Hope in captivity: How kidnapped journalists coped

"Baghdad is at the heart of the major issues of our time. For a foreign correspondent it is a dream to be there," explains Aubenas.

Some hostages have been fortunate enough to have books to read: Mr. Auque's Hizbullah guards gave him a copy of the Bible in English, and in the course of reading it over a year "I traveled a spiritual path and became a believer," Auque recalls.

Others found the enforced idleness difficult. "A lot of it is simply sitting there or lying on your back," Mr. Garen points out.

To cope, he counted the insects that crawled into the outdoor cage where he was held, and tried to remember details about his friends' faces. "You don't want to let your mind go soft," he cautions.

Roland Madura, a sound engineer with French TV who was captured, along with two colleagues, on the Philippine island of Jolo in 2000, says he too played memory games. "We tried to think of five towns beginning with 'A,' or five famous people beginning with 'B.' When you're under stress it's not as easy as you'd think." Simpler, he adds, was his half-hour of morning exercise.

Garen says the two most important qualities during his captivity were endurance and compassion.

"You keep extending the amount of time you think you can endure," he says. "On the first day I didn't think I could handle two days of this. After four days I thought I could manage a month. The hardest part for me was the first day."

Compassion, he adds, was important because "all you can do is try to reach out to the people who have taken you, explain who you are, and try to create some kind of bond with them."

That has been possible to different degrees for different hostages. Some guards have simply delivered food in silence to their prisoners, and accompanied them to the lavatory. Others made conversation.

"They were curious to know me, and I was curious to know them," says Ms. Sgrena of her captors. "We tried to discuss many things" in broken English, Arabic, and French.

At different times, the former hostages say, they found reasons for hope. Aubenas, "optimistic by nature," says "I was convinced that I would get out, that the public, my newspaper, and my government would not abandon me ... I was sure of a happy ending." Sgrena also drew hope from her certainty that "people outside would be mobilizing for my freedom," and Garen says his spirits were lifted when one of his guards said he had seen Garen's sister appealing for his life on Al Jazeera TV.

Carroll's parents have also made appeals on Arabic TV channels, including Al Jazeera, as part of a campaign to win her freedom.

Though "the worst thing about being a hostage is not knowing" what the next moment might bring, says Garen, hostages learn to cope with that uncertainty adds Madura. "It's in difficult situations like that that you discover you actually can hold on."

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