An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  “You’re all sick,” I shouted. “Watching us in the shower is perverted. What do you think we are going to do in the shower?” I shouted furiously.

  After that, we refused our shower privileges until we figured out that we could wear layers of clothes to the shower and hang the outer layer on the bars to block their view.

  The only visitor I saw was the rabbi: under BOP contract. I assumed that the officials allowed him in to see me because they felt that violating prisoners’ religious rights was one of the few places that they were still vulnerable to a legal challenge in the federal courts. He was the head rabbi of the Lubavitch community in Cincinnati and he drove once a week, every week, year in and year out, to meet with the twenty or so Jewish women in the general population of the more than twelve hundred women at Lexington. Rabbi Josephson had been ministering to Jewish male felons there for more than twelve years, before the prison had been turned into a place for women, in 1984.

  That first time we met, he was accompanied into the basement by Chaplain Bits and two lieutenants. Rabbi Josephson was in his forties, with black curly hair and black clothes. He was a burly man who fit my exact preconceived notion of an Orthodox rabbi. Even though he was sweating and seemed nervous, his eyes were direct and searing. I have no idea how he perceived that first meeting, but I committed the first infraction right then by trying to shake his hand while introducing myself. Of course he wouldn’t take it, and at first I thought it was because he was afraid of me. Then I realized that he wouldn’t shake a woman’s hand. My heart sank, and I thought, I’ve been struggling all my life against this type of backwardness.

  But he smiled and said, “Let’s sit.”

  We were standing in the day room with cameras whirring, COs watching us through a window, and the chaplain and the lieutenants hovering nearby. I said, “I want privacy. How can we talk with all these people?”

  “Let’s sit and talk. Forget about them.”

  I began to object, but he moved to the corner of the room, pulled up two chairs, put his back to the men, and pointed for me to sit. I sat. Very softly he whispered, “I’ve never seen anything like this, in all my years, never. They didn’t want me to see you. I’ve been trying for weeks to get down here.”

  I said, “Thank you for coming, and making it happen.”

  “Ms. Rosenberg, Susan, what did you do? Why all this hatred?”

  I whispered back, “Whatever they told you, it is a lie. I am not a terrorist, nor am I dangerous.”

  And then his face split into an enormous grin. “That I can see.”

  Chaplain Bits and the others were talking among themselves and laughing loudly. Again, I wanted to tell them to leave us alone. The rabbi said, “I have only five minutes now, but I promise I will be back. What do you want from me? How can I help?”

  I was taken up short. I had been arguing with the COs for a long time about my right to see a rabbi, but now that he was here I didn’t really have an answer. I realized that I had gotten caught up in “my rights” without having a deeper reason. I felt embarrassed at that. “They’re torturing us down here. You can see we’re buried alive. And every day it gets worse and worse,” I said. “Regardless of my conviction, I think I should be able to celebrate my religion, and practice it. I want to go to the Jewish Passover with the other Jews here. I want to explain to you why I am here.”

  The rabbi said, “In all my years here I have never been escorted anywhere, even to segregation. Upstairs we study, we pray, and we practice together. I oversee the holidays and the kosher kitchen; I teach and give solace and ensure that the religious rights of Jews here are upheld.”

  “I don’t want to study. I am not a Jew who believes in that way, but I am proud to be a Jew and these people won’t ever stop me from being one. The COs read their Bibles out loud over the intercom going directly to our cells. Hellfire and damnation are the order of the day, every day. It’s driving us crazy, Jews and non-Jews alike,” I continued.

  He sagged at my words. He didn’t say anything, but I could see that he believed me.

  “It’s Stammheim2 down here. You know what that is?” I asked. He shook his head, so I kept talking, rushing to get as much out as possible, with my eye on the clock. “It’s the prison in Germany designed to hold political prisoners and modeled after the Third Reich’s penology. Attorney General Edward Meese, the current German government, and others have agreed to build these prisons in all the Western countries.”

  His eyes said, You go too far, this can’t be right.

  I knew I was losing him. “No, really, it’s modern and new. It’s small-group isolation in what are called ‘dead wings,’ with the goal of identity destruction.”

  Before I could get another verifiable detail out of my mouth, Chaplain Bits broke in. “That’s it. We are leaving, now!”

  The rabbi stood up rapidly, and I could see that he was more than ready to go. “Susan, where are you from?”

  “New York, New York City,” I answered.

  The rabbi’s face lightened ever so slightly. “Me, too; Brooklyn.” As the COs hustled him off, he called back over his shoulder, “I’ll bring a study book next time.” Then the elevator doors closed and he was gone, and all the men with him.

  As soon as Rabbi Josephson left, several COs came in. They were bruising for a fight and their hostility was palpable. “Rosenberg, get in that room. We’re doing a strip search,” the head CO, Ms. Marshall, barked.

