Deception and Prisons
For the Soviets and the Germans, concentration camps were instruments of terror and venues for slave labor. The camp's very existence fostered a paralyzing fear among citizens who might deviate from the state's agenda. Yet some macabre elements were concealed from the outside world. This is also true of Iran. The Germans sought to disguise extermination centers, particularly after their defeat at Stalingrad. One infamous deception was to mask the brutality at the Terezin concentration camp, which served as a way station for prominent European Jews, most of whom were sent to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Under international pressure to allow inspection, the Nazis beautified the camp before the Danish Red Cross visited it; as a result, the Red Cross reported that it found no indication of systemic mistreatment.
The Soviet Union concealed the poisonous conditions in its prisons from the West. U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph E. Davies penned a fawning account of Stalin and his regime. Henry A. Wallace, vice president of the United States, visited the Soviet concentration camp at Kolyma, sometimes called the “Arctic Death Camp.” He spoke of the beauty of the flowers, the sturdily built young miners, and the warm reception he received from the guards. In fact, the prisoners he saw were guards dressed as prisoners. The real prisoners were dying of starvation and freezing in forty-degree-below-zero temperatures.
Iran’s Evin prison also reveals the conditions under which political prisoners are held. For example, in early 2017, prison authorities choreographed activities for foreign dignitaries visiting the facility to observe conditions there. Much like the charade staged years earlier by the Nazis at Terezin, officials at Evin shepherded Western observers to certain areas of the prison. In this case, the investigators were not misled and protested loudly against the charade.
Mental Hospitals
Iranian leaders, like those in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, misuse the diagnosis of mental illness to incarcerate and execute political dissidents. Soviet physicians swore to serve communism. Soviet psychiatrists systematically suppressed dissent by interning and sedating free spirits, misdiagnosing them as mentally ill. Those who found faults in the Communist Party’s philosophy and in the party’s rule were declared either enemies of the state or mentally disturbed. Some illnesses were diagnosed as “sluggish schizophrenia” or “delusion of reformism.”
In Germany, National Socialism billed itself as “applied biology,” and psychiatrists directly collaborated in the mass murder of the mentally ill. Most of the killing took place in six psychiatric institutions. Psychiatrists oversaw the killing of over two hundred thousand patients by gassing, starvation, and injection of poisons. In Iran, high-profile critics of Khomeinism can be arrested and imprisoned in mental hospitals. A retired teacher and member of the teachers’ union was incarcerated at the Ibn Sina Psychiatric Hospital in Mashhad, with his parents prevented from visiting him at the facility. The teacher was a civil rights activist who had earlier served two years in prison after the 2009 postelection protests in Iran. He had no history of mental illness.
Incarceration and constant beatings can produce an emotional collapse from which inmates never fully recover. Ali, a young prisoner, said his worst experience in prison was witnessing his friend, another Basij member, being sexually assaulted: “My friend . . . was confused. He lost control. He screamed and shouted, threw himself against the walls. The guards warned him that if he continued with this behavior, they would make things worse for him.”
A Young Basij Guard and His Brides
In German and Soviet prisons, inmates were abused with little mercy. German concentration camps held “brothel women.” The Nazis nicknamed these forced brothels Joy Divisions. Imprisoned women and girls included the unemployed, beggars, the homeless, prostitutes, Roma, and anyone the Nazis deemed nonconformist and physically attractive. Free thinkers were incarcerated as well. In Soviet gulag camps, women were regularly subjected to rape and humiliating, degrading conditions. Some became sexual fodder for incarcerated criminal gangs.
In Iran, religious authorities have pronounced that it is unethical to execute virgins. But Shia Islam allows for temporary marriage. By marrying girls and women temporarily, guards perform sex under the covenant of marriage, which accords with Islamic law. Sometimes lotteries are held to give guards equal opportunities to marry and rape condemned virgins. Some guards enjoy it and see nothing wrong with either the sex or the killing. Others are less enthusiastic.
The case of a young Basiji illustrates the sexual brutality endemic in Iran’s prisons. When he was sixteen years old, his mother delivered him to a Basij station and pleaded that they take him, feed him, train him, and employ him. They did so, and years later he became haunted by memories of raping virgins the night before they were executed. He confessed, “I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning, the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.” Some images of the defeated looks on the faces of his sexual prey still haunt him: “I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her fingernails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her.” Other Basij live with memories of the torture and the shame of the pain they inflicted on their countrymen. One Basiji apologized for what he judged to be cowardice in refusing to intervene against the torture and beating he witnessed: “I am thoroughly ashamed. I’m shamed before God, ashamed of my youth, ashamed in front of my friend, ashamed in front of the people.”
Coping in the Camps: Evin Cabaret. As in the German and Soviet penal systems, a pool of creative talent flourishes among Iranian political prisoners. German and Soviet concentration camps hosted underground theaters. At Buchenwald, humorous performances began with an opening song, followed by satirical sketches, folk songs, and political songs. In Iran, political prisoners make sotto voce jokes about the sadistic guards, foul food, and swill to help them grapple with the cruelty they cannot control. There is collective resistance in prison. Evin prison has been nicknamed Evin University because of the many student activists, journalists, and intellectuals who have passed through its gates. Iranian political prisoners continue to stage hunger strikes to protest conditions and the deaths of fellow political prisoners there.164 Sometimes hunger strikes turn from “wet” to “dry,” meaning strikers refuse to drink water or eat food. Many political prisoners devise their own coping plans. Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was, in his words, jailed for “118 days, 12 hours, 54 minutes,” on charges of espionage. Worn out but not defeated in captivity, Bahari imagined a book about his ordeal. Upon its release, he wrote it, and the humorist Jon Stewart adapted it into a film.
Other prisoners develop a personal regime. In May 2007, Iranian-American Haleh Esfandiari was thrown into Evin prison on charges of conspiracy. The director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C., Esfandiari spent 105 days in solitary confinement. She survived by maintaining a regular 10-hour exercise regimen. Like Bahari, she crafted and memorized a book: a biography of her grandmother. Another intellectual drew on his mastery of Persian poetry to survive. A world-renowned epidemiologist drew on poems he had memorized as a boy. Alone in his cell, the physician would recite his most-loved poems and write new ones. Others shout their defiance from the prison to all those within earshot. They yell “Allah-o-Akbar” (God is great) and “death to the dictator” from the darkness of their cells. But not all prisoners are emotionally well-integrated or strong, and some cannot cope. They are malnourished, abandoned, and dejected, and they begin to die physically and spiritually. When they are released, some stumble into despondency and despair and are haunted by memories of Evin prison that they cannot escape.
