Then They Came for Me_ A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival - Maziar Bahari [66]
When Maryam was finally released from prison, in 1989, I was living in Montreal, where I was about to begin my university studies. The first time we spoke on the phone, I thought I was speaking to a zombie. I could hear the exhaustion and pain in her voice. I was desperate to go home and visit her, but that was impossible. When I’d left Iran, in 1986, I had avoided being drafted, and if I returned, I would be arrested immediately. As a former prisoner, Maryam could not leave Iran. The best we could do was speak by phone, and we did, once a week for six years, until they finally allowed her to travel outside Iran. We met in Turkey. When I first spotted Maryam walking toward me with my mother, Maryam’s son, Khaled, and her daughter, Iran, at the Istanbul airport, I was overcome with emotion. The last time Maryam had seen me, I was eighteen. Now I was twenty-eight. I had become a man.
We spent ten days together, staying mostly inside our hotel suite. Maryam and I both looked forward most to the hour when everybody else would finally fall asleep and we could have some time alone.
It was here that she first told me about the things they did to her in prison. It was hard for me to hear her stories. The Revolutionary Guards had ordered that she be kept in solitary confinement for one year. She spoke to nobody during that time, except the prison guards who would deliver her meals. At times, they would bring her to a room simply to beat her, most often with a cable on the soles of her feet. Thousands of people perished in Iranian prisons in the 1980s, and there were many times when Maryam thought she was going to die.
In 1988, five years into her sentence, many of her cellmates—even some with light sentences—were dragged from their cells and executed, in a nationwide massacre. This crime against humanity was precipitated by the fact that the MKO, the terrorist group based in Iraq, had organized an attack on Iran at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, in the summer of 1988. The leader of the MKO, Massoud Rajavi, sent thousands of his followers to attack Khomeini’s defeated army. Rajavi had brainwashed them into believing that when they arrived in Iran, they would be greeted like heroes and be able to take over the government within a few days. But the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian army repelled the attack in less than a week, and arrested and killed hundreds of MKO members.
Khomeini, like Massoud Rajavi, believed that murder was the most effective political tool. After the military defeat, to teach all political dissidents a lesson, he ordered the massacre. Within a few weeks, thousands of people who were suspected of supporting the MKO were rounded up and killed. Khomeini’s henchmen also killed hundreds of people who supported other political groups, including the Tudeh Party. No one knows exactly how many people died during this barbaric slaughter, but Amnesty International recorded the names of more than 4,482 people. Maryam never understood why she was spared.
Her worst experience in prison happened not long after the massacre, when she had gone on a hunger strike in protest of abuse by the prison guards. One night, Maryam and several other prisoners were summoned to an area outside of the cells. They were then marched to a field and lined up against a wall. Maryam had no idea what was happening, and was too afraid to ask. Prison guards began to hand out blindfolds and asked the prisoners to repent. This was when she knew: it was an execution ceremony.
“I thought I was going to die, Mazi,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears. “All I could feel was guilt. I felt guilty for putting