  I had known ever since my arrival that I was part of an experiment in dehumanization and that no one involved in it could risk any empathy. Their role was to transform me into the “other.” In spite of this knowledge, when I got back to my cell after the strip search I couldn’t help falling into a deep sadness. I thought, Rabbi Josephson thought I was crazy, a paranoid, crazy woman. I berated myself for hours for not being calmer, or more thoughtful, for not making a plan prior to talking with him, and for not putting on my neater and cleaner uniform. And then I wished he had been a Reform rabbi and not Orthodox, which made the terrain of our Jewishness so wide. Yet despite my self-doubt, and my fear that I was losing my grip on reality, I knew I felt better simply from the familiarity of his New York self. It was only later that I realized that his very orthodoxy was what drove his commitment to me and the other prisoners; it was his mitzvah (good deed) which had enabled him to listen and understand me. His open-heartedness and his willingness even within the confines of the extreme security measures to risk engaging with me challenged my own rigidity. This challenge made me see beyond my own stereotypes.

  After the rabbi’s visit, something extraordinary happened. My food tray changed. The rabbi had put me on a kosher diet. He had told the food line that it was a religious necessity for me (although we hadn’t discussed it). The food was infinitely superior to the standard fare, and it came in huge servings. It was prepared separately from the rest of the food, for a small segment of the population and in small batches with better ingredients. It was cooked in a pork-free kitchen by both Jewish and Muslim prisoners. This was the result of several lawsuits that had been won over the previous decades that upheld a prisoner’s right of religion.

  At a time when the regular food trays for everyone in the HSU were filled with heaps of processed American cheese, tiny bits of lettuce, and ketchup (then deemed a vegetable by President Reagan), three times a day for weeks on end, Rabbi Josephson’s small act of solidarity saved all of us from nearly starving. I shared my better fare with everyone in the basement. Later, I learned that one of the Muslim cooks was a woman named Apple. She was a good friend of Laura’s, my dear friend and political associate of over a decade. Laura Whitehorn, who had been arrested in Baltimore, MD in 1985 and been held in preventive detention ever since, detained in the women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia, awaiting trial on politically motivated charges of weapons possession and bombing. Apple was responsible for the enormity of the portions. There was an informal grapevine and network in prisons all over the federal p
rison system. The grapevine was used by both prisoners and officials. For prisoners, it was a way to get information about people and where they were and how they were, and for officials it was a way to hold people in line with what they wanted prisoners to know. Apple had been in prison with Laura in West Virginia, and had heard all about me from Laura, so when she got to Lexington she did what she could to help me. She succeeded beyond measure.

  I was never allowed to see the other Jewish prisoners. They wanted me to participate in their services, and I wanted to, as well, but my basement status overrode religious rights. In April 1987, after I had been in Lexington six months, I asked the rabbi to bring a message to the Passover service. I wrote:

  I wish to share my spirit and love with you tonight. I wish that I could be there with you, but for obvious reasons, not of my choosing, I cannot. Tonight as you celebrate the Passover and remember the struggle for liberation and freedom, I will also. Coming to prison has taught me much about anti-Semitism in America, and as a result I have come to better terms with my own history and the most positive and progressive aspects of our traditions. I long for peace between Israel and Palestine. I will drink from Elijah’s cup. In solidarity, Susan.

  It was in that basement where I began a study of Jewish history and thinking. I had consciously rejected the Holocaust as a frame of reference when I had been in previous prisons as too extreme and not accurately comparable. I did not want to overstate the conditions that I was experiencing, yet I found reading about it crucial to my mental framework and my very survival. I felt encompassed at Lexington by an ideologically driven evil, beyond anything I had yet experienced, and I desperately needed a frame of reference to understand it. I read modern European history, German history, Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Communist and writer who wrote Prison Notebooks, and one history of the Jewish people after another. I followed the path of repression over the twentieth century through a circuitous route that led from the “disappeared” in Argentina, to the work of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, to the poet-philosophers like Elie Wiesel and Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish poet and writer also imprisoned in Auschwitz, who had survived the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Primo Levi more than other survivors showed me a way to give meaning to my suffering and to try and give voice to the others who were suffering alongside me. I found a purpose in the anguish, if not the philosophical and moral explanation I was looking for. I would bear witness. I would render from the isolation and repression and torture a record. Finding this purpose, grasping this idea and making it my task changed my life, my thinking, and ultimately my view of the world. And on a more internal level (before I learned that all my poet heroes—Levi, Borowski, Paul Celan, and others—had committed suicide), I found a new way to survive by reading and writing and thinking with purpose.

  I had help in this realization, help and support. It was during this time that Mary, my lawyer, had really become my lifeline to the outside, to a semblance of sanity, to a human and loving connection, which all took place through weekly twenty-minute phone calls. I think Mary understood the limits of what she could do to help me and at the same time understood that her work in relation to me and her communication with me was the most vital in staving off madness from the conditions. Mary knew that the tenuous thread connecting me to the outside—maintaining my strength and sense of humor—was critical to surviving. We developed an ongoing private joke that served to underscore the battle we were in. I would tell her about one horrendous violation after another and she would say, “Write it down, for the record.” I half believed that keeping a record was a futile effort, and she half believed it would be of use in fighting for justice, but that sentence became a signal between us, a way to reference acts of violence too difficult to discuss.

