“It was a chance to see the world,” says Rosen. There was, however, an opportunity in Iran. But Pakistan was under military rule, and there were no openings. Wanting to visit Pakistan, Rosen applied to the Peace Corps, a program started by President Kennedy in 1961 that sent young people abroad to assist in civic-minded projects. His research was on a Pakistani mullah who had formulated a notion of an Islamic state - a kind of forerunner to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. He attended Yeshiva Rabbi David Leibowitz in East Flatbush for nine years, graduated in 1961 from Tilden High School, went on to Brooklyn College, and entered a graduate program in public affairs at Syracuse University. Growing up blocks from Ebbets Field, Rosen loved the Dodgers and was heartbroken when they left. Rosen was born in East New York and raised in East Flatbush by his mother, a housewife, and his father, an electrician.
DAY FOUR OF THE HOSTAGE SITUATIIN HOW TO
Only after years of therapy, meditation, and reading has Rosen come to understand what happened to him and how to live with it. It was very hard.” Rosen gradually discovered that what he needed more than anything was to be with people - his family, friends, and colleagues, whose support kept him afloat in rough mental seas. “In the beginning I was trying to get my head around it all - especially coming home and trying to integrate into the family and restart my life.
“Healing has been a very slow process,” he says. When he was finally freed, on January 20, 1981, he had lost forty pounds and much of his spirit.
He lived in anguish and acute fear, cut off from the world and from his wife and two small children, never knowing if he was going to live or die. Fueled by zealous anti-American sentiment, the uprising led directly to the Iran hostage crisis, which destroyed Iran–US relations, battered the American psyche, brought down an American president, and changed the lives of Rosen and the other embassy staff - attachés, officers, and military guards - who got caught in a geopolitical whirlwind.ĭuring his confinement, Rosen suffered beatings, mock executions, and unbearably long, desolate stretches of isolation. He had spent two years in Iran as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s, was fluent in Farsi, and had great affection for the people and culture of Iran.
DAY FOUR OF THE HOSTAGE SITUATIIN FULL
Seated in his apartment on Riverside Drive a short walk from Teachers College, where he spent ten years as an administrator, Rosen talks about those horrific 444 days with the disarming openness of a person who has worked for years to make sense of his experience.Īs the embassy’s new press attaché, Rosen had arrived in Iran in 1978 full of enthusiasm. This winter marks the fortieth anniversary of the end of the hostage crisis, but for Rosen the memories are still fresh. Ultimately, he and fifty-one others would be held in appalling conditions for more than fourteen months. Rosen was one of sixty-six Americans seized inside the US embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979. This is far better than captivity,” he says with a faint chuckle.
In my 444 days as a hostage, I spent maybe twenty minutes outdoors. “I feel freer than most people who are constrained by COVID because of my experience in Iran. “I’m inside a lot, but I can take a walk, I can see grass, I can enjoy the sunshine, I can read anything I want,” says Rosen, who lives on the Upper West Side with his wife, Barbara. People around him grew restless, anxious, and depressed, but Rosen, seventy-six, was unperturbed. When COVID-19 hit New York and the city shut down, Barry Rosen ’74GSAS took things in stride.