Austrian Armed Forces

He embraced his parents. Leonid, his younger brother, was not present; a week earlier he had received his conscription notice and written a letter to the authorities saying he refused to serve in the armed forces of the Soviet Union. Then he had left the apartment and gone underground, first saying good-bye to his older brother. Sanya boarded the plane and flew to Vienna with one other Jewish family. Two days in the Vienna holding center: a Red Cross building, slanted roof, guard towers with Austrian police at the gates. In the morning a loudspeaker called out, БЂњAchtung! Achtung!БЂ«An uncomfortable experience. In Israel he was met by his grandmother and relatives and friends. He rented an apartment in Jerusalem, was asked by the Israeli Foreign Office to work on behalf of Russian Jewry, began to travel to conferences. One day in June 1978 Sanya was listening to the English-language news broadcast over Radio Israel and heard that his parents had been arrested. He hurried to Tel Aviv and met with Nechemyah Levanon, an Israeli who had once played a major part in the secret Mossad operation that had brought Hebrew books into StalinБЂ™s Soviet Union ...»