Lisa Ruyter: The minute you have a camera, people sort of freak.
Kristopher Jansma: Yeah, I had a lot of anxiety about that.
Ruyter: So that’s what surrounded us. Like a dye job. [laughs]
Jansma: We probably forget about a lot of that now, but we helped each other get through it that way.
Ruyter: Wrestling and stuff?
•••
Jansma: When I started writing the book, I imagined that would be the whole story.
Ruyter: Which story? They all look exactly the same.
Jansma: Yeah—I mean, think about it.
Ruyter: That’s something I’ve always wanted to do.
Jansma: The twentieth century was such a nightmare in so many ways.
•••
Ruyter: That’s sort of a weird line to draw, I think—where you end and the world begins.
Jansma: That’s hard after spending fifteen or twenty years trying to protect somebody from the truth.
Ruyter: Yeah-yeah. Oh, goodness. Everything.
•••
Jansma: He mostly wrote about the other prisoners, about what they were reading, sharing from newspapers, and gossiping about—or how they got bored and decided to fix a motorcycle!
Ruyter: He kept me out of that trouble. I don’t know.