The Morning They Came for Us Read Online Free PDF Page B

deadened, sheopens and closes her hand mechanically, clutching at the straps of her backpack. She starts to cry. It very quickly turns to a raw sobbing.
    â€˜The things I saw . . . the things I saw . . .’ she spits out. ‘It is unbearable to explain what I saw . . . 
I cannot forget . . . I saw . . . another prisoner being raped . . . a man being raped. I heard it . . . I saw it . . . Do you know what it’s like to hear a man cry?
’
    She abruptly gets up from the chair where she is sitting, claps a hand over her mouth, and runs into a nearby bathroom. She turns on the tap and begins to vomit.
    A friend, who is with her, is also close to tears.
    â€˜Yes, Nada was raped,’ she says. ‘But she can never admit it, even to herself.’
    Her friend goes to console her. She comes back. ‘She cannot even say the word aloud. When she talks of others and what they endured,’ her friend says, ‘she is talking about what happened to her.’
    There are no words to say to her, no more details to extract. What has happened to Nada cannot be undone. What she has seen and heard cannot be forgotten. It cannot be erased.
    A few days later, I offered Nada and a friend a ride in my car to a class in Antakya. They were studying English together, taking a course that Nada hopes will eventually get her a job, and maybe a chance at a new life. When her friend talks about this, Nada offers a fleeting smile, and looks, if only for a moment, like any other young woman her age setting out into life – confident, happy, free.
    Then something crosses her mind, and her eyes go grey and dead once again.
    â€˜I changed a lot when I was in prison,’ she says quietly. Then she smiles. ‘But you know, even there, I was the revolutionary.’
    In between beatings and interrogation sessions, she confronted her jailers. She chastised them for small things, for prisoners’ rights. It gave her a feeling of having some control.
    â€˜I made them get plates for the other prisoners!’ she says proudly. ‘I made them realize we are not just dogs to be kicked and used, but people. I made them put plastic over the broken windows.’ She looks faintly triumphant. ‘Before we had nothing, then we got plates!’
    Small victories for a broken spirit.
    One afternoon in Antakya, a friend introduced me to Shaheeneez, a thirty-seven-year-old former teacher. She was dressed in black trousers and a long black belted coat, despite the heat. She wanted to meet somewhere anonymous. When she entered the room, a shadow seemed to walk alongside her.
    After she sat, Shaheeneez explained that she is very religious. As she talked, I couldn’t help but notice her headscarf, silver rings and watch, her olive, faintly pitted skin, her full nose and defined jawline. She looked strong rather than pretty.
    Still, she was nervous and jittery, visibly shaking as she spoke. When I learned that it was only recently that she had got out of a Syrian jail in which she had been held for ‘several months’, I began to understand why.
    As she told it, in 2012 she was arrested at the airport on her way to Egypt from her home in Aleppo. She was goingto a conference. ‘I think my name was on some kind of list.’ Her actual arrest was probably for political activities, but she is not sure.
    After she was taken, the men who arrested her threw her into a state security prison in Damascus. There she was blindfolded and interrogated, often for hours at a time.
    â€˜It confused me,’ she said, trying to explain what it was like to be asked questions with her eyes covered. ‘I heard voices, but could not put the faces to them. It was a tactic, made to scare me more.’
    The interrogation exhausted her, but she had no intention of giving away names. She was aware of what they were trying to do to get her to