238: What if you were tortured in an Iranian prison?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. You were in this abyss of darkness and the hardest part was not knowing, not knowing at all if you're going to live or die or when or how. And nothing made sense. Nothing made sense at all.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 238. What if you were tortured in an Iranian prison?

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I was born in 1965 in Tehran, Iran. Both of my grandmothers had escaped the 1917 Russian Revolution and had somehow, it's a long story, ended up in Iran. My parents were both born there and I was born there and so was my brother. My father was very quiet, not very talkative.

There was this very respectful distance with him all the time. My father taught ballroom dancing and he walked with the elegance of a dancer. You know, there was something about the way he moved.

Sometimes he would take me to this huge theater in Tehran. We called it Talar-e-Rudaki. And he would let me be in the backstage, hanging out with these beautiful dancers with their beautiful clothes. And they loved me. And I was like a part of this hidden world that not too many had the opportunity to be a part of. And everybody loved me because I was the daughter of the teacher.

My dad's mother lived with us until I was seven. She was a very proud Russian woman. I was very close to my grandmother, Babu. Her name was Zina. She was a remarkable woman. And she came through a lot of terrible things that happened to her. But she came through. She was kind. All the time she would talk to me. She would tell stories. But she used to read to me all the time.

She always said, this stupid revolution is going to just go away. The communists will be gone and I will go home one day. And she didn't. She died in Tehran when I was seven. She was in her late 70s. My mother was beautiful and she was short-tempered. I was a very curious child who had also an opinion about something. I was a handful.

My mother had a beauty salon and she didn't like to have me around much in her beauty salon. And when I got in her way, which was often, we had three balconies overlooking the busy downtown street, Shaw Avenue. She would lock me on one of those balconies.

I ended up spending a lot of time locked up on the balcony. And what I learned was to observe. I spent my time looking at people and making up stories about them. This is how I passed my time. It was kind of like the world of its own. Being locked up on the balcony and my grandmother's death, what they did was that they made me terrified of losing people.

I thought, if you can lose your grandmother, why wouldn't you lose your mother? Why wouldn't you lose your father? Why wouldn't you lose everything? You know, after I lost her, like even now, I'm like almost crying. I was so scared that I'm going to lose everybody. And that was what made me probably the most anxious child you have ever, ever met.

I went to sleep every night thinking about scenarios that would mean you losing people. My mother always threatened to leave. When she got mad, I know she got in a fight with my dad. Honestly, I don't remember why. She would sometimes yell and scream and say, oh, I'm leaving. And then she would just stomp down the stairs and I would be hanging onto her legs and she would drag me down stone steps. She would just walk out the door and I would sit by the window and cry my head off.

Then I had this epiphany that, look at me. I don't need my mother. So what? Let her leave. You don't need her. I realized that I was absolutely fine. And I really think my savior was books. I have this ability to enter stories. I literally see them in my head to hear the characters talk.

My soul, my mind, they rest when I enter stories. I 100% enter this other realm. Suddenly my world wasn't limited. My world was literally limitless. And this allows me to relax and to be happy again.

We were Christian. And back then, and still today, Iran was 98, 99% Muslim. And Christians were a tiny, tiny, tiny minority. I ended up going to a Zoroastrian school. It was very multicultural. We had many Zoroastrians. We had Jews. We had Christians. We had Baha'i. We had Muslims.

I never felt discriminated against in any shape or form. I felt I was a little different. We had different customs, maybe. But that was that. I loved to learn and I loved to read and I loved to hang out with my friends. Iran, until the revolution in 1979, when I was 13, was cosmopolitan.

When I looked out of the window, I saw women on my street who wore mini skirts and tight T-shirts. Some of them were covered up. Some of them were more religious. But you also had many women who had their hair done and their nails done and they had a ton of makeup. I mean, this is the 60s and the 70s.

girls were going to school. They were becoming doctors and engineers, not just teachers and secretaries and nurses. Back then, a woman could even become the prime minister. Today, that's not possible. Today, because Iran is now an Islamic republic, back then it wasn't. When I was born in 65, Iran was a monarchy, and we had a king, we called him the Shah. So I

I wanted to become a medical doctor and the road seemed to be absolutely clear. And everybody always told me, you can be whatever you want to be. We had a cottage by the Caspian Sea and it was my happiness.

We would spend the school year in Tehran, downtown, crowded, polluted, lots of people, crazy. And then as soon as the school ended for the summer, we would go north to the Caspian. And I just loved it. There, my mother would just let me be. I would just go and explore everything.

When I was about 13 years old, my activities had expanded to going to parties at night. We would be dancing to the tunes of the Bee Gees. Donia Marie Osmond, absolutely my favorite. I was your almost typical teenager. I wanted to go to every single party that was out there. And, you know, I was thinking about boys all the time.

I met this young man. I was 13 and he was 18 actually, so five years older. He was like me. He was a bookworm and he had just finished his first year of studying medicine. For me, the world had just become perfect because I had the perfect boyfriend. Everything was going so, so well. But this is my last happy summer.

