Captive in Iran (15 page)

How savage the culture whose survival depends on abusing and killing helpless girls! Cruel, heartless, indefensible—and all in the name of Allah.

The leaders of Iran are right to fear Jesus, because He is infinitely more powerful than they are—and they know it! Still, for now, they rule by force and terror, holding back the truth at all costs, imposing on their people a religion that the leaders can control.

God bless the precious memory of Zeynab Nazarzadeh. And may God deliver the people of Iran.

Marziyeh

After living on separate floors in Ward 2 for a week, we were taken again to Ward 209. Our first trip over there had lasted only half a day, and all they did was interrogate us. We didn’t know whether to expect more of the same treatment as full-time inmates, or if this was when our torture would begin. We said a tearful good-bye to our friends—especially those who had been to 209 and knew what could happen—and placed our few personal possessions into bags. Again we were led across the prison yard to a brick building with a small door. We put on blindfolds and went inside.

After shuffling down a hallway, peering out as best we could through the bottom of the blindfolds, we were ordered into a tiny cell about six feet square—the size of a closet. A guard told us to take off our blindfolds and all our clothes, and then gave us men’s prison uniforms that hung on us like sacks. We couldn’t keep from laughing at each other.

“Silence!” the guard ordered. She was a hefty woman of about forty who wore glasses. “Keep quiet. That’s the rule here. If you talk, talk softly. Don’t yell for us and don’t knock on the door. When you have to go to the toilet, press this button on the wall and someone will come for you.”

She left us to look around our new home, but there wasn’t much to see. Grimy carpet covered the floor. A few dirty blankets were tossed in a corner. The only furniture was a small metal sink. There were no windows in the tall steel walls, which were painted white. The only natural light and ventilation came from a skylight covered with a heavy metal screen that blocked most of the light and air. A bare lightbulb in the ceiling, we soon would learn, burned day and night. We sat talking quietly for several hours. There wasn’t another sound anywhere—quite a change from the constant noise and commotion of Ward 2. We had no knitting, nothing to read. Shirin and Silva had told us to pound on the walls to see if any other prisoners heard and answered back. At first there was no reply, but then we heard an answering knock.

In response to our pounding, the cell door opened and a young, heavyset guard stood glaring at us without a word. We stared back for a moment before collapsing on the floor in laughter. We were not going to allow prison to rob us of our sense of humor. We needed it to survive.

“So this is what you do!” the guard said. “Don’t do it again!” She slammed the door and disappeared.

Sometime later, a tall, young guard, scarcely more than a girl, came in with plastic plates of food. There were decent meatballs in the dish, and it was hot! It was the first time since our arrest we’d had a good, hot meal served to us on plates. Silva had told us that the guards in Ward 209 feed the inmates better because they are political prisoners and news of their treatment is more likely to get out. This made about as much sense as anything else in the Iranian justice system. If we were going to be tortured, at least we’d be well nourished.

The combination of a hot meal and the quiet surroundings made us very drowsy, and we soon drifted off into a deep sleep. When we awoke, we needed to use the toilet. Though we pressed repeatedly on the buzzer, no one came. Finally we banged on the door. After a minute the older guard with glasses threw open our door.

“Do you know what time it is?” she huffed angrily.

“No, we have no idea,” I said. “How could we possibly know what time it is?”

“It’s three in the morning.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. But the buzzer doesn’t work.”

“It’s not a buzzer,” said the guard, exasperated. “It blinks a light to let us know you want to go. Here, put on these blindfolds.” We covered our eyes and followed her down the hall.

Except for breakfast at 7:00 a.m., our other meals, and trips to the toilet or the shower, our only activities were talking or sleeping. We slept a lot just to pass the time. Every two or three days, we had the chance to go on a break to a larger room with a clear skylight, but we turned it down in protest over our tiny, windowless cell and lack of books or other diversions. We made up nicknames for the guards based on our impressions of them: Mommy, a kind, older woman who was the head guard and usually brought us our food; Auntie, a short, fat, comical-looking woman; Cousin, another chubby guard; Iron Woman, who had braces on her teeth; Grumpy, who was always in a bad mood; and the Ghost, who never spoke or made an unnecessary move.

After a few days, we were transferred to another small cell, the same size as our old one, where we scarcely had room to lie down, but which we would now share with a third woman, Munis, who had been in Ward 209 for three months. She and her former cellmate, Roxana Saberi, were the ones who had answered our knocks the day we arrived. Roxana was an Iranian-American journalist falsely accused of espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison. Our friend Silva had met her in 209 and had told us to look for her. Because of pressure from the international community, including the American president, Barack Obama, Roxana had recently been released. (She later wrote a book about her experience,
Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran
.)

Munis was a publisher and a leader of Al-e Yassin, an ideological group based on Islam, but which respects all religions. Later that day, a fourth prisoner was added to our cell, a girl of about sixteen with long black hair. When she and Munis saw each other, they embraced with shouts of joy. They had met earlier, but then had both been placed in solitary confinement. The new girl’s name was Mahtab, and she had been imprisoned for belonging to the
mujahideen
organization. She was arrested while walking in a park with her fiancé. She believed it was a way for the regime to harass
her father, who had already spent a year at Evin, leaving her mother and ten-year-old brother to fend for themselves. Her father was in the public ward of the prison, and Mahtab had been allowed to see him only once.

