Nicholas Goldberg: After 22 years in a South African prison, freedom fighter Denis Goldberg faced an agonizing choice

Denis Goldberg, who died recently at age 87, was an early hero of the anti-apartheid movement. A member of the military wing of the African National Congress, he was arrested in a police raid at the group's hideout near Johannesburg in 1963 and prosecuted for sabotage alongside Nelson Mandela. The youngest and only white defendant convicted, he was sentenced to four life terms in prison.

But his obituaries last week largely ignored one of the most fascinating episodes in Goldberg's life, an agonizing moral choice he was forced to make after 22 years behind bars - the kind of enormous, freighted, painful decision