The summer of 1978 came to an end too quickly, and I returned to Tehran. Everything looked normal, but then suddenly there would be protests. I would see people coming on the streets and yelling slogans against the king, against the shah, and saying death to the shah.

They were yelling slogans about someone named Ayatollah Khomeini, a religious leader. It was shocking, but Arash had told me that there was a revolution in progress. But I mean, I was 13. What does a 13-year-old know about revolutions?

They want freedom. And my question to Arash always was, oh, so, but we have freedom. I can dress the way I want. I can go to the school I want. I can become a medical doctor. What's the problem? And then he said, well, you know, if you criticize the king and if you say anything he doesn't like, you're going to end up in jail. I had never heard of it. He says, prison? Like, why? Yeah, they torture people. Torture? What? I mean, what does that mean?

He tried to explain these things to me and I was just surprised. They were demanding that the Shah leaves and this Ayatollah returns and Iran becomes an Islamic republic. What the heck is an Islamic republic? When I looked out of my window, you couldn't see the street at all. Like it was people. And the sound, I mean, the way they yelled this slogan, it shook the street.

I spoke to Arash on the phone. We decided to meet a day or two later at a bookstore not far from my house. And when the time came, I went there and I waited and waited and waited and he didn't come. So I went home very worried. But then I said, oh, you know, maybe his car broke down. I got home. I called his house and his brother. Aram, he answered the phone and he was super worried.

Arash had gone to protest rally the day before and he hadn't come home. So they were terrified. Father was like going to every hospital, calling all of his friends. Nobody knew the rally was attacked by soldiers and there was shooting. And now they were saying that people had died, people had been shot. I didn't know what to make of it.

Every day there were protest rallies and there were shootings and just got worse and worse and worse. And then there was this thought, where is Arash? I mean, he just didn't show up. He was gone. This Ayatollah Khomeini was insisting that the Shah leaves and that Iran become an Islamic Republic. It seemed like everybody wanted the Shah to leave.

Especially, I think, religious minorities when they heard the words Islamic Republic. If you are not Muslim, where are you going to fit? But even some religious minorities were supporting this Ayatollah because he made such beautiful promises. He promised everybody would be rich. Everything will be fine. There will be freedom. There will be democracy. You can say whatever you want. You can do whatever you want. Just get rid of the Shah. Bring me in and I will fix everything for you.

The Shah left the country, he was forced into exile. This Ayatollah Khomeini returned and the referendum asked the people, do you want an Islamic republic? 98% said yes, they did. But the funny thing was that nobody knew what an Islamic republic even was because the constitution to this Islamic republic had not even been written yet.

At the beginning, it was great. I mean, there was actually freedom. There were books that I had no idea existed, like books about socialism and communism and that sort of thing. They had been illegal in Iran. And now everybody was reading them. All these publications about democracy and freedom and how to make the world a better place and all of these very interesting ideas were out there.

But the more I read, the more I realized that a lot of these things, just like it happened in Russia, and I remember my grandmother and the way she hated communists because they came and they made promises and then they destroyed and they killed and they massacred. I remember that. And I had no faith in this revolution at all. And then things began to change slowly.

Women were, of course, the first target. They said, you know, when you go to school, you have to wear these baggy jackets below your knees and you have to cover your hair and basically the hijab, you have to be covered up. And then workplaces and then everywhere on the street, everywhere, we even have to be covered. And then if you said anything against, even mildly criticized Zayatullah, you would be frowned upon.

When the limitations of women came into place and it was announced that women were basically worth half of men, that the testimony of a woman was worth half of the testimony of a man in court, it was too much. So there were protest rallies again organized against this new government, against the Islamic Republic, against Khomeini. My friends and me, we went to all of them.

It wasn't even so much political. I mean, if you have grown up in a miniskirt and bikinis on the beach dancing until 2 a.m. with your boyfriend, and then someone says a woman's place is at home, you're not allowed to go to parties, you're not allowed to have a boyfriend, period. You're not allowed to wear makeup. Makeup is satanic. You're not allowed to sing in public because hearing your voice is something satanic. Having fun basically is illegal, especially for women.

I mean, if you tell a 14-year-old girl all of this, what do you think you're going to have on your hands? After about a year into the success of the revolution, so this is around 1980, the new government, the Islamic Republic, was becoming very organized. The Revolutionary Guard had formed, basically the police of the revolution, and they were violent. They were attacking all the protest rallies everywhere.

At the beginning, they would just come and beat people up, but then there were guns and they were shooting at people and I found myself dodging bullets. But you know, when you're 15, when you're 14 and you go to a protest rally, there's so much energy. There's so much positive energy and you're with your friends and you want to make the world a better place and you are not going to allow injustice.

This went on. And in school, it was just getting harder and harder. A lot of our teachers had been fired because they were not in line with the new ideology. And they were replaced by fanatic young women who were not qualified to teach. Some of them were 18, 19 years old, and they were there to brainwash us. This was the cultural revolution.

