The first time I worked as a volunteer for an international human rights organization, more than 15 years ago, I was sent to an Eastern European country to be a “presence” at a trial of some dissidents. My host there took me to meet members of the local Helsinki network. We walked down narrow streets, doubled back, entered a grim housing project, took various paths, entered one building and later exited, checked whether we were being followed, and finally knocked on the door of an apartment. Its occupants were delighted to see my companion, who introduced me as a new emissary from human rights bringing news from New York. Unsure of what to say at first, I let her do the talking. One of the Helsinki people asked if I knew Jeri Laber. At that time I did not know her, although I knew many of her associates. Silence fell; suspicion was palpable. My companion tried to explain that I was new to the work and all that, but the frost barely thawed. The implication was clear that if I did not know Jeri Laber, I could hardly be the real thing.
Jeri Laber certainly was the real thing. Trained at the Russian language institute at Columbia, she had been active in human rights organizations and had been attacking Soviet policy toward dissidents for years before the Helsinki accords were adopted in the mid-1970s. “The Courage of Strangers: Coming of Age With the Human Rights Movement” is Ms. Laber’s memoir. She had left her traditional middle class life to confront the varieties of human depravity as an operative in a growing worldwide human rights movement. Ms. Haber, in fact, was one of the founders of the Human Rights Watch, originally the Helsinki Watch, which now is one of the most influential human rights organizations in the world. In November 2000, she was awarded the Order of Merit by President Vaclav Havel on behalf of the Czech Republic.
