Behind Bars - Part 6: Torture Survivors' Crushed Feet and Burns, and Two Jewish POWs Given Geneva Convention Treatment

3. And Aleppo's Blood Stirred

This cheerful-faced lieutenant colonel, who walked with an unusual gait, was a native of Aleppo who believed in Arab unity and was convinced that the man best suited to achieve it in our own time was Gamal Abdel Nasser.

He held that the Egyptian president had drawn Egypt's millions out of the embrace of Pharaonism into the wider fold of Arabism, and had thrown the full weight of "the Egyptian nation" onto the scale of the Arab national struggle.

He cited proof after proof: the July 1952 revolution, the abrogation of the British treaty that had served as a cover for British colonialism disguised as "protection" in 1954, the nationalization of the Canal and the victories of Suez in 1956, and the establishment of the first Arab union, by mutual consent and amicable agreement, between Egypt and Syria in 1958.

To him, Abdel Nasser represented the past, the present, and the future all at once, the Saladin of the twentieth Arab century.

He alone, in this man's eyes, was capable of clipping Israel's claws and forcing it to abide by the rules of civilized international conduct.

For this reason he regarded the secession of September 1961 as the crime of the age, a treacherous stab in the heart of the Arab nation, delivered by a conspiring clique that had played the corrupt Arab rulers' own hand, dancing to the tune of colonial interests and petrodollars.

And since he had access to some measure of Arab weaponry, he considered it his national duty to turn it against the enemies of Arabism, whatever slogans they might raise before "the masses," true or false. And so he mobilized his own battalion to join his fellow unionists in their assault on the General Staff headquarters. But the poor planning of the planners doomed the operation, and he was seized and put through "questions and answers."

This "questions and answers," a civilized euphemism, spares the tender feelings of the tenderhearted from the word torture.

He hid nothing from his "interrogators," for he knew the purity of the principles he believed in, and had no need to raise some glittering slogan to conceal black intentions and treasonous aims beneath it.

He told me of his ordeal, and of what he had endured in it, and showed me the soles of his feet.

They were two slabs of bone-mosaic, laid out like a rigid abstract painting, for there was no joint left in them that could still move. Each foot rose and fell as a single solid block, like a slab of bathroom tile lifted and set down whole. And Riyah al-Sharif would lift these two feet with a smile still on his lips, and when he caught the look of sorrow and grief on my face, he recited the poet's line:

"Whoever courts the beautiful bride
Must not begrudge the dowry..."

A young man of the nationalist principle, who had paid dearly for his conviction and felt no regret for it.

"A man must strive toward what will bring him success,
though success itself is not his to command."

In the wing I also came to know a disabled sergeant, likewise from Aleppo, who leaned on a cane and would take my arm whenever he wanted to go to the bathroom, since he could no longer walk any distance on his own. He was as gentle as a lamb, as plain and open as sunlight, and the burns across his face struck me deeply.

He confided in me what he had gone through during his own "interrogation."

He too belonged to "the unity group," and had believed in the movement's own victory and in raising the flag of reunion. But since the coded signal never came over Damascus radio, he had held back and waited. He and his companions could easily have taken control of their battalion, since they were already mounted on their armored horses, ready to spit fire in the faces of the "new" secessionists.

Once it became clear that Jasim's own attempt to seize the General Staff building and the radio station had failed, they took him in for questions and answers.

I now relate what he told me, exactly and faithfully as he said it.

He said: they put me inside the rubber casing of a large truck tire, and carried me to the top of a high hill, and sprinkled gasoline along a long stretch of ground between the summit and the level ground below. My back was bent double inside the tire, my legs and arms unable to move, since my upper arms and thighs were inside the tire while my forearms and lower legs stuck out beyond it. They set fire to the sprinkled gasoline and released the tire, and it went rolling down through the middle of the flames. The fruit of this interrogation was the burns that now "decorate" his face and the ends of his arms and legs.

And I ask myself: from what clay were these men made? Are they even men at all?

I have not singled out these two men from Aleppo out of any regional partiality of my own. Rather, I came to know, in the course of speaking with them, some members of their own families, and we fell into easy conversation, and old memories stirred of "the city of the gardens," as al-Buhturi once called it, our own beautiful city.

If I were to write down everything I saw, or even a portion of it, I would also have to speak of that "Shahbawi" officer, so called for Shahba in Jabal al-Druze, and of his extraordinary courage in repelling an attack on the barracks he and his fellow unionists had seized, coming out of the battle with eleven bullets lodged throughout his body. Whoever shot him assumed he was dead, but he did not die. He was carried to the hospital hours later, after nearly bleeding out entirely, and God in His mercy wrote him safety and recovery, saved from certain death by doctors who knew no politics but their own human duty.