One day, it really felt like this noose had been tightening and tightening and tightening around my neck. So I just got tired. I raised my hand and she said, yes, what? And I said, well, miss, this is a calculus class. Can you please teach calculus? And she gave me a dirty look, raised an eyebrow and said, you don't like what I teach, leave. I said, fine. So I collected my books, walked out.

I didn't know what I was doing. I walked in the hallway and there was this noise behind me. And I looked back and maybe only five remained in the classroom. The rest had followed me out. We went in the yard. It was exhilarating. It was the most amazing feeling. We had just walked out of class. I mean, it would never have occurred to us that you could do that.

And then by the time it was lunch break, everybody knew that I had walked out and that my classmates had followed and that we were on strike. Strike was a brand new idea to me. But that was it. So we came up with demands.

The principal, who was a member of the Revolutionary Guard, she was a fanatical young woman. She came and she yelled and she screamed and she threatened. And you go back to class and they said no.

Then I go home and my mother, you know, is very angry in the kitchen. She said, oh, your principal called and she said this. And I said, mom, seriously, do you really expect me to swallow all of this? And my mom, of course, she knew. I mean, she understood. But she said, Marina, just keep your head down. You know, these people are crazy. Lay low and the Islamic Republic will collapse.

So after three days of the strike, the principal called me and a few other representatives to the office. And she said, listen, you're going to go back to class right now. If you don't, I will call the Revolutionary Guard and they will come and they will arrest all of you and take you to prison. And the way she said it, we realized that this was serious. She meant it. So we talked between ourselves. We talked to our friends and we decided that we had made the point. And we went back to class. But of course, nothing changed.

The wave of mass protests had begun. The government had made a list of who were anti-revolutionary, who were the free thinkers, who were the protesters, who were the strikers. They were coming after them. So every day you would go to school and you would hear that so-and-so had been arrested. My friends were disappearing.

It was January 15, 1982. I was at home. I was doing my routine. I was ready to go and take a bath. I turned on the hot water. I was waiting for it to heat up when I heard the doorbell. I just froze. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I knew they had come for me. There was this sense of finality.

A moment later, my mother called my name. I opened the bathroom door and there were two revolutionary guards in their green uniforms with their big guns pointed at me. I expected myself to be terrified and I wasn't. There was this absolute sense of calm and it shocked me. Emotionally, I went numb. My mom and dad were both crying.

And the guards, they searched the house. Of course, they got to my bookcase and they started taking English books like Gino Senesi's Lewis Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickinson.

They said that these were showing that I was a Western spy, that I hated the revolution. And then I picked up my rosary and they said, oh, what's that? I said, it's my rosary. I had to explain to them what the rosary was. They said, oh, you're a Christian. I said, yes, I am a Christian. And then they took me to their car, which was parked at our door and put me in the back seat. My mom and dad, they asked, where are you taking her? They said to Evie in prison.

Evin had been built during the time of the Shah. It was a prison for political prisoners, very big and surrounded by tall brick walls, barbed wire and armed guards. The name always brought fear.

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This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. We arrived at the prison. They gave me a strip of cloth. They said, blindfold yourself. So I tied it around my head and blindfolded myself.

Then we entered the building, they made me walk along the hallways and they said, sit on the floor and wait. The girl next to me started crying at some point, saying, we are all going to die. We are all going to die. We are all going to die. So I said very quietly to her, I said, please be quiet. We are not going to die. We are not going to die. We are not going to die. Be brave.

The moment I said it, the moment those words just left my mouth, I realized I was an idiot. How dare I say to another human being to be brave? I mean, what did I know about what she had faced or what we would face or what will happen?

But I didn't have much time to think about it. A guy came and called my name and told me to follow him. He took me into this room, a door closed behind me. I'm still blindfolded. And he says, sit down.

And he started to ask me questions, you know, the basic stuff. What's your name? What school do you go to? Who's your mom? Who's your dad? Who are your friends? And then he started asking me about my opinions about the revolution and the Ayatollah and Islam. And he asked me, why didn't I believe in it? And I tried to explain to him that I believe in Jesus.

But he tried to argue me into seeing his perspective and maybe giving in, which I didn't. I have studied the Quran and I know what it says and I still don't believe it. And he said, OK, I'm sorry you feel that way. And then he took me back into the hallway and made me sit there. I sat there and there was a man screaming. He was being lashed.

You could hear the strike, sharp sound, and then the scream. And it just went on and on and on. I was going to throw up. This guy came to me and called my name and took me into another room. And he said, where is Arash? We discovered that he had been killed. But I said, I don't know, which was the absolute truth.

Then he took off my blindfold. We were in a small room. And then the other guy also came in and they handcuffed me. They tied me to the bare wooden bed. I was lying down on my stomach. They took off my socks and my shoes. They tied my ankles to the other end of the bed. And then the second man started lashing the soles of my feet.

With every stroke of the lash, it was as if I was literally hit by lightning that somehow penetrated my nervous system. The pain wasn't just in my feet. The pain was somehow magically everywhere. And it was like being exploded from inside. I couldn't believe the amount of pain. How can a human being go through that much pain?

