"In such times as these it is easy to lose hope. Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, died in 1938 in a "transit camp" at Vladivostok, wrote a book about their life of unspeakable suffering under Stalin. This book she called Hope Against Hope. After his death she wrote a second book, and wished it to be called in English Hope Abandoned. In South Africa we are still writing the first book. We trust that we shall never have to write the second."