I would sit on my bed beside his, and hear from him words that anyone wishing to learn what sacrifice and death for a principle truly mean ought to hear for themselves.

How radiant his young vitality was, even swathed as he was in white gauze, his chest wrapped in a white cloth stained with red seeping from his still-raw wounds, his hands bound upward so that their movement would not tear open what had begun to heal.

I will never forget, as long as I live, that dreamy gaze and that pale, gentle smile. These two men from Aleppo and this man from Jabal al-Druze are living examples of a far larger body of men who strove, and strove well, only to have fortune trip them, so that they paid the price for other men's mistakes.

Merchants and Two Jewish Women

In the two rooms adjoining the ward, two secrets required that the doors and windows be kept locked on their occupants, for these occupants held secrets of the highest state importance.

In the first room were smuggling merchants.

In the second were two Jewish women held in detention, prisoners of war.

Much whispering circulated about the occupants of these two rooms, and our attempts to glimpse these "secrets" came to nothing, since discretion proved sharper than curiosity.

One early morning, as I was walking the corridor, I drew back the curtain of the room on the right. Through the opening I had pushed open with my own hand, taking the risk, I saw a mass of white-gray hair above a swollen face, flanked by two other faces just as disfigured and concealed, so that it was impossible to make out their owners' true features.

These three were the smuggling merchants. But what exactly was their "heinous" crime?

I asked one of them: are you dollar smugglers, who put the safety of the national economy at risk?

He said: what dollars, professor? I'm a grocer in Bab Musalla. They found a sack of sugar in my shop. Since that day, my two brothers and I have been interrogated and beaten and shuffled like kittens from one detention center to another, until we finally ended up before the martial-law governor.

I closed the opening in the curtain, to spare myself and them any further trouble.

I gave myself over to deep thought, only to find that my own mind had stopped working, had lost all capacity for it.

But I remembered what the Italian chicken thief once said to the presiding judge: poor Italy!

As for the secret of the second room, which no one but a civilian security officer was ever allowed to open, a sergeant of the military police revealed it to us. He said: they are two Jewish women who had been out boating with one of their fiancés on Lake Tiberias, and their boat had drifted to the eastern shore of the lake, and they fell into the hands of our own troops stationed there.

We understood then the reason for all the attention given them: they were prisoners of war, and our own wise government wished to apply to them the Geneva Convention concerning prisoners of war, with all the good treatment it prescribes.

So much so that our man in charge would, every Thursday evening, have the corridor cleared of us and our own room doors locked, so that he could quietly bring in the third prisoner, the fiancé, to his beloved's room, then stand at the door waiting out the full hour of his "visit."

A kind of weary envy took hold of us. We were grateful, in a way, that our government held so firmly to international law and treaty, for the benefit of Jewish prisoners of war, even as we, its own citizens, wished that this same government would read what rights the constitution grants its citizens, and what the law itself says about their treatment when held in detention.

But "the one-eyed daughter of the house" draws no suitor's interest of her own.

We finally found rest, and so did the guards, on the day we woke to find the door of the two Jewish women's room standing open, with no one left inside.

The Red Cross had intervened on behalf of "the Jewish prisoners." As for "us," we remained orphans at God's own door.

5. Grains of Sand at the Prison Door

When the coup of the eighth of March took place, the new authority arrested the journalists of the secessionist era, those who had sold themselves to the devil.

It is true that the union had wounded them, when it bought up their papers and shut them down, but it had also protected the dignity of ordinary citizens whom these same journalists used to terrorize and extort.

They had never been sharper of tongue than when attacking "the Nasserists" and Abdel Nasser himself, at which point every moral value and legal consideration was dragged through the mud.

We bore their obscenities with the patience of Job and the endurance of camels.

Among those who fell into the new authority's hands was Mr. Izzat Hasriyeh, owner of the newspaper Al-Ilm. Mr. Hasriyeh had been a secessionist like the rest of the journalists, whether out of genuine conviction in what he wrote against the union, or out of currying favor with the secessionist authority so that it would let him keep publishing his paper within the narrow circle he never aspired to expand beyond.

He differed from the other "professor-owners of newspapers," though, in that he was, for the most part, the one who wrote his own paper's content, set its type by hand in his own small print shop, and printed it in small numbers, occasionally with the help of a single assistant, usually a brother or a son.