So they kept hitting me and I thought it has to get better. I mean, your feet have to go numb. They didn't. Every strike hurt more than the one before. I started counting 1, 2, 3, 10, 12. I don't know. I forgot what came after. And I started praying. I started yelling out, Hail Mary, full of grace. And I forgot the words to it. I can say Hail Mary in a coma, but I forgot the words to it. I was just drowning.

And I realized I'm not saint material. If Satan was so kind to appear and say, Marina, I'll get you out of here. Just follow me. Sum your soul. Give me what I want. I'll get you out. I would have. But the thing is that there was no offer. So they kept meeting. Eventually they stopped. And again, they asked where is Shahzad? He said, listen, I don't know.

They made me sit up and I looked at my feet and my feet looked like overgrown party balloons with toes on them. And my feet were indigo blue. I had never seen anything like I didn't know the human body can swell like that. It looked like my feet were going to blow up. Then they made me walk. And walking on your feet when you're like that is not easy.

Eventually, he said, listen, I believe you that you don't know where Shahzad is, but you have to give us the names of your schoolmates, friends who have ever said or done anything against the government. I said, I'm not going to do that. Why would I do that? Don't you want to know where Shahzad is? Isn't that what you want to know? And he said to me that if I didn't cooperate,

I would be executed. He said, don't even doubt it for a moment. I'm serious. They're just going to drag you out and shoot you. So share the names. I said, no, to be honest with you, I don't know why. Maybe I was just tired. Maybe I just wanted them to shoot me. I don't know why.

This guy took me into a cell, a small cell, and gave me two military blankets. He called the prison doctor. He came. He gave me a shot of something, and I fell asleep. And then I woke up in the middle of the night with someone kicking me. He said, get up, get up, get up right now. And he dragged me out, and I was blindfolded. And there was like a line of us, and they took us outside the building. So we walked out.

They guided us for a while. It was cold and it was snowing. And they walked us into the night. Eventually, they said stop. They removed our blindfolds. And I looked around and we were in the middle of absolute nothing. It was like an empty field. There were these wooden poles sticking out of the ground. And there were guards with guns.

I realized, oh, this looks like an execution. But I was so tired. I was just so tired that I was happy that I thought, okay, there's not going to be any more beating. There's not going to be any more pain. And I'm just done.

There was a group of us, I think it was three women and three men, and they started towing people to these poles. But then one of the girls, she started to run, and there was a gunshot, and she fell. Back then, the early days after the success of the revolution, it would take them minutes to give that sentence.

And there were so many prisoners. Avin prison wasn't built for the number of prisoners that were entering. Thousands, thousands of prisoners. And they were trying to process them. So if they felt that a prisoner was not cooperating, especially if you talked back to them, and if they felt that they were not able to get any valuable information from you,

They would give you a death sentence in two minutes. The interrogator in this case, it was Hamid. The Sharia judge had an office. Hamid would go to the Sharia judge. He is a clergyman appointed, just sitting there, believing that we all work for Satan.

So Hamed would say, well, this person is not sharing information. To be honest, at the end of the day, we don't even think she has any valuable information. But she is really, really an anti-revolutionary. And we do not need her in this country. We do not need her in this world. She's better dead. So the Sharia judge would just put the stamp on the paper and say, yeah, condemned to death.

At this point, a car came speeding towards us and it stopped. And Ali, the first guy, he got out of the car and he came to Hamed and gave him a sheet of paper. Hamed looked at it, said something to him, and then Ali walked toward me.

He grabbed my arm and he took me to the car and he pushed me in the front passenger seat, closed the door, got in the driver's seat and drove off. He took me to a cell. He said to me that the judge gave you a death sentence, but I was able to get you a pardon. Your sentence has been reduced to life in prison. And I wanted to kill him. I tried to hit him.

He said to me that I was stupid, I was an idiot, because it took him a lot of effort to get my death sentence, a reduced life in prison. I said, I've never been tried. He said, no, no, no, in absentia, you have been tried. The guards in the prison, we could have divided them into two groups. There was one group of them, like Ali, who really believed in

You know, they believed in the Quran. They believed that Khomeini was the savior of the country and of them and of souls and of everything. They genuinely believed that we were a danger to the country, to Islam, to his way of life.

They would spend hours reading for you from the Quran and trying to have discussions with you to prove to you that you were wrong and they were right. But then there was another group like Hamid. They were sociopaths. They were there for personal gain. They saw which way the tide was turning.

And they decided to get on the bandwagon and to gain as much power and money and influence as they could. They took pleasure in making people suffer and in killing people. I saw joy and pleasure on his face when he hurt me.

Ali, I never saw it in him. He always looked upset and sad and anxious and devastated. He was never happy about it. But he believed it was a necessity because we had dangerous ideas and we had to be stopped.

From where he was landing, he later explained this to me, that he believed it was his place to serve God and to bring light to me, to enlighten me. And I had to repent. And maybe if I repented, then maybe I could be saved, not only my mortal body, but my soul.

