April in Washington, D.C., is normally the month of nature’s renewal—and my favorite—for the pastel blossoms of azaleas and tulips, the shades of green in new grass, the warming temperatures, and the soft light that lingers into evening. This spring, the window is the prism of human existence—looking through the glass and waiting for the pestilence to pass. From my window, I can see a pear tree shedding white flowers to make way for sprouting leaves. Little else is happening on the other side of the pane. As eerie as this spring has already been, Surgeon General Jerome Adams warned on Sunday that this week will be “the hardest and saddest” in most Americans’ lives. “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized. It’s going to be happening all over the country,” he said, on Fox News.

I began to wonder how much the human spirit can endure—and for how long. We’re only in the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, with a second wave expected in the fall. “Catastrophizing is really bad for your mental health,” Samuel Paul Veissière, a co-director of the Culture, Mind and Brain Program at McGill University, told me. “You bring depression into being by worrying. And that has an impact on quality of life and immune functions.” To circumvent the numbing fear of becoming the next numeral in a running tally of cases, I started playing a mental game—identifying the people I’ve known or covered who were imprisoned, isolated, or banished in far worse conditions. Covering the world’s wars and political hellholes, there have been many—some famous, many little-known. Each of their stories reaffirmed what humans are capable of bearing—and eventually overcoming.

In the nineteen-seventies, I covered the apartheid era in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated in a damp concrete cell on Robben Island, a former leper colony converted into a prison. “I could walk the length of my cell in three paces,” Mandela recalled, in his autobiography. “When I lay down, I could feel the wall with my feet and my head grazed the concrete at the other side. The width was about six feet. That small cramped space was to be my home for I knew not how long.” Mandela’s prism on the world was a small window with six bars but little to see. Robben Island was five miles off the coast. He didn’t have access, as we do now, to newspapers, telephones, and a television. He once wrote the warden begging for pajamas that only white prisoners received. After his wife was arrested, in 1969, he wrote his children, “For long you may live like orphans.” In 1988, he developed tuberculosis, another highly contagious disease. Mandela was imprisoned for twenty-seven years; he was seventy-two when he made his famous walk to freedom. He went on to re-create a nation and win the Nobel Peace Prize. I saw him twice after he was elected President, in 1994. He was never self-indulgent about his confinement, the conditions of life during isolation, the separation from family and society—or his disease. He endured, brilliantly.

In 1992, exactly twenty-eight years ago this week, I flew with Elie Wiesel to the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, an annual conference held in the Midwest to honor the laureates and highlight human rights. Wiesel had won the Nobel six years earlier. Wiesel was a child when his family was confined, first in Auschwitz, where his mother and younger sister were killed, then in Buchenwald, during the Second World War. There’s a haunting picture of Wiesel packed with other men and boys on wooden planks, shelves, really, that were stacked in four rows on top of each other, floor to ceiling, in Buchenwald. The men were all skeletal. They had no windows to the outside world.

My father fought to liberate Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp seized by the U.S. Army, in April of 1945. I still have his letter to my mother about the horrors he found. On our flight, Wiesel and I talked about our fathers’ experiences in the camp. He told me a longer version of what he recounted about his father’s fate when Elie returned to Buchenwald, in 2009. “The day he died was one of the darkest in my life. He became sick, weak, and I was there,” he said. “I was there when he asked for help, for water. I was there to receive his last words. But I was not there when he called for me, although we were in the same block; he on the upper bed and I on the lower bed. He called my name, and I was too afraid to move. All of us were. And then he died. I was there, but I was not there.” Wiesel was sixteen when Buchenwald was liberated. He came out of his imprisonment an orphan, a pauper, and stateless. Yet he survived another seventy years, wrote remarkable books, lectured around the world, and became a living reminder of the Holocaust. He made his life a testament to the human spirit.

In 2017, I met Mansour Omari, a Syrian journalist who chronicled the Assad regime’s arrests and human-rights abuses during its ruthless crackdown on Arab Spring protesters—until Omari, too, was arrested, in 2012. He was locked up in a filthy underground cell with so little space inside that the prisoners—the number in his cell fluctuated from sixty to more than eighty—took turns sitting, standing, squatting or sleeping. They shared a single toilet and a sewer hole to defecate—with no toilet paper. Bugs and mites were pervasive; cases of scabies were common. “The smell was unbelievable,” Omari told me. “People were, almost all of them, sick. All of them had blisters or wounds. It’s infections that eat your flesh so quickly.” Omari lost seventy-five pounds. Prisoners used salt to treat each other’s wounds after beatings or torture. “This is how we healed each other,” Omari said. “Sometimes it worked. Sometimes not.”

Omari’s cell had no windows. The prisoners had no communication with the outside world. Many of their families didn’t know where they were—or even if they were alive. Omari came up with a scheme to write the names of the prisoners—using a quill fashioned from a chicken bone and ink blended from rust chipped from the cell bars and blood squeezed from the gums of prisoners diseased by malnutrition. With no paper, they wrote the names on small strips of cloth torn from a shirt. The prisoners wrote eighty-two names on the strips of cloth and then sewed them into the collar and cuff of a single shirt—using a sliver of chicken bone as a needle. Whoever got out first would wear the shirt and be responsible for informing the other prisoners’ families. Omari was the first one summoned for transfer. He wore the shirt—only to be sent to one prison, and then another. The names began to fade from moisture and perspiration; half the names were lost. After he was finally released, Omari fled to Turkey, then Sweden. I met him in 2017, when the little blood-stained cloths were exhibited at the Holocaust Museum, in Washington. He told me that he managed to reach thirty of the families of the men imprisoned with him in Syria. Three of the five in the group that assembled the list of names—including the tailor who sewed the strips back into the shirt—died in jail.