  “Write it down,” Mary said on a phone call that I was allowed to make after several weeks of concerted sleep deprivation. Hysteria was rising in me as I recounted the past nights of forced waking, and I could hear the tears in Mary’s voice acknowledging my pain. I knew she believed me, yet neither of us could express our outrage directly (over a surveilled phone). “Write it down, for the record” was Mary’s way of helping me see the means I had in front of me. She never grew inured to my suffering. She felt it as her own.

  Primo Levi wrote that the best historians of the concentration camps were political prisoners. Because the camps were fundamentally a political phenomenon, he said, it was the ex-combatants and anti-fascist fighters who had the background to interpret the events. They realized that recording their testimony was an act of resistance. I started to write.

  Alex and I had successfully resisted our jailers’ attempts to fingerprint all our visitors. We felt that underneath the policy of fingerprinting them was an assumption of guilt by association. We believed that if the authorities succeeded in implementing it at the HSU, they would then make it national policy. It would be a step toward criminalizing people as a preventive measure. For the first several months we simply refused visits. Eventually, with the legal community on the outside publicizing the HSU’s violations of constitutional due process, the prison authorities backed down.

  Mary’s first visit brought me great joy and relief. She had come to see me and Alex, and to see the unit for herself. With her dark blond hair, her vibrancy, and her warmth, she looked so normal that the sadness mixed with fury that emanated from her was astounding and beautiful.

  Alex and I had been there for three months. By then we had already begun to look sick. We were thin, pale, drawn, unkempt (haircuts had been out of the question). Our beige uniforms were the same color as the walls in the visiting booth. We were beginning to blend into the concrete.

  “What is it like?” Mary wanted to know. “Tell me. How is it different from the other places?”

  To see a friend, to see someone who was not an agent of the government, brought out the emotions I had been suppressing. “It’s got eleven surveillance cameras. There are no visible cameras in our cells, but the surveillance extends into the area of the showers. There is a little room on the tier with the cells called the multi-purpose room, and we are allowed in there. We eat in that room. It is about the size of a cell, six by eight. To get off our tier, we have to go through two electronic gates. We are always accompanied by an officer. It is controlled movement.” Without pausing for breath I kept on. “We have no contact with anyone outside of the staff, yet we are subject to strip searches anytime. We are constantly patted down by men, and our cells are shaken down every day. It is utter craziness! No one comes here, and no one could get us any contraband unless they were an alien with magic powers.”

  Mary was writing as I was talking. She didn’t look up, but she kept asking questions. “Go on,” she said. She knew I needed to tell her the details. Somehow she knew that I had been humiliated beyond imagination and that maybe recounting it all would help me.

  I wanted her to believe me, to know that I wasn’t exaggerating. “We see no natural light, we breathe no natural air, and we eat no food that hasn’t been microwaved. We see nothing but white color. Our social contact is with a television. Our mail and our reading material are either withheld completely or censored. We don’t get outdoor recreation, we can’t take showers except when the COs say, and they always tell us to shower when men are on duty.”

  I finished this description by telling her about my cell. The thing I wanted Mary to understand was that we were being subjected to an orchestrated psychological program. I told her that Alex and I had cells on the “dark side” of the tier, the internal side of the building. I described our high-up windows and limited view of the courtyard. On the “light side,” the windows, at normal height, looked out onto a fenced-in field that was part of the prison grounds. We had been told by Mr. Ogden that the light side was the privileged side. When we heard that, we laughed.

  I don’t know what Mary made of my account. I know that I felt embarrassed at my appearance and at what a mess I was, and how I sounded, even to myself. I remem
bered her from the days when I had been free and we’d both been political activists. Now I felt awful and sad that she was seeing me like this. But there was no way to talk about that, to even get close to those kinds of feelings, because they took energy and energy was diminishing with each passing day.

  Mary brought up the subject of my parents visiting me. I didn’t want them to come; I didn’t want them to see the prison, or me in it. They had visited me regularly in New York and in Tucson, and the connection between us was growing, not diminishing. But I felt that it would be too hard here. Mary told me that it wasn’t my decision to make, that they were my parents and they needed to see what was happening. We argued, but in the end I knew I couldn’t stop the visit. She then told me about other friends on the outside and people I had come to know on the inside. Just watching her sitting across the table from me was a calming experience.

  Then she began to talk about the beginning of the campaign to get Alex and me out of Lexington. There were groups and organizations on the outside that would not let us be disappeared. The Puerto Rican independence movement and, more specifically, the National Committee to Free the Puerto Rican Prisoners of War were not going to let Alejandrina Torres languish in a basement. She was considered to be one of fourteen Puerto Rican prisoners of war in U.S. prisons having been convicted of seditious conspiracy. The Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN) and other independence organizations had launched a campaign to free them, defend them, and link their continuing resistance in prison to an anti-colonial campaign against the U.S. government. They were planning to engage the progressive churches and get them to examine and monitor the conditions at the HSU.

  The United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, and other religious denominations had also heard of our plight and were just beginning their support work. There were people from the left who were organizing and supporting us. A small number of women lawyers and students from Lexington and Louisville had begun a group to protest the conditions at the HSU and had organized several small demonstrations outside the prison. The committee to shut down the Lexington High Security Unit had been formed, and people were working to defend us.