So this is what he believed. And he went the extra mile. He went to Khomeini himself because his father was a good friend of Khomeini. He went and said to the leader of the country that, listen, this girl, she's a Christian. She's ignorant. She has done terrible things. She has gone against you. But I really believe I can turn her. Give me the chance. And the leader said, OK, sure, you can have it. It was that simple and that chaotic. And then I got to live.

with a life sentence sent to the prison block called 246 in Evin Prison. Just before he sent me to 246, he said to me that he was planning to leave because Iran was at war with Iraq at the time. He was planning to leave and fight at the war because this was a war of good against evil. So he left to go fight. They sent me along with some other people. They put us in a line again.

This was 246, a cell block for women, two stories. My feet were still in really bad shape and I was dehydrated, exhausted physically. Emotionally, I felt nothing. I was just tired. That was the only thing I felt. Nothing else. There was no fear. It had completely wiped my emotions. I had turned into a shell.

We entered the small room. They told me to take off my blindfold. There was a woman there with a complete Islamic hijab, very serious-looking woman, young, 20s. She said, yes, I'm Sister Maryam. I am one of the guards of the cell block. In each of these cells during the time of the Shah, there used to be five or six prisoners. Now in every single one, there were 50 or 60. There were people everywhere. It was like a beehive everywhere.

And they took me to the last cell at the end of the hallway. There I saw one of my old friends, Sarah, who had been arrested before me. And I was actually very worried for her. And we hugged and we talked a little bit. She brought me up to date on her own arrest and her brother was in prison. And he was in a bad spot because Sarah knew that he had been also sentenced to death.

Soon it was time to go to bed and there were so many of us, we were like sardines in a box. There was a set of bathrooms like halfway down the hallway and in the middle of the night if you needed to go to the bathroom, you literally had to walk on people. Everybody is like you, you're all in the same boat. Everybody needs to go to the bathroom. Everybody is in pain. Everybody has problems. We were always hungry. Food was extremely limited.

Then in the morning and in the afternoon, they brought us this big military style flask of tea. Everybody looked forward to that. I mean, to get a nice hot drink.

And then I put it to my mouth and it smelled horrible. It smelled chemical. And I said to Sarah, I mean, what is this? This doesn't smell like tea. And she said, oh, they add camphor to it, which is usually something that's used for embalming. I said, why do they add camphor to it? She said, because it stops us from menstruating.

They don't want to pay for pads. And this way it's controlled. But it also has interesting side effects. I heard that it can cause depression and it makes your body absorb water. So you swell. Even though you're malnourished, you don't get food, you look quite chubby. So if when you're allowed, your family can come and see you, they would say, oh, you look very well fed. At least you're not hungry.

I don't think being hungry or even the comfort, you know, those were not the biggest problems for me. The biggest problem was at night when we had to listen to gunshots. We knew that these are executions.

Especially for those like Sarah who had family who were condemned to death, people really lost it. And they would scream and they would cry. And then if you screamed and you cried, you would get in trouble. Then the guards would come and drag you away and send you to solitary confinement or God knows where. Sarah had not been doing very well and she had had a serious nervous breakdown. They had taken her away and she was in solitary for a while.

And her brother had actually been executed. They could take you and shoot you or they could take you and torture you all over again. A lot of bad things could happen to you. And you had no idea if one day you could go home and that one day could never come or it could come in a year or two or five or ten. You just didn't know.

You were away from home, from loved ones, from comfort, from who you were. You were in this abyss of darkness. And the hardest part was not knowing, not knowing at all if you're going to live or die or when or how. And nothing made sense. Nothing made sense at all. When you're 16, what is safety?

and comfort and warmth to you. It is a home. You know, when we say there's no place like home, I mean, for a 16-year-old, it's a mom and dad and it's home. That is safety. A 16-year-old is basically a child. And when you're snatched like that from everything familiar,

from everything that has ever meant safety and comfort and warmth to you, no matter how imperfect they are, you are left in what I can only describe as hell. This is a place that anything painful, awful, horrible, senseless evil can happen to you. You will suffer and nobody cares. Nobody will show up to save you.

Nobody will show up to help you. It's you and it. And you have to take it and you don't have any choice. More than anything, I think, you know, I'm glad that I was so numb emotionally. But even though I was numb, there was that fear. There was that fear that everything and anything horrible was imminent.

And pain is such a strong thing. It can destroy even the most noble human emotions.

But as time went by, we had little to really do. But what we could do is talk to each other. So we talked to each other. We told each other our life stories and what had happened and how we ended up there. And, you know, we told each other about our families, about those parties at Caspian, about the boyfriends and hopes, about our dreams, about all of these stories.

We had a couple of young women in our cell who had babies. They had been arrested and had given birth in the prison. So we felt responsible for them. Maybe they needed a little bit of better food. They needed a little bit more fresh air. And then there was, you know, the whole process of trying to negotiate with the guards and trying to get a few more advantages and basically helping each other.

