Yvonne Bornstein - Eleven Days of Hell

Although the events in this book seem in my mind to have happened only yesterday, I could not have written about them until enough yesterdays had passed for me to be able to see those events in the overall perspective of my life. But, just as crucially, it also could not have happened until enough people encouraged me to write it. For this reason, I consider all of the following people my ‘co-authors,’ for without them you would not be looking at the book before you now. I say a collective thank you to all of them, for accompanying me on a journey into uncharted waters and for holding my hand at various points to keep me from drowning. My heartiest, and most heartfelt, appreciation goes to: My parents, Billie and Wally, for their unlimited supply of love and devotion, and for always believing in me. My husband, Sam Bornstein. Through Sam, I found myself. My sisters, Jan and Erica. My beautiful daughters, Romy and Melanie. Rhonda Kohn, my best friend and confidante, who not only stands by me but sometimes has to pull me out of the mud. Mike Carmona, one of the few people I trusted to read the manuscript as it was being written. His valuable feedback helped keep the boat going in the right direction. I am especially grateful to my former husband and the father of my daughter Melanie, Daniel Weinstock, one of the kindest men I have ever known, for reliving the pain of the nightmare so that this book would be factually thorough and accurate. Only Danny could recount in vivid detail his own desperate hours when we were kept apart during those eleven days of hell. He provided documentation that filled in the gaps. I hope that by telling this story, I can ease his pain as much as I eased my own.

I would also like to express my deepest appreciation and admiration to three men who generously took time from their busy schedules to jolt their memories about events that grow more distant each year. Though I didn’t know it at the time, they were working day and night to save my life. A multiple thank you from the bottom of my heart to Dimitry Afanasiev, Gerry Ingrisano, and James Pelphrey.

Dimitry, brilliant lawyer that he is, is a practiced orator, yet he is more than that. A humanist, he brought an emotional attachment to saving the lives of two people he didn’t know, which still warms my heart. He also has an expertise in Russian affairs and terrorist activities, and when he traced my kidnappers to Osama bin Laden’s murderous al-Qaeda network, it made my heart pound.

Gerry is a longtime FBI agent, and James a veteran diplomat. Neither is prone to patting himself on the back; ‘All in a day’s work’ is their motto. Yet they gladly went back and researched their roles in my story. I will never be able to thank them enough for their efforts, but I hope this book makes clear the underlying lesson in the work these men did: Nothing is impossible when people care enough.

This book tells the story of eleven days out of my lifetime of forty-eight years, eleven days of terrible events, frozen fear, unimaginable degradation, and constant anticipation. And yet, at the risk of sounding flippant, I can honestly say that the thought of writing this book was just as terrifying in its own way. Actually, the writing of any book would be a challenge for me on the order of climbing Mt. Everest. I would hardly describe myself as a shrinking violet—talking about myself has never been as easy as going out and being myself. I’ve done many things, admirable and otherwise in those forty-eight years, but it has only been recently that I’ve been able to learn what’s inside me that makes me, well, me.

This book posed an enormous challenge, one much more stringent than merely scaling Everest. It required that I look back at things I had pushed hard out of my memory, never again wishing them to come back in. It also forced me to look so deeply inside of me that it felt like I was performing surgery on myself. Imagine excavating your own liver and you’ll get the point—and a very painful point, I might add. Only in my case, I wasn’t aiming at my liver but something more vulnerable: my innermost feelings.

In the same way that my ordeal of terror had a happy ending, I am pleased to say the operation went quite well, thank you. Both patient and surgeon are doing fine. In the end, writing all of these pages seemed to have exorcised the pain, if I may be so trite. It was no picnic, but to have gotten through the whole book is the dessert, the Pavlova pie. It really tastes delicious!

Not that I am pronouncing myself completely cured of the residual fear I’ve lived with for the past twelve years. Far from it. The old saying that goes, ‘Time heals all wounds,’ is not true, at least not for me. Some wounds can never heal. Some are too intimate, too brutal, too dehumanising. That is why it took twelve years for me to even attempt to write my story. Many times during those years, I tried another form of self-surgery, using a home lobotomy kit to numb my memories and feelings. However, there could never have been enough anesthetic to fully numb myself, and not enough bricks and mortar in the world to build a wall high enough around the memories. If I pat myself on the back for writing a whole book, that same patting hand will still tremble when I wake from a nightmare in a cold sweat, as I do often.

Reliving those terrible eleven days with pen in hand is one thing; reliving them involuntarily in a dreamlike state and not knowing if it’s real and happening all over again is quite another. Dealing with them—and the unyielding fear that I’m still in danger, that people are lying in wait for me around the next corner—is what psychiatrists get paid for. I know. I’ve paid enough of them. If I can walk alone outside in the glorious sunshine and smile, if I can laugh with my husband or spend time with my beautiful children, it’s a good day. A very good day. There are more of them now.

In a very real sense, writing the book was a form of therapy, though I take no credit for understanding that beforehand. The idea to write a book came from my current husband, Sam. Though Sam came into my life after the events described herein, he could see from an objective distance how damaged I was as a human being. One consequence of those events had been the collapse of my previous marriage to Daniel Weinstock. Danny, like me, is Australian. Together, we built a thriving, global, commodity barter trade business. We were one of the very few Australian companies to do business in Russia, both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. If you are not familiar with this shadowy occupation, these pages will open your eyes. Suffice it to say, we sometimes bent the rules of business and ethics, and partnered up with shady characters that we could never really trust.

Though we didn’t know it at the time, we fell into a spider’s web of Russian villains that included underworld gangsters, defrocked KGB agents, and half-crazed gypsies from freshly-minted Russian republics given their freedom in the early 1990s. Those who are familiar with post-Iron Curtain events may know the particularly bloody history of one such republic, Chechnya, where bloodthirsty nationalist rebels evolved into the monsters we know today as al-Qaeda. Although my husband and I knew little of this developing history at the time, we may have been known to them. In the early ’90s, terrorist ‘sleepers’ began to practice methods of financing their bloody deeds by kidnapping and extorting Western businesspeople. Like us, most people had never heard of the sinister group until after that tragic and horrendous September 11th morning of 2001. It certainly surprised me—shocked is a better word—that I may well have been a seminal target of opportunity for Osama bin Laden.