought in, and these were just left there.

They were sold, and they just enabled these families to survive.

-Lipsticks, make-up, dirty postcards, anything.

So if you've got a request for six pairs of ladies undies, the sexier the better, that's what you did.

And we found out this was all to bribe the prison guards.

♪♪ -Sharansky was definitely the most famous refusenik in history.

His antics with the Soviet authorities became known.

♪♪ -My name is Anatoly Sharansky.

I am three years old refusenik.

It means that for three years already I'm fighting for my right to leave for Israel.

♪♪ In my childhood, there was nothing Jewish.

The only Jewish thing which we had, it was anti-Semitism, and it was in abundance.

-[ Man speaking in Russian ] -The day that Stalin died, I am five years old, and my father explains to me that it is very good for us, for Jews, that Stalin died.

But he adds, "Don't tell it to anybody.

Do what everybody does."

Next day, I go to kindergarten and I'm crying together with all the children about the death of the great leader and the great -- the son of all the people, Stalin, and this double life I continued until the day that I rediscovered my Jewish identity.

[ People singing in Hebrew ] First of all, I said publicly that I want to leave.

Then I started participating in demonstrations demanding freedom for myself and for other Jews and then for everybody.

[ Singing continues ] Of course, it meant that you're challenging authorities, that you are constantly searched, interrogated, arrested for 10, 15 days, or warned that you'll be arrested for high treason.

♪♪ -Oh, my goodness, Natan Sharansky.

[ Sucks teeth, sighs ] I just have to tell you that if I'm gonna talk about Natan Sharansky, I'm also going to talk about Avital Sharansky.

Natan met his wife, Avital, in the '70s.

She wanted to learn Hebrew, and they met outside the synagogue, which was the gathering place for refuseniks.

They were married on July 4th, and the Soviets gave her permission to leave on July 5th.

She didn't want to leave, and Natan told her, "You go, I'm coming right after you."

-I assured her that in six months we'll be together.

In the meantime, she can prepare our new home in Jerusalem.

We met 12 years later.

♪♪ [ Speaking in Russian ] -The Soviets didn't like that he was spanning both the Jewish movement and the dissident movement, and they really cracked down at him and they arrested him for treason.

-The verdict was announced today, and as expected, Anatoly Sharansky, one of the more famous dissidents ever to be placed on trial in Russia, was found guilty of treason, of spying for the United States, and... ♪♪ ♪♪ -In the camp, the treatment was horrible.

I mean, it was torture by cold.

It was torture by labor.

The idea of being dehumanized was part of the system in the Soviet camps.

-In prison, I told to myself that my aim should not be physical survival.

My aim should be to remain free person in prison.

♪♪ I was very isolated from the outer world.

For years they were confiscating all your letters.

And then I had to start hunger strike, which continued for 110 days, in order they will give me opportunity to write letters.

Now you have the right to have a meeting with the family, personal meeting with the family once in half a year.

But again, for the bad behavior, I got two meetings in nine years.

So again, the information which I could receive was very limited, but I knew I felt that the struggle continues.

♪♪ ♪♪ -A very good friend of mine, her name was Joyce.

She was my first companion going to Russia.

We joined up with a group from London and flew British Airways to Moscow, and that was the start of our adventure.

And it was an adventure.

-The only person who knew was my husband.

"If that's what you want to do, okay, but make sure you come home."

[ Chuckles ] -I was the one who really, really, really wanted to go.

But the kids were small, and if my parents knew, it would have been an absolute "no, you're not going.

You may never come back.

How can you be so irresponsible?"

So the next best thing was, "Let's engage John."

[ Doorbell ringing ] -We were briefed here by somebody who came from, I think, from London.

We were given four names, addresses, and phone numbers.

They wanted cigarettes, and they also wanted winter clothing for the prisoners in the gulags.

So it's very cold there, certainly in the winter.

It's horrific.

I suppose it was a risk in a sort of a way.

But you always felt that the worst that could happen was that you'd be sent home.