Sometimes people just couldn't take it anymore and they would have like serious nervous breakdowns. They would have screaming fits and, you know, just basically just completely lose it. Every day carries so much weight when there is so much death, when there is so much pain around you and you start feeling that if you can relieve, if you can help even a tiny bit of that pain, you have done something. Maybe this is the best you can do.

It wasn't about ideology. It wasn't about what who believes in what. It wasn't about which God or which prophet or which whatever. It was about this is evil and this is death and this is pain. So we have to find a way to dance with it.

My cellmates, my closest friends ever, they understand me and I understand them better than anybody, better than any mother, any father, any husband, any wife, any child, anybody, because we were in it together, because we sustained each other. We carried each other through a kind of darkness that is difficult to understand.

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So for about six months of living in this strange alternate reality of being in prison and not knowing what's going to happen, I had not heard anything from my interrogators. And my name was suddenly called over the loudspeakers and just said, come to the office. And usually when they said come to the office, it usually meant you would be taken to the interrogation building as torture or execution. You didn't know.

So I was, of course, a little worried. So I put on my headscarf and stuff and I went to the office. Maryam, she said, Brother Ali has returned from the war front and he just wants to see how things are with you. So I was taken to the interrogation building and he told me to take off my blindfold. There he was. And he looked certainly thinner. He got up to pull the chair and he was limping.

So I said, how are you? And he said, I got shot in the leg and I was in the hospital for a while. I said, you know, I'm sorry to hear that. And he said, how are you? I said, well, you know, I'm still alive and it's been difficult. And then he said that he had decided to ask me to marry him. It just came out of nowhere. Here I was with my interrogator. I was 17 years old now. He was about 28 years.

My first reaction was, I said, no, I can't. I don't know you. Who are you? I mean, I don't know you. You are my interrogator. We didn't just happily meet somewhere and get to know each other. And he explained to me, you don't need to know me.

This is how it is. This is how it has always been in my family. Marriage is arranged. A lot of times, the woman has never met the guy she's going to marry, and the guy has never met the woman he's going to marry. And he said, don't forget, you had a death sentence. You would have been dead. I reduced it to life in prison. You're going to be here forever, and nobody's coming to your rescue anymore.

You are an enemy of this country. You are an enemy of God. I'm giving you this opportunity to get your life back and to turn things around and to repent. So I said, can I think about it? He said, yes, you have three days. Go think about it. I'll call you back and then you give me your answer. Just as the goodbye, he said, and don't forget, I have the power.

to go after your family. I have the power to go after your boyfriend. I have the power. Don't forget while you're thinking, keep that in mind. So I got back to the cell block and I basically slept for three days. I just completely shut down. If I said no to this guy, he could arrest my parents. So I said, fine, what difference does it make at this point? At least this way I could protect my family.

He explained to me that this didn't mean I would be released, but he would try to have my sentence reduced. But if I married him, even if my sentence was significantly reduced, then I wouldn't be able to go home because I was his wife. So he set a date just a few weeks actually down the road.

He got me like a day pass from the prison and he put me in a car and we drove to his house, not very far from the prison. Nice, big piece of land and a nice, big, beautiful house. His father was very well off and we went in and his mother was just this little woman who opened the door and so kindly, so gently, you know, took my arm and

She was just so kind, so mild. You know, she took me in the kitchen and then she showed me stuff. And then she asked me if I wanted tea and she said, oh, you look so thin. And she got me like all these sweets and all this food. And she was like, oh, eat, eat, eat, please eat. And just her kindness, but it was genuine. This woman was kind.

And then his father was, again, so mild-mannered, so gentle, so respectful. You know, I was, to him, I was a prisoner and I was an enemy of God. But nevertheless, he respected me. The way they looked at me, there was not pity there. There was kindness. They're just this wonderful, beautiful family, kind, generous. And then they have a son who is a torturer. How does it happen?

His mother really opened up to me eventually and said that, you know, when Ali was a prisoner himself, and I was like, what? She said, oh, he didn't tell you. I said, no. She said, well, he was a prisoner for three years during the time of the Shah, and he was tortured for three years, and he has this scar and he has that scar. And it's like, he never told me.

So they made him suffer and then the tables turned and he said, oh, now I'm going to go get back at my enemies for what they did to me. But then what? Then there is the next round. This is disgusting. This is wrong.

But it did change something because he and I had much more in common than I had thought. We had both been prisoners. We had both been tortured. There is something, I think, between most people who have ever been tortured. There is this closeness, even if we disagree with each other. We have this thing in common. We understand what it means.

I was married to him in his parents' house. You know, it was a very close-dressed family. And he had bought a house for us. Of course, I wasn't free. He could just get me passes from the prison. Now, my parents didn't know. My family didn't know at this stage any of it. And I told him that I had difficulty thinking of how to tell my family. I was really struggling with that.

I did have my retrial. He did arrange for that. During this so-called trial, I got three years. And from that three years, I had already served about one and a half. So I just had the remaining. Ali said, maybe he can even have that reduced. He said, then you can go home with me. And I thought, hmm, my idea of going home and your idea of going home are very different.

