About the book

The following is the true story about a year more or less of my life when I was held in Poland for a crime I didn’t commit. It’s a story about what happened to me and about what life was like for me and is like for the people I was involved with. I think that while I was in the middle of all that was happening around me, it was everything I could do to keep some sense of clarity. But it is obvious to me now, looking back over my notes, the papers I have saved and the almost two thousand E-mails I used as a reference from that time that I was quite affected by all of this. I can see that there were a lot of things I could have done differently. Of course, if there had been more money, anything would have been possible. I am an American you know and don’t think for a minute that this is any small matter. And to this end, I am sure that 90 percent of the people who had their hands on me were doing nothing but waiting to be paid. But I think I tried to do the best that I could with what I had to work with, even if ironically enough, this was the thing that was held against me the most.

Over the last couple of years, while thinking about in the eventual writing of this book, I had always thought that I would have liked for it to have it begin on one warm September morning while riding my bike in Manhattan. Eventually though, and this has included three major edits and a lot of water under the bridge, I got to thinking that I was being a little gratuitous in attaching this story to September 11th. But in a lot of ways my experiences in New York had a great effect on me and my feelings about my life and what sorts of things were important. That day was a huge shock and along with the following times of economic struggle that followed that most catastrophic day, I am absolutely sure that a lot of my choices were colored.

But then again, maybe the story really started as I was waiting for the plane to take me to Italy for that promise of a job, that potential romance and all of the other things that never happened. Or perhaps this account could start on the train to Belarus about six weeks later and what I found had become of Belarus in the five years since last I had been there. Perhaps finding Tatyana and riding with the boys at the bike club were really the beginning of the story. None of this was unimportant. But maybe it is all a bit personal.

So let's start this story on May 15th 2002, at the corner of Solidarnosci and Andersa in Warsaw, Poland. Well, actually we'll start the night before, but I think that all things considered, it really was all about the events of that particular day that affected all of us so much, so I think I would like to start there.

Adam Goodman
September 15th, 2003