Read Online The Morning They Came for Us by Janine di Giovanni - Free Book Online Page B

never knew, seemed to bear no resentment that he had been disfigured in such a public way. Because hands are one of the first things we notice about someone, every time he stretched his out, it was immediately apparent that he had done something.
    Or perhaps he had done nothing at all. Perhaps it was all a horrible mistake. Such things happen all the time in dictatorships. People get locked up for years, forgotten about. Then the key opens their cell door and a jailer says, ‘You can go now.’ They never know why.
    The day Saddam’s regime fell, I went to search for the man with no fingernails to open the seal so I could use my satellite phone. In the chaos of the American troops pulling down Saddam statues, the looting, the feverish hysteria, I still thought I needed the man to open my phone. But he, like most of the regime staff, had fled. He was hiding in a hole somewhere, like Saddam.
    I went back to Iraq many times after that, but I never saw the man with no fingernails again.
    In the Gaza Strip, many years ago, I stood near the Mediterranean Sea beside one of the saddest men I have ever met. His trauma was so deep that if you walked behind him and suddenly tapped him on the shoulder, he jumped. He also never smiled.
    He had been imprisoned in the Israeli torture centre in the Negev Desert for fifteen months and – like those African tribesmen who believe they will die if they are imprisoned, because they have no sense of the future, only of thepresent – he woke every day thinking it would be his last day on earth.
    â€˜Once you have been tortured,’ he told me, ‘you leave the human race.’
    Victims of torture often recount their methods for surviving during such barbaric pain. Someone once told me that they tried to recall complicated French verbs. Another used meditation to distance their abused and battered spirit from their body.
    And yet, I have never interviewed a torture victim who has come away feeling they have not been betrayed. They say it’s by the person who turned them in to the police, or by their countrymen who might be the ones doing this to them, or even by God for inflicting upon them such unthinkable horror.
    In Syria, however, it is not just the torture victims who feel betrayed. The cost of loyalty on all sides – even if you believe in nothing at this point, five years into the war – has been steep.
    In northern Lebanon, in a town now inhabited by refugee Free Syrian Army fighters who are recovering from severe injuries, I walked up a series of dark staircases to reach the floor where the victims of torture were recovering.
    It was a secret place, in a secret location. I was asked not to write the name or the address, or the names of the men. They had been shipped by road across the Syrian border to this frontier town, and they were still afraid of Assad’s spies, who could kill them, bring them back to their country, or harm their families.
    As I walked around the room, I passed a man who had recently had twenty-nine bullets removed from his body. ‘They just kept shooting me as though I were a piece of paper,’ he said.
    Then I met a paralysed man strapped to a board who was playing with a child – an orphan. The man had been badly beaten with a club by the Assad security forces and had been left with a fractured spinal cord. He lay on the board, joking with the small child, and repeated that he was exposed to the same mantra that Nada and others had been subjected to, over and over: ‘Every time they hit me,’ he said, ‘they screamed at me, “You want freedom! Okay, take this! Here is your great freedom!”’
    Next, I met a man whom I will refer to as Hussein, a student of human rights law. He was tall, thin and bearded, and had – as expected – a broken, desolate expression, which reminded me of my Gaza friend, and his words about being exiled from the human race.
    Hussein was