I had this weird life with him that was basically between this house and the prison. There was this group in Iran, the Mujahideen Haq organization, that was an anti-government organization that assassinated government officials. So they had started assassinating a lot of the people who worked in Ibn. So a lot of the guards and interrogators, they were being assassinated.

Ali got the heads up and he decided that it was safer for both of us just to basically be in the prison, like even he wouldn't be going home. So I was in solitary confinement and he would be staying there for just a few weeks until things quiet down. And then the few weeks went by and things seemed to be quieter. And then one night we just went to his parents' house for dinner.

Just before that, Ali said to me that he had decided to resign from his position in Evin Prison. His dad had a very successful business. He was going to work with his father and he was not going to be an interrogator. He had resigned. We were going to have a normal life.

At least I thought that if he's not an interrogator, if he's not torturing people, it's a good thing. And that if I have to live with this man, at least I know that that is over. That is not going to be a part of who I am anymore. So, you know, that night over dinner, we talked about that. We talked about him working with his father and his parents were happy. I think they were rather relieved.

I had developed a relatively good relationship with all of them. They seemed to like me. And I mean, his mother was just such a sweetheart. And, you know, my own family, I didn't have too many good things to say about them. Then we got out of the house. It was late at night. The car was parked just up the road and we walked. There was the sound of a motorcycle. And the moment I heard it, I knew what was happening.

These assassins that killed government officials, they always came on motorcycles and they always took their shot and they were gone. Ali knew too because he pushed me really hard and I hit the ground really hard. As I hit the ground, there was the sound of bullets. He fell right on top of me and the motorcycle was gone.

I managed to turn, you know, to try to push his weight off of me. And there was blood. And I thought, oh, I've been hit. But then it didn't seem like I was hit. And then I looked and he was hit. There was blood just everywhere. And his parents, they were running up and they came. And I said, call an ambulance. And I passed out. I woke up in the hospital and he had died and I had lived.

I had lived with death for quite some time when he died and the way he died. I had seen violent deaths. But there's something about witnessing violent death that will leave you different. It's like taking an axe to someone's soul and chipping a part of it off. And it can never be replaced. That was that when he died.

I knew that he was dying. I somehow knew. And I think very quickly in my mind, I tried to decide who was this man to me. Yes, he was my husband, but who was this man? I definitely did not love him. But did I hate him? I did not. There is this man that has saved my life. He saved me literally from the firing squad.

There was a price. There was a price to it. But he saved me. But one thing I knew is I had tried to love him. I had tried very hard. I had not succeeded. But there was so much pain. There was so much evil. There was so much darkness. There was so much wrong in this relationship that I could not expect myself to understand it.

It was enough to know that I didn't hate him, that I did not want him dead, that I did not want him to suffer, that I wanted him forgiven. Wherever it was he was going, I wanted him to have peace because I don't want the tortured to become torturers. That doesn't do anybody any good. That doesn't relieve anything. That doesn't save anything. That's not justice.

That is evil. Evil had been done to him and he had chosen to do evil. That just magnifies it. That just empowers it. The only thing that can destroy evil is goodness, is forgiveness, is love. And I had tried to give him love. I had failed. But maybe, just maybe, from where I was standing, I always hoped that one day I could face God and say, I did come to love him.

that love is forgiving, that love is above all else. I'm not there yet, but I'm really, really trying. And I still have not been able to because the pain that he caused me in various ways, because when I slept with him, I was basically being raped, even though I was his wife. But that was horrible. That was painful. That was awful.

I have nightmares not about the tortures that I experienced in prison or about the gunshots in the middle of the night. I don't have nightmares about that, but I do have nightmares about the nights that I spent with him. That damaged me more than the torture. That damaged me on a level that is extremely personal.

And to forgive that, to overcome that, I think that is what has taken me so long. The prosecutor of Tehran, who was the head of a prison, insisted that I would be returned to the prison. And he was planning to marry me off to another guard. And he was a crazy man. He was a psychopath.

Ali's family, his parents got in the way. They talked to Ayatollah Khomeini and it took about six months for me to be officially released from prison after Ali's death. But I was. So after about six months from his death, they opened the gate of the prison and they said, go home. And I did.

When I was released from prison, I went home. I sat at the dinner table with my parents and my boyfriend, a couple of family friends, and they talked about the weather. They said it had rained a lot during spring and the roses were doing really well. All that time from the prison and everything that happened, I thought I'm going to go home and everything will be fine. I'm going to go home and I will be happy and I will be safe. And I looked at these people and they were all strangers to me.

I had become a different person and they didn't understand at all, understand. They didn't even come close to understanding what had happened, what they had seen, what they had experienced. And they didn't want to know. They never asked. They never said, hey, how was it? Like, are you okay? Do you want to talk about it? Never. It was very obvious. Put it behind you. Whatever happened, happened. We don't want to know. Just move on.

