Agetting to the point of not being able to look in the mirror, so deep is the sense of guilt to be alive and safe outside Iran at a time when many Iranians are risking their lives for freedom. Each new young face fallen under the blows of the Iranian regime makes me the 16-year-old girl that I was and sends me back to a long and dark corridor, in which I walk blindfolded, without knowing what wait at the end.
« Maryam… » I hear a woman’s voice from across the visiting room. It wasn’t my first name, and yet I turned around. The woman’s face changed expression upon seeing me. “You are wearing my daughter’s headscarf”, she says. Her husband, at her side, remained silent. Yes, I told him, and I didn’t know how to finish my sentence. It was December 1981. The women’s section of Vakilabad prison in Mashhad, where Maryam and I were detained, along with several hundred other women, many of them teenagers like us. It was visiting day and the families were there to see theirs.
We were the same age and were awaiting trial. Security rules meant that we never talked about the charges that were brought against us by the regime. The less we knew about each other, the better. And Maryam was among the quietest. Since Ali Razini, a mullah who graduated from the ultra-radical Haghani school of clergy, had been put at the head of the revolutionary court in Mashhad, the trials were even more expeditious, lasting only a few minutes. Razini was reputed to have a grudge against women. It was he who started the wave of executions in Mashhad, condemning more than a hundred women to death in less than three months.
death row
During the trial, the central question posed to the accused was whether she agreed to repent in front of a TV camera. Most of those who refused were sent to death row. We bade them farewell in the morning as they left for the Revolutionary Tribunal. The guards embarked them, blindfolded, and in the evening, when the group returned, there were often two or three missing. And we knew what that meant. They were the ones who had maintained their position. Those who were going to be executed in the night, often without their families being able to pay them a last visit. The news of their death was published in the newspaper Khorasan a few days later.
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