♪♪ -We always went in twos.

You couldn't do it on your own.

It was too nerve-wracking.

We had names and we had addresses and we had a guidebook.

-We took a few Jewish prayer books.

My suitcase was full of jeans.

-We brought a lot of thermal underwear.

We were requested to get gray, if possible, to send down to Siberia to the prisoners.

-You know, this took place nearly 40 years ago, and I don't know if I remember all the details.

We were given names of people that we needed to visit, and I hid the names and addresses in a face powder case where you lifted up the mirror, and we put the names and addresses underneath and hid them in the hope that there would not be discovered.

-I actually don't remember being very concerned.

Sharon is a very reliable person, and I knew that the worst would happen is that she would be home early and I would benefit from that anyway, so I wasn't too concerned.

♪♪ -We were a bit unsure of what was going to happen, but we got off the plane, we went through customs.

We had little trouble in security.

We think it was the silver paper in the cigarette packets seemed to alert the security system, but we got through eventually.

Both of us had decent cameras, and we took quite a lot of photographs of what we were allowed to photograph.

We always felt that possibly we were being watched or followed or something, you know.

It was quite unnerving, really.

♪♪ -The kids were only little, and as far as they were concerned, he was gone to a medical conference.

That was the end of it.

So any emotions and any worries I had had to be kept to myself.

♪♪ -On every corridor, a woman sat at a desk.

When you went in, she wrote down the time you went in... and when you went out, the time you went out.

When we were in the bedrooms, we never used to speak.

We used to write notes to each other and then tear them up and flush them down the loo.

There was a clock in our bedroom, and it used to go backwards, and I felt that it was probably the bug in the room.

You had to be very careful.

You just didn't know.

Walls had ears.

♪♪ In the daytime, we went with the group to whatever tours they were doing, whether it was to a museum or whatever, and at night we had to go to work.

One night, the Intourist guide said they had tickets for the circus, and I said, "Well, as a matter of principle, I won't go and see animals performing," we wouldn't go.

And Joyce said the next night when they were going to take us to the ballet, the Bolshoi, and she wouldn't like to go and see men prancing around in tights.

So we got out of that, and we had to go and see these people in the darkness.

-We had a map of the underground, which was difficult to work out because it was all in Cyrillic.

But when you get off at the stops, all you see are blocks and blocks of gray, dull apartments.

-It was always a bit nerve-wracking because you just didn't know what you were going to encounter or whom.

We got lost once, and I said, "I will never see David again."

And Joyce said, "Come on now.

Behave yourself."

-She was saying, "We'll never get out of this."

And I was saying, "We will.

Don't worry.

We'll find our way."

So we were very good for each other.

We were good partners.

-When we were there, it was suggested that we go to visit this secret school.

And when we got there, they were learning Hebrew.

And when I spoke to them about learning Hebrew and why they were doing it, they were sure that they were going to be able to get out eventually and that they wanted to prepare themselves for living in Israel.

They were really excited to hear about the outside world, to hear about the Jewish world and the fact that we were showing solidarity, because of course they were not getting the information that we were getting.

That feeling of they're not alone, that they're not isolated, that we care about them was very important.

-Some of them spoke little English.

Some of them spoke better than others.

They told us of their plight and what they needed.

-They would ask us if we could go to the Beryozkas, which were the shops that catered just for tourists with hard currency.

They weren't allowed in.

When we came back here to Dublin, we would always report back who we'd seen, where we'd seen them, circumstances, what was needed.

And this is how it was set up for the next people to go from wherever they went in the UK or from here.

♪♪ We found the people very hospitable, very resilient, very brave, and very warm.

They always offered us something when we were there, and a number of them gave us gifts, and each and every one of them had a story to tell.

-35 was exactly this type of organization, which, first of all, is very public and which tries to keep personal contact and personal eye on the families.

And Avital found their support from the very first day.

-When she came out, she came straight to us in London in order to campaign for her husband.

And she did a brilliant, brilliant job.