Munis and Mahtab had both endured intense interrogation during their time in solitary, living in cells half the size of the one we were in, which had scarcely left them room to sit. Mahtab’s interrogator had sat close in front of her, opening his legs and moving his body in suggestive ways. She’d had the good sense to tell him to stay away. She might be young, but she knew how to stand up for herself.

“We’ve heard about the dangerous, high-profile political prisoners in 209,” I said. “Who would have believed this teenage girl has put the national security of our country in jeopardy!” When we laughed this time, no guard came to shut us up.

“Before I transferred to this cell,” Mahtab said, “the interrogators told me I would be with two girls who had run away from home and converted to Christianity. They said I might be able to convince you to recant and return to Islam.”

We couldn’t help laughing. “We’re not runaways, and we didn’t leave our families,” I explained. “Your interrogators have tried to shape your perception of us with lies before you even met us.” For a minute, we suspected that she had been sent to spy on us; but we soon realized she was a brave and very honest and naive young girl. Her interrogators had sent her in to change us. What eventually happened was that my testimony changed her. In time, she would become a Christian.

With four women in the cell, there was scarcely room to lie down. The air became thick and stifling as we did our best to get comfortable. We arranged our pallets on the floor, wedged ourselves next to each other, and fell into an exhausted sleep.

MARYAM

The next day, I was blindfolded and taken away to another cell, separating Marziyeh and me once again. My new cellmate was Fereshteh, a middle-aged woman with short, scruffy hair, who looked like a walking skeleton.
She had large, sunken eyes that contrasted sharply with her starkly white skin, and her dark, bleeding gums were a testament to long periods of malnutrition in prison. Her whole body shuddered and wheezed with every breath, and she was so weak that her voice was almost inaudible.

“Don’t sit here,” Fereshteh said in a worried tone when I took a step toward her in the tiny cell. “Sit on your blanket in your corner. They’re watching us on the security camera, and they can also hear us.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, trying to calm her. “I don’t think it’s that important to them.”

“You don’t know these scumbags! You’re so naive.”

To avoid upsetting Fereshteh, I sat in my own corner and we began to talk quietly. As I related my story of being arrested for being a Christian, Fereshteh constantly warned me to be quiet and to be careful what I said, or else the guards would take me away and she would be alone again. By the time I finished my story, Fereshteh had calmed down enough to tell me her own.

“I have been here in solitary confinement for about three months,” she began in a thin, soft voice. “Until yesterday, I was interrogated every day. I’ve been on a hunger strike for a month, taking only dates and tea, to protest against my treatment. I’ve been charged with belonging to the
mujahideen
, but I’m not a member of that or any other movement or political party. My real crime is being a mother who loves her children and wants to stay in touch with them.

“My two daughters live at the Ashraf camp for
mujahideen
in Iraq. After I visited them last year, I stayed in contact by telephone and e-mail. One day, coming home from an Internet café, I saw several men lounging outside our apartment. I could tell they were from the ministry of intelligence. I called my husband and told him what was happening. We hid in the street, watching the men around our door, and knew we had to decide right then whether to leave our entire lives behind and escape from the country that day, or face the agents and try to sort everything out. We decided to face them. They ransacked our apartment, arrested us, and separated my husband and me.

“I have been interrogated seven or eight hours every day until yesterday. I haven’t been tortured, only hit in the head and slapped, but I still have
terrible headaches. I have multiple sclerosis. I’m too weak to be a political activist, too weak to endure torture beyond what they’re already doing. That’s why I shake all the time. If my MS isn’t treated, my doctor has told them I will soon be paralyzed and blind. But these vile, inhumane people have no conscience whatsoever.

“There have been times when I thought I couldn’t endure another day. I’ve tried to kill myself, but have been too weak even to do that. The guards have promised me I will either die of MS in prison or commit suicide. They say I’ll never walk out of 209 alive.”

“Dear Fereshteh,” I said, “why are the authorities punishing you so harshly for sending e-mails to your children?”

“As a student, I was politically active and wrote political articles,” Fereshteh said. “I wanted to do something good for my culture and my people. When I was twenty-two, three weeks after my wedding, I was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison. I went to Ghezel Hesar Prison, in Karaj, with some other women from various groups, including the Daftar Tahkim Vahdat student association. For a month, my husband didn’t know where I was, and he thought I’d been killed.

“In Karaj, we were stripped naked, blindfolded, and put in a cold, empty hall. One by one, we were taken for interrogation and torture. Some women, especially the young, pretty ones, were raped; others whipped with cables; others, including me, beaten in the head until we had concussions and blood streaming from our noses. My MS dates back to this time. I was whipped on the soles of my feet so that I couldn’t walk or stand for days at a time. I had buckets of scalding water poured over my head. Some of us were led blindfolded into the execution chamber, where corpses still hung in their nooses. They made us walk around inside the room for hours. When we bumped into a body, a guard would announce that person’s name.

“My husband finally found out where I was and came to see me. ‘Forget about me,’ I told him. ‘Go find a new life for yourself.’ After a year, I was transferred to Evin and spent four more years here. By then, most of my friends had been tortured to death or executed. When I was released, I went back to my husband.