In the field of evolutionary immunology, “it is important to recognize that every organism living today has an immune system that has evolved to be absolutely capable of protecting it from most forms of harm; those organisms that did not adapt their immune systems to external threats are no longer around to be observed.”
His story begins on March 5th, 1984, an ordinary Damascus morning. He was on route to university, where he was a second year electrical engineer student. He decided that morning he would read Ahmad Shawqi’s play, The Death of Cleopatra, on his two hour bus commute from al-Mezzeh to the university. He also brought his small English dictionary to study during the often boring lectures. At his destination, he saw a double line of students waiting to be searched before entering the building. He thought, “I feel sorry for the guy who is going to be taken.” He knew the lines meant the mukhabarat were looking for someone specific. After passing through the doors, someone called him by name, he turned, and a man said, “We need you for five minutes.” He felt “his heart drop to his feet.” After a few hours of waiting and interrogation, he was blindfolded and placed in a car. He thought he was on his way to General Intelligence in Kafar Souseh, outside Damascus, but he wasn’t. Instead, the car took a cross-country detour to a prison in his home town, Hama.
He would disappear for the next twelve years, touring the depths of Assad’s dungeons, in Hama, Tadmor, and Sayd Naya. Bara Sarraj was twenty-one years old.
Bara and I are both Syrian, but we may as well have been from different planets. When we first met, there was an unspoken, suspended disbelief between us. Nothing but the revolution could have joined us. It is one of the positive outcomes of this bloody uprising: the mixing of forces which never knew of each others’ existence. Bara’s thin, kind face is permanently marked with traces of fatigue. It’s no wonder; he didn’t sleep well for twelve years, in addition to his insomnia during the last nine months. He is known in Twitterworld as @Tadmor_Harvard. His 1,849 followers address him with a respectful Doctor Bara. To me, he is simply Bara, and to him, I am “ukhti,” his sister.
In Syria, we all know there are people in jail for nothing but their dissident thoughts, and sometimes for nothing at all. Bara is an anomaly, the story of survival, the one who emerged intact, determined not to allow his prison story to define him or to limit his future. But he is literally one in tens of thousands. The less fortunate ones, when (or if) released, are banished to the margins of society that must be as lonely as the corners of their prison cells.
Although Bara is from Hama, when he talks about the 1982 massacre, he is not as moved as the rest of us who speak of “the events” in dramatic whispers. He says, “Many died, thousands died, but the dead are dead. What about the rest of us, the living, the ones who were forgotten? Who was there to defend us?”
During his first year in prison, Bara kept a list of names, dates, and events in his mind, preparing a detailed account to tell his mother when he was released. When the first year passed and he wasn’t released, and the second year seamlessly turned into a third, he began reciting the lengthening list to himself, so he wouldn’t forget. After his release in 1995, he lived in Damascus for a year before coming to America. He didn’t dare write a word then, because he constantly feared a surprise visit from the mukhabarat. In America, Bara wanted to start a new life, far from prison and its traumatic memories, but in 2000, after graduating from the University of Illinois, he realized if he didn’t write everything he had memorized, the list would be gone forever. In one month, he documented it all, forty pages of the essential facts, and filed it away. He left out his personal experience because, as he says, “those details are my life, and that will never be erased from my memory.” I think the details were too painful to write; he could never get past a few pages before giving up. This year, his walls of repression broke down and the memories finally flowed.
Bara opened his Twitter account on his birthday, February 2nd, to follow the Egyptian Revolution. His first tweet: “I wish our Egyptian brothers will forgive Mubarak.” He explains, “I wanted to see the presidents leave the way the American presidents leave, peacefully. I wished we had that, but then I erased it because it is an impossible wish when you see what Mubarak did and what Assad does. How can I ask the Egyptians to forgive Mubarak and I cannot forgive Assad?”
Immunology is a science but philosophically, it is rooted in protecting the most basic human need: shelter. From birth, after leaving our first home, the sealed womb, humans continuously seek for protection against the harms of the world: disease, climate, the environment, and sometimes, ruthless dictators.
He began his memoir, From Tadmor to Harvard, on March 25th. After sixteen years of silence, he thought no one would ever care about his story. But as he heard stories of a new Syrian generation of detained young men and women, his own story began to haunt him once more. Twitter was the perfect medium to communicate the trauma of memory. Bara tweeted his story in bite-sized sentences which reflected the pain of releasing the details. His loyal followers were hooked and encouraged him to continue the story. He finished the book in just over two months, on June 6th, his 27th anniversary of entering prison.
Bara's Tadmor and Harvard IDs
From Tadmor to Harvard, is a journey through the dark
underbelly of Syrian society, the prisons and the torture cells that
were essential to make the upper world run smoothly, both interdependent
machines of fear. He frames his memoir as a universal story, “one of
thousands of prisoners of conscience who were arrested by the hands of
those with no conscience, in any country where the citizen is worthless,
including Syria.”
