Memoirs of Mehri Hajinejad from “The Last Laughter of Leila”— Part Twelve
In the previous part, we followed Mehri Hajinejad through the tightening fear inside the prison as threats of exposure grew and she narrowly avoided being identified by a collaborator. In this section, she continues recounting life inside the regime’s prisons during her teenage years. She shares the heartbreaking story of a child in prison who disappeared, never to be found again.
A Child Who Was Never Found
In the autumn of 1982, they brought a young woman named Farzaneh into our cell. She was twenty and from Ramsar. She had been arrested during the regime’s suppressive “Landlord–Tenant Plan.”[1] They had beaten her so badly that her back, waist, and legs had turned a deep eggplant purple from the cable lashes.
At first, I noticed how restless and agitated she was. But according to prison custom, I didn’t ask about her political background. I only asked how many lashes she had received or which interrogation unit she was in. And because of her physical condition and fragile emotional state, I tried to help her however I could. That brought us close.
One day, Farzaneh told me her story:
“Early in the morning I went out to buy bread. When I came back, I saw our house, where my husband and my little boy, Hanif, were, under attack by revolutionary guards.[2] The whole neighborhood was surrounded. I escaped house-to-house, but during the chase I broke my leg. I hid for several months in the home of one of the residents of Ramsar. They knew I was with the PMOI[3] and they sheltered me. The lady of the house even went to check on our place after the attack. The regime’s agents had fired several RPGs into the house and set it on fire. Everyone said whoever was inside had burned to death.
When