For this reason he refused to extend his hand for aid from any joint-stock company or business concern, or to accept an "Eid gift" envelope from the prime minister.

This much I can personally attest to.

Each Eid, I would be the one to pass along the Eid gifts for the various professors to the prime minister, and they would come to greet the president, drink the bitter coffee, then rise to bid him farewell and shake his hand, at which point he would hand them the "usual" envelope, and they would smile and wish him "victory" in return.

It happened once that Mr. Hasriyeh drank the bitter coffee and left the president's office, and was handed the customary envelope on his way out, apparently without realizing what it was. When he opened it in the hall and found the "known allotment" inside, he turned right back on his heels and returned the envelope to the president, apologizing that he had not known what it contained, and that he could not allow himself to reach for gifts of this kind.

This is what President Sabri al-Asali himself told me, praising the conduct of this poor journalist. Mr. Hasriyeh was a man of limited education and limited means, but what became known of him was that he never extended his hand toward the East or the West, and was never counted as beholden to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Jordan.

He took his own pleasure simply in having a newspaper that bore his name, and in putting it out by his own toil and effort. And to his further credit, he never harmed a single soul. He never slandered or insulted anyone, nor did he hint at or openly allege wrongdoing against any citizen.

He was a man of sound character, blessed by God with a permanent smile and a warmth that never left him. He was arrested along with the other newspaper owners, though he differed from all of them in every respect except his support for the secession.

He was brought to the same wing we had been transferred to from the military hospital, before we ourselves were moved there.

Detention weighed heavily on him, to the point of real psychological strain. The wing's director told me that he ate little, spoke to almost no one, and read the Noble Quran constantly.

One time he asked the corporal on duty to bring him a handful of sand, for a need of his own, and the corporal obliged. Mr. Hasriyeh then devoted himself to reciting Surah Yasin, over and over, and each time he finished a full recitation, he would drop a single grain of sand into a tin cup of water, the kind allowed into the detention wards.

Once a hundred grains had gathered, he would slip past the sleeping men, tiptoe to the door of the ward, and scatter the sand from the cup across it, then return to his sleep or to his recitation.

The sergeant watched him for days, then finally asked him about it, and Hasriyeh admitted that he was convinced Surah Yasin would relieve his distress and open the door of freedom for him, since his own confinement here had grown unbearable to him.

After he had scattered the sand ten times, a hundred grains each time, he was called to gather his things "for an important meeting." He bid his fellow prisoners farewell, a broad grin filling his face, and walked out proud of what his own recitation of Surah Yasin had secured for him. He left together with the other journalists, some of whom believed in no recitation and no principle at all.

What I witnessed with my own eyes in this same wing was a brigadier general who would sit for long stretches beside the sergeant, murmuring with him at length. The day would end and night would fall, and the sergeant would go home, replaced by another man on night duty over the wing's safety, and when he returned the next day or the day after, the brigadier would come back for another of his long sittings with him.

Once I sat down beside the brigadier as he was whispering some "important" matter into the sergeant's ear, and asked his leave to join in, since I too "see dreams and nightmares" and would like to know their meaning.

The brigadier was recounting a dream of his to the sergeant, and paying him a small sum to go to the tomb of the Prophet Zechariah in the Umayyad Mosque and seek out a sheikh known for interpreting dreams.

The sergeant would come back with the interpretation, and it was usually reassuring, though it never brought the brigadier any practical benefit whatsoever.

I felt for him once when I saw him in a state of real anxiety. It seemed the "sheikh" had not been kind or gentle with him this time, and I could sense that the world had gone dark before his eyes.

I set about easing his worries, casting doubt on the whole notion that dream interpretation held any truth, since God, who created man from a clinging clot and wrote out his good and his evil, said in His own perfect Book: "a confused jumble of dreams." Modern science, too, has confirmed that dreams truly are nothing but a confused jumble.

The contemporary Jewish physician Freud built himself worldwide fame from his invention of what came to be known as "psychoanalysis," yet his own interpretations have come under fierce criticism, and have been torn apart in our own time.

A single dream was once put before three of the most celebrated "psychoanalysts" in Britain and Germany, and before Freud himself, and each one of them interpreted that same dream in a way wildly different from the interpretation of his two colleagues.

I recall a friend of mine who used to tell me, and still does, that whatever he sees in a dream comes true by morning, a conviction he lives by and shares with no one but his own wife.

My own conviction remains that whatever the sleeper sees in his dream is nothing more than what the Quran itself calls it: "A conglomeration of false dreams, and we are not learned in the interpretation of dreams."

God has spoken the truth, and the astrologers have lied.