While he experienced several of Assad’s prisons, the most horrific was Tadmor. The city of Tadmor or Palmyra, is the jewel of ancient Syria. An archeological treasure, Palmyra is Syria’s prized tourist attraction: an authentic site of Roman ruins set within an authentic Arabian desert landscape. This isolated location, far from the cities and population became home to Tadmor, the prison, where thousands of political prisoners were tortured and executed. On June 27, 1980, Rifaat al-Assad ordered the execution of a thousand prisoners in one day. (This is a very conservative number, it may have been up to four thousand. It also took two weeks to clean the prison from the bloody aftermath.) When a prisoner entered Tadmor, it was unlikely he would leave undamaged, or even alive. According to Bara, Tadmor is a synonym for fear, in all of its definitions: terror, horror, panic, dread. “Language cannot describe it. Fear is the internal sensation when you physically feel your heart between your feet and not in your chest; fear is the look on people’s faces, and their darting eyes when the time for the torture sessions comes near.” Bara learned to be first in line to go to the torture cell, because “the fear was worse than the pain.”
He is still haunted by the sounds: creaking doors, rattling keys, gunshots, the dreaded shuffling of heavy feet in the corridor, the sound of torture, the sound of screams. Tadmor, was “the symphony of fear.”
His account describes the tools of torture in detail like, the dreaded dulaab, a car tire used to fold the prisoners’ bodies into human contortions while suffering intense beatings with the kirbaaj, a one meter long rubber belt, embedded with metal pieces, used for fixing tank wheels, that dug into their flesh and scarred their bodies, or the technique of hanging prisoners from their wrists for hours, or beatings while being forced to write their confessions of treason against the country, or the falqa, the continuous whipping of the soles of their feet. After enduring a falqa session, they would hop on their damaged feet to combat the swelling. If they were able to, then the pain would only last two weeks, but if they didn’t, the skin would crack and break open, leading to pain that would last for months. Most times, torture sessions would end when the prisoner lost consciousness and would be dragged by the guards back to the cell. The prisoners learned to differentiate how their friends were being tortured by their screams. Every time the door of the cell opened, someone suffered a beating, to bring in food, to take out empty trays, to go to “recess” in the courtyard. The door of the cell was terror itself, a continuous breach to their immunity.
Bara demonstrates dulaab technique at a Walmart.
While he experienced several of Assad’s prisons, the most horrific was Tadmor. The city of Tadmor or Palmyra, is the jewel of ancient Syria. An archeological treasure, Palmyra is Syria’s prized tourist attraction: an authentic site of Roman ruins set within an authentic Arabian desert landscape. This isolated location, far from the cities and population became home to Tadmor, the prison, where thousands of political prisoners were tortured and executed. On June 27, 1980, Rifaat al-Assad ordered the execution of a thousand prisoners in one day. (This is a very conservative number, it may have been up to four thousand. It also took two weeks to clean the prison from the bloody aftermath.) When a prisoner entered Tadmor, it was unlikely he would leave undamaged, or even alive. According to Bara, Tadmor is a synonym for fear, in all of its definitions: terror, horror, panic, dread. “Language cannot describe it. Fear is the internal sensation when you physically feel your heart between your feet and not in your chest; fear is the look on people’s faces, and their darting eyes when the time for the torture sessions comes near.” Bara learned to be first in line to go to the torture cell, because “the fear was worse than the pain.”
He is still haunted by the sounds: creaking doors, rattling keys, gunshots, the dreaded shuffling of heavy feet in the corridor, the sound of torture, the sound of screams. Tadmor, was “the symphony of fear.”
His account describes the tools of torture in detail like, the dreaded dulaab, a car tire used to fold the prisoners’ bodies into human contortions while suffering intense beatings with the kirbaaj, a one meter long rubber belt, embedded with metal pieces, used for fixing tank wheels, that dug into their flesh and scarred their bodies, or the technique of hanging prisoners from their wrists for hours, or beatings while being forced to write their confessions of treason against the country, or the falqa, the continuous whipping of the soles of their feet. After enduring a falqa session, they would hop on their damaged feet to combat the swelling. If they were able to, then the pain would only last two weeks, but if they didn’t, the skin would crack and break open, leading to pain that would last for months. Most times, torture sessions would end when the prisoner lost consciousness and would be dragged by the guards back to the cell. The prisoners learned to differentiate how their friends were being tortured by their screams. Every time the door of the cell opened, someone suffered a beating, to bring in food, to take out empty trays, to go to “recess” in the courtyard. The door of the cell was terror itself, a continuous breach to their immunity.
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