And this is exactly what I did. I couldn't go back to school because of my record of being in prison. I studied at home. I went for the final exams. I got my high school diploma. I wouldn't be allowed in university because of my prison situation, and I wouldn't even try. So I married my boyfriend, and I was not allowed to leave the country for five years.

They finally gave me a passport and then we, my husband Andre and I, we had a little boy and we left Iran in 1990. We came to Canada and we arrived, you know, with very little money.

We had to work very hard to build a life here. We had another son and, you know, we put our kids in soccer and piano lessons and we tended our garden and, you know, watched hockey and became Canadians. We bought our first home in the suburbs and I started working at McDonald's and then, you know, I sued Chalet and I was a waitress.

My husband, he's an engineer, so he got a job in his field and he was working. And I brought my parents here and they lived with me. And people, they thought I was just another refugee or immigrant or, you know, whatever, a normal person. But no one knew. I was not ready to talk about it. I didn't talk about it for close to 20 years. I kept it all in.

It was like you carry lit dynamite inside you, inside your soul. And you can just feel the fuse just sizzle, sizzle, sizzle. And then you know it's going to blow. And I finally had to let it out. I had to talk about it. I had to face it. It's all about looking at this evil straight in the eye and saying, I know you, I acknowledge you, and I'm not afraid of you.

It was about facing the truth, all the good and the bad and the ugly, all of it, all my faults, all of my sins, all of my mistakes, everything I did, for good reason or not, it was all about facing it. You cannot live something like that and go silently into the night. The night wouldn't allow you to get through. The night would stand in your way. You have to fight your way through the night to get today.

I seemed normal. I mean, I married, I raised my children. I acted and looked normal. But then my mother died from cancer here in Canada. And I started having symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. I started having psychotic episodes. So keeping an experience like that in, it leads you to a place where suddenly one day out of the blue, a scream escapes your throat. Then because you let it out, it happened to me.

For the first psychotic episodes that I had, I started to scream and I couldn't stop. I screamed so much that I started to suffocate. It is so urgent that it stops you from breathing. It is relentless. That need to let that scream out, it rewrites your need to breathe.

What had happened, what I had witnessed was screaming to come out. I had to bear witness. I basically decided that I cannot be silent. I have to testify to what had happened just so that the world knows. Because it wasn't just me, it was a lot of people. So I wrote about it. It was a part of my therapy.

But it became a book, and I took creative writing courses. I worked, worked, worked very, very, very, very hard for years on that manuscript. And the book, finally, Prisoner of Tehran, was published. I have written another book about my grandmother's life and her escape from Russia. But that's basically what I do. I write, I teach writing, and I live in a very quite remote area by a lake in a forest.

Just imagine for a moment that you are grabbed out of your life, out of your ordinary, not perfect, but ordinary life, and they come and they strip you of everything you have, and then you just go on.

There is something about pain and suffering. They do something to people. I don't know how to explain that. I don't think the words can do it justice at all. But those who have been there, they know what I'm saying. This is the deepest kind of human experience that takes us to places that define us in a very visceral and raw sort of way.

We cannot understand that kind of suffering unless we go through it. I never got through the uncertainty of it. And I think this is the mistake people make. People think I got through uncertainty. I didn't. Life, the world is a place of a lot of injustice, a lot of evil.

It is a tough lesson that I was put in this micro-universe in which human being killing human being, human being torturing human being, human being making human being suffer, all of it multiplying and multiplying and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And what is at the end of that tunnel? Death. It is a painful, horrible, meaningless death.

You understand that nothing is here to stay. You become the perfect wanderer. You become, I don't belong anywhere and I'm forever lost and I don't know where I'm coming from and I don't know where I'm going. I know uncertainly. I understand uncertainly. It is the acceptance of suffering itself.

without letting it crush you. And if you don't let it crush you, you can walk through it. It doesn't make it pleasant. It doesn't make it easy, but it makes you capable. And suffering has made me who I am.

Suffering a lot of times can seem and does seem meaningless, but even through suffering, we can make someone's life even if slightly more bearable. And that is the meaning. That is all the meaning we need. I recognize those opportunities when they come along, and I think they are all the meaning I need.

I feel like I can walk through death. Not that I'm not afraid. I am afraid, but I know that I can. And it doesn't bother me that I'm going to be alone because I have been alone before. I have been utterly alone. And here I am. It takes a lot of patience, but this is what it is all about.

We have to walk through it. This is not a race that has any shortcuts. This is one of those races that you have to go through every stage of it with a lot of patience. And I'm still trying to figure out how to love. And I'm still trying to figure out how to forgive. And I still try to figure out how to walk through a very uncertain life with grace.

Today's episode featured Marina Nemet. You can find out more about Marina and her story by going to marinanemet.com. That's M-A-R-I-N-A-N-E-M-A-T dot com. There you can find contact information and more about her two books, Prisoner of Tehran and After Tehran, A Life Reclaimed. Her books are also available on Amazon, Simon & Schuster, and bookshop.org.

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In January 2022, local woman Karen Reid was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police cover-up. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover-up to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.

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