Having spent nine years in the gulag, I know something about loneliness.

Back then, locked up in a Soviet prison, I was for years denied the company of other human beings.

It was absolutely forbidden for us to communicate with prisoners in other cells, a prohibition we skirted by inventing risky and creative methods to speak to each other, from tapping Morse code on the walls to shouting into our toilets and hoping our voices carried through the pipes. 

But despite these draconian measures, I was never really alone: Out there, I knew, were my people and my country, Israel.

I knew there was a great big country, America, where free people lived, and a president, Ronald Reagan, who wasn’t afraid to look at the Soviet Union and call it precisely what it was — an evil empire.

And as long as there were principled people in the world willing to fight for what they believed, I knew that there was no reason for despair. 

I am, thank God, a free man now, living happily in the Jewish state of which I dreamed for so long.

And yet, these days, witnessing the very same Western world I once regarded with such admiration cheer for the murderous marauders of Hamas, I — like Israel — feel more lonely than I have felt in a very long time.

My friend, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, captured this feeling eloquently in his new book, which he sadly and wisely called “Israel Alone.”

Like me, Lévy asked himself how it could be that American universities, say, once bastions of the free and unfettered exchange of ideas, are now awash with young men and women who wave the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah and readily repeat antisemitic lies without sense or compassion.

Or how it could be that the United Nations, formed to help curb violence and aggression and promote justice and well-being to all, now watches its employees take part in deadly pogroms against Jews.

Or how it could be that world leaders, themselves facing the challenge of grappling with homicidal Islamism, fail to support Israel as it stands up to the very same benighted forces. 

Contemplating these questions and so many more, it’s tempting to feel, well, alone.

It’s tempting to abandon hope and argue that there’s little hope of Western civilization surviving this onslaught.

Here, too, I’ve Lévy to thank: A strong — and, often, lonely — voice fighting for the rights of Kurds, Armenians, Yezidis, Syrians, Ukrainians and all the other victims of genocide in the world, he knows that evil, sadly, is not the exception but the rule.

And, watching the global reaction to the horrors of Oct. 7, he passionately accuses the Free World of its unforgivable appeasement of evil and of failure to act when it mattered most. 

But Lévy is neither gloomy nor bitter.

He knows — like his great fellow countryman, Albert Camus — that doing the right thing is often a sadly solitary task, but that anyone who stands up and fights is never truly alone.

There are always others watching.

Maybe, like I had once been, they’re imprisoned by the perpetrators of evil and cannot stand up and join the battle.

Maybe they’ve been swept up by a collective inflammation, succumbing to fashionable trends without thinking about their grim consequences.

Maybe they’re not paying attention, or, at least not yet.

But Lévy knows, and I know, that these people are out there, and that, at one point or another, they, too, will step up and fight. 

It won’t happen overnight.

Don’t expect the masked zealots on campus, for example, to shake off their keffiyehs tomorrow, apologize and stand with the Jews as we resist the rise of a movement no less murderous and no less hateful than the Nazis.

If there’s one thing you learn in the gulag, it’s that justice is served, but it takes its time. 

And yet, it always comes.

As the one-year commemoration of Oct. 7 is less than a month away, so many of us are heartbroken when we see antisemitism everywhere on the rise, the war still raging, more than a hundred of our brothers and sisters still in captivity and the world at large caring little to none about our suffering.

For the moment, we are alone.

But our loneliness isn’t that of the condemned man; it is, as Lévy reminds us, the loneliness of the prophet, the person guided by love and faith and justice who isn’t afraid to bear the scorn of others because he knows that truth eventually prevails and that loneliness is not forever.

In this most trying time, for the Jewish people and Western Civilization, it’s a very important insight to recall.

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Natan Sharansky is a former political prisoner in the Soviet Union, an Israeli government minister and the co-author (with Gil Troy), of “Never Alone: Prison, Politics, and My People.”