She explained their case to person after person in the news and person after person inside Parliament, until we got to the prime minister.

By the time this happened, of course, Sharansky was in gulag.

-Mrs.

Sharansky, do you know where exactly your husband is?

-He's in the 35 camp.

-35?

-Camp.

In the Ural Mountains.

-Avital was, I think, one of the best ambassadors for Soviet Jewry.

She was a remarkable woman.

Her campaign for him was ceaseless.

I don't think there was a country in the world that didn't know Sharansky.

♪♪ -President Reagan, during his first meeting with President Gorbachev, told him that he will not be trusted as long as Sharansky is in prison.

And that was the first months of the Gorbachev and his desperate attempt to change the attitude towards Soviet Union.

[ Hinges shriek ] Some weeks after this, I was suddenly taken from punishment cell, moved to the hospital, and for more than a month, they were feeding me with food that I even forgot that it exists.

They were giving me all types of injections in order to strengthen me.

And then took me to the airplane.

They say in a very official tone that there is special decision of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, that for the bad behavior, not worth it to Soviet citizens, I am deprived of Soviet citizen and exiled from Soviet Union.

♪♪ I went out of the airplane, reached the KGB car already in Eastern Germany, then was brought to the bridge, and there, an American ambassador took me from Eastern Germany to Western Germany.

-Anatoly Sharansky, the Jewish human rights campaigner who'd spent nine years in jail and labor camps, was released in an exchange of prisoners at the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin.

-When Sharansky came out, I mean... wow, that was something special.

I met him coming over the bridge.

It was just incredible.

♪♪ -I went to Frankfurt there, saw my wife after 12 years.

I said, "I'm sorry I'm late," and we went straight to Israel.

-For Anatoly Sharansky, a lifetime's dream come true -- freedom in Israel.

-I was the first political prisoner, the first refusenik released by Gorbachev.

But all our friends were still there.

There are at least 400,000 Soviet Jews who were waiting to be released.

So it's very important to continue fighting.

And that's why quarter million Jews were released, and that's why... -Well, the one gathering, the most spectacular one, was Natan Sharansky called for a demonstration of 400,000 people.

At that exact moment, Gorbachev was meeting with Reagan, and Reagan said, "Mr.

Gorbachev, look on the Mall.

There are a half a million American citizens that are asking me to raise the issue of Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union."

-You see, my people spoke.

I cannot ignore it.

And that was like the last big battle for Soviet Jewry.

Yeah, after this, all the refuseniks and prisoners then were released.

Two years after this, Iron Curtain fell and 400,000 came over in the first 2 or 3 years, and then there was more than a million.

1 million people coming to the country of 8 million, it was not simple.

The question of integration is a difficult one.

-People are coming off a situation where they've rejected left-wing ideology.

So you tend to have a community that came in that was very insecure about the idea of the possibility of territorial compromise, very much looking for the strong leadership and therefore significantly bolstering the right wing of the Israeli political system in the process.

♪♪ -It was September, I think.

I've got a phone call that my mother, father, and Raiza is coming to Israel.

♪♪ I was very happy.

♪♪ -Two and a half months inside the hunger strike, finally was brought to the court.

The KGB wanted to give me five years of imprisonment and seven additional years of exile.

And I got record low in the year and a half, which I served.

♪♪ I was a part of something that could not be called any other word but a miracle.

-You know, if not this group of 35 women, we all would be dead.

♪♪ -Looking back, I got more out of the 35s than I ever put into it.

Some called us spoiled housewives who had nothing better to do.

But that wasn't so.

Having a child, doing the shopping... actually was quite boring... until the 35s came along.

-I truly believe I came out of that organization as a changed woman.

I realized that it's not just speaking.

It's doing day after day and consistently never letting up that you can have an effect on a government that you never believe would even hear you.

-It's very important to know that a small group of people can make a difference.

So if it's a matter of somebody now thinking what they can do to help people, even if it's something small, do it.

Because that's what counts.

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