After Tehran (17 page)

In Anne Frank House, I also watched an interview with Hannah Goslar, Anne’s neighbour, friend, and classmate. Like Anne, Hannah was sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and she was one of the last people to see Anne alive. A barbed-wire fence had separated the two girls, and Anne had cried and told Hannah that she had nobody, which wasn’t true—but Anne wasn’t aware her father had survived. Hannah believed that if Anne had known her father was alive, she would have lived. I agree with her. Hope has miraculous powers. Anne died only days before the liberation. With a great deal of sadness in her eyes, Hannah said that Anne’s death and her own survival were “cruel accidents.” Yes, maybe both our survivals are cruel accidents, or maybe they are the will of God; either way, life is precious.

On Thursday morning, March 25, 2010, a beautiful sunny day, I stood in Auschwitz and looked down a narrow road sandwiched between two rows of red-brick, two-storey buildings. Unlike the flimsy wooden barracks I had seen in other concentration camps, these were well built and appeared sturdy. Many tour buses sat
parked in the parking lot, and tourists of all ages and nationalities walked everywhere. I was on a trip organized by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies. Birds sang in the pale sun, and the clear voice of our young tour guide, Anna, who was knowledgeable and professional, streamed through my headset. But I wasn’t listening. The bricks of Auschwitz were almost identical in colour to those at Evin. I reached out and touched them, and tears blinded me. We had just seen piles of the thousands of shoes taken from the victims of Auschwitz, and I remembered that in Evin, guards had taken my white-and-red Puma running shoes and had given me rubber slippers, instead. Where were my shoes and those of my prison friends? Had they been destroyed? We entered a barrack, and I peered into the bright, average-size room on my right. A wooden table stood in the middle of the room, with a few chairs around it. Anna explained that this room was used for arbitrary trials and that most of the prisoners tried here were sentenced to death and executed in the courtyard behind the building. In Evin prison, the Sharia judge who had condemned me to death probably sat in a similar room and drank tea as he passed on verdicts.

I followed my group down the hall and into the basement. A friend turned around, looked at me, and asked, “You okay?” I nodded, but I could hardly breathe.

On my left was a dark cell with a small barred window. This was where Father Maximilian Kolbe, canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982, was killed in August 1941. During the Second World War, he had provided shelter to Polish refugees, including two thousand Jews. In February 1941, the Gestapo arrested him. He was transferred to Auschwitz about three months later. In July 1941, a man from Kolbe’s barrack vanished, and the deputy camp commander picked ten men to starve to death in order to discourage further escapes. One of the selected men begged not
to be killed, saying that he had family waiting for him. Kolbe volunteered to go in his place. I wished I had been as brave as Kolbe, but I was not.

After three weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. Each time the guards checked on him, Kolbe was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell and looking calmly at those who entered. When his remaining cellmates had died, Kolbe was killed with an injection of carbolic acid.

I gazed at the small barred window of Kolbe’s cell. It was as if I were back in my cell at Evin. Even though Auschwitz was now a museum and a place of remembrance, I knew that Evin was still operational: innocents were still being tortured and executed there. I searched my heart for something more I could do for them. My legs somehow carried me out of the barrack and back into the spring sun. I sat on the steps and covered my face with my hands. I couldn’t stop crying. Maximilian Kolbe is the patron saint of political prisoners. I begged him to show me the way to help bring about real change in Iran without endangering more lives.

As in the concentration camps, life in the public cellblocks at Evin revolved around routines that, even though tedious, carried us through the days. The constant religious-education programs broadcast for hours every day on the closed-circuit television of the prison were designed to brainwash us, but after a while, even as I sat in front of the TV, I didn’t hear a word of them. I either whispered poems to a friend sitting next to me or I daydreamed about going home. I heard from one of my cellmates who had been in Evin during the time of the shah that back then, each cell in 246 held five or six prisoners. In my time, we numbered sixty to seventy. When so many people have to live in a small space, simple tasks become challenging. Finding a place to sleep, dividing food, tidying up, washing dishes, cleaning the bathrooms, and taking showers were all major issues that required a great deal of
organization. We chose girls to do different jobs, and the duties usually changed hands weekly. One week, for example, I would be the “sleeping-spot authority.” This meant I had to make sure everyone had a place to sleep. This might sound simple, but it was not. There were so many of us that we had to sleep not only on the floor in the cells but also in the hallway. There was absolutely no room to spare. The lights were turned off in the cells at night, but they remained on in the hallway, so sleeping in the cells was more comfortable. In addition, your chances of getting stepped on while asleep increased dramatically in the hallway, because you would be in the way of the people who needed to use the bathroom. In the cells, some girls preferred to sleep close to the windows because we usually left them open even in winter. However, others preferred to be far from them so that they wouldn’t be cold. And we all always wanted to sleep next to our friends.

Dividing the food, which typically consisted of bread with dates, rice, or soup, was a challenge, as well. We didn’t get much food in Evin, and making sure that everyone had an equal share was not easy.

Cleaning was another problem. Imagine cleaning a bathroom used by three hundred and fifty to four hundred people. We had warm water once every two or three weeks for two to three hours each time. Water customarily warmed up in the middle of the night. When you were your cell’s shower worker, you had to send sixty to seventy sleepy girls to use four or five shower stalls in a matter of minutes. The shower worker had to stand at the door of the shower room and rush girls in and out. Shower nights were always loud.

“Afsaneh, Fereshteh, Nahid! Get out! You’ve been in there forever! I told you that you had four minutes!” the shower worker would yell.

“I’ve been here for only two minutes! I still have soap in my hair!” the girl inside would shout back.

“Doesn’t matter! Out! People are waiting! Do you want them to have to wash up with cold water? Out!”

And if the worker had been too hard on someone and the next day that person was called for interrogation and was tortured, the worker would feel horrible for days. The injured always received longer turns and help in the shower. My first evening in 246 was shower night. I couldn’t stand on my feet well because of the lashing, so Sarah helped me, and the girl in charge gave us extra time.

I have faith that one day Evin, like the Secret Annex and Auschwitz, will become a museum where people will honour those who suffered and died. One day, young and old will walk its hallways, look inside its cells and torture rooms, and learn about a dark time in Iran’s history when the torture of teenagers was considered a good deed, done to please God and protect the country from evil.

*
Imre Kertész,
Fatelessness
,
A Novel
, translated from Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson. (New York: Random House, 2004), 261–262.

My Dragonfly
Brooch

I
n August 2007, while I was in Edinburgh, I gave a short phone interview to Radio Hambastegi, a Persian-language radio station based in Stockholm. Soon after returning home to Toronto I received an email from the interviewer, Nasser Yousefi, with the link
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to the program they had had on my book. Only when I clicked on the link and began listening did I realize that the program was about three hours long. The first interviews were with three of my critics, who had been prisoners in Evin and members of Communist or Marxist-Islamist groups. Two of them had written their own memoirs of Evin. They believed that my book shouldn’t have been published because my experience of Evin was different from theirs. They said that I had not properly conveyed the horrors of Evin and that I had not told the story of the heroes of the prison who had suffered and died for their ideology and beliefs.

Before the interviews, Nasser had given a brief introduction on memory and memoir writing, and had quoted from a Persian-language publication named
Baran
. He said that events happened in a place and time, and the exact retelling of them was impossible, because when events become memories they exist only in our
mind, and how we view them depends on our perspective. Even immediately after we see a photo, remembering its details clearly is impossible since human memory is, simply, imperfect. He compared writing a memoir to making a movie: two directors making a film from one book might end up with two very different accounts. Some scenes we fast-forward and some we put in slow motion because of the way we feel about them. He concluded that we therefore had to respect memory and memoirs and never consider them completely accurate, because all humans look at the world through a lens, and there is nothing we can do about that.

I had hoped that my critics would deliver a rational review of my book—which is how a literary review should be. But what I heard on the radio show was an extreme personal attack. My critics called me a liar, a
tavvab
, and a traitor, and claimed that I had written
Prisoner of Tehran
for money. One woman openly admitted that she had not read my book; she had only read
about
it. She said, “I first criticized Marina’s book, but then when I saw that some people had turned this [criticism] into a personal attack on her, I pulled myself aside from that … This [book] is not the truth of the pain of those who suffered in prison and were tortured. It is important for every publisher to sell books. This [book] is not the description of the pains Marina endured. It has been twisted and turned into something that would sell … This book is the result of the work of a group of people [and not only Marina] …”

To me, these attacks were very much like the intolerance of the Islamic Republic: if you’re not with us and like us, if you don’t share the same religion or ideology with us, then we’re against you.

I have experienced how a victim can become a torturer—Ali, the guard I was forced to marry, had been tortured in Evin during the time of the shah. Torture creates a vicious cycle that repeats itself as long as victims give in to hatred and let it blind them. If my critics ever have authority over me, they will probably ban my
book. They call me a
tavvab
, but if I have betrayed anyone, I have betrayed myself and my religion, not them or their ideology. I was coerced into converting to Islam and marrying my interrogator, but my humanity and who I am have remained intact, even after the pressure and brainwashing that I was subjected to in Evin. The Islamic Republic of Iran tried to turn me into an angry, illogical, and dysfunctional individual, but it failed. What do my critics see when they look at themselves in a mirror? Heroes? Maybe. But all the heroes I know, including my close friends in Evin, are open-minded individuals. Even though they had to pretend that they had “repented,” they always preserved their goodness and humanity.

Those who have spoken against me in chat rooms or on air are a small group of twenty-five or thirty men and women. They were adults when they were arrested and had been active members of various opposition political groups. Their ideology was everything to them, and they bravely fought for it, which I respect. But they know nothing of how a helpless sixteen-year-old feels under torture, of how she would be willing to confess to anything or share any information with prison authorities to stop the vicious beatings.

I personally know only one of my critics: Soudabeh Ardavan. Online and in the interview with Radio Hambastegi, she accused me of being a traitor. I had seen her at two events during the winter of 2006 in Toronto. Then I attended a dinner party where I saw her again and where I also met a few other ex-prisoners from Iran. Even though
Prisoner of Tehran
had not yet appeared in print, my story was not a secret. Michelle Shephard’s article “The Woman without a Past” had come out in the
Toronto Star
a year earlier, and my interview with my father on CBC Radio (during which I explained the details of my experience, including my marriage to Ali) had been broadcast; both were available on the Internet.

Ms. Ardavan admitted in her interview with Nasser that before my book came out, she had never mentioned that she had known
me in Evin. But after the success of the book, she remembered that she had. She said that from Qezel Hessar prison, she had been moved to Bandeh yek in Evin, which she said was the cellblock for
tavvabs
and traitors. I was never in Bandeh yek, also known as 240, but I vaguely remember someone who bore a resemblance to Ms. Ardavan in 246, where I spent most of my time while in Evin. Ms. Ardavan said that in Bandeh yek, she had heard that I had married my interrogator, and she had been appalled and disgusted by it. In an online article, she has written (translated from Persian):
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