Photo: Anita Martinez
WhenSarah Krivanekset foot on U.S. soil for the first time in years — and afternine months in a Russian penal colony— she dropped her baggage and ran through the airport to embrace loved ones, she tells PEOPLE.
“She was wearing clothes she’d picked up in the prison and at the first rest stop on the way back to my home she changed and binned them,” says Martinez.
Krivanek adds that it was a symbolic gesture to cast off “the filth from the hell hole I had spent one year in.”
From left: Anita Martinez, Sarah Krivanek, “Nannie”.Anita Martinez
Krivanekrecently spoke to PEOPLEat length about her traumatic time in what she called “Hell Camp,” and what it meant to regain contact with the outside world recently.
She was only freed from confinement on Thursday, the same day that another American woman imprisoned in Russia, WNBA starBrittney Griner, alsoboarded a planeto the States.
At the next stop she ordered a Mexican dish — something she and Martinez had been talking about during her one-month detention in a deportation cell in Ryazan.
Anita Martinez
She spent her first night back in America sleeping soundly in a bed that felt “like I was wrapped in clouds.”
When she woke, she asked Martinez if she could take a shower. “It wasn’t a Tuesday or a Saturday,” she laughs — which are the days that inmates were taken to the bath house in the penal colony — “so it felt wrong.”
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Krivanek then accompanied Martinez to the grocery store and went clothes shopping before going to a barbecue with Martinez' son. “It was strange to be socializing,” she said.
Of course, food and showers were not Krivanek’s top priority, as exciting as they were. The first thing she did upon her return was call her children, who live in Colorado.
“This is where my joy lies,” she says. Krivanek has four adult children and three grandchildren, whom she hasn’t been able to keep up with for some time.
source: people.com
