Free The Morning They Came for Us by Janine di Giovanni Page B

tossed in an underground room that served as a morgue. He died alone, Hussein reckons, quietly suffocating or drowning in his own blood. This was the same room in which, from then on, Hussein was thrown every night to sleep after he was tortured: on top of the dead bodies.
    But he never slept, of course, lying on top of mostly corpses. Some of them were not yet dead. Hussein described how he would lie awake, listening to people breathing their last breaths. One night they tossed him on top of a body and when he turned his head, he saw his dead brother.
    On his first day in captivity, Hussein’s torturers, who were Syrians, introduced themselves as doctors. There were about four of them, and together they brought him into a room that appeared to be used for operations.
    â€˜Are you a fighter?’
    â€˜No, I’m a student.’
    â€˜Are you a fighter?’
    He insisted: ‘I’m a student. A law student.’
    They held his penis and took a blade and said, ‘OK, cut it off.’
    They pressed the blade into his flesh, enough to draw blood; they then began leaning painfully on his bladder, forcing him to urinate.
    â€˜Why do you want to kill me?’ Hussein asked, terrified and in pain.
    â€˜Because your people are killing us,’ he was told.
    Then they electrocuted him. This went on for three days. Beatings, burnings, cuttings. Then, again, beatings, burnings, cuttings. The worst, he says, was ‘the cutting’.
    â€˜They came for me. I lay down on a table and closed my eyes. I saw them cut my gut with a scalpel. I felt nothing because I think I was still in shock. Then they lifted something out of my body – I felt pulling. It was my intestine. They stretched it. They held it in their hands and laid it on the outside of my body. They made jokes about how much the rebels ate, how much food was inside my intestines. Then they sewed me back up, but in a rough way so that there was skin and blood everywhere.’
    Hussein told me his stomach was ‘open’ for two days before they properly stitched the wound closed.
    The next day the torturers – who must have had medical knowledge – punctured Hussein’s lung. They took a long plastic tube and cut an incision that runs from under his nipple to the middle of his back. They inserted what he described as a small plastic suction tube.
    â€˜I felt the air go out of my lung,’ he said quietly. ‘My right lung had collapsed. I could not breathe.’ *
    But of all the physical misery he suffered, he said the worst for him was the psychological torture – the feeling that he would never get justice, that he was being punished for something that he did not do. Because Hussein was a student of human rights law, he said he felt, above all, betrayed.
    â€˜By whom?’ I asked.
    By Syria, by Syrians, by his government. By his own people, who brought violence to what had started, in March 2011, as a peaceful protest for democracy.
    â€˜We have broken our country,’ he said.
    On and off during the days Hussein was tortured, he was hung upside down, sometimes for up to five hours. The story of his rescue is so unlikely it is almost unbelievable, and yet I met him, alive, broken but healing, in a hospital ward in northern Lebanon, several months after the event.
    He went back in his head to those days of torture. He told me how he was ‘used as a punching bag by nearly everyone that walked by as a way of having fun’. On the fifth day, when it was quiet, a doctor suddenly knelt before him.
    â€˜I am on the side of President Assad, a pro-regime doctor,’ he said quietly to Hussein. ‘My job is to make sure that you are still alive and can sustain more torture. But I can’t watch this any more.’ The doctor touched Hussein’s wrist, taking his pulse.
    â€˜Your heart has technically stopped twice, once for ten seconds and once for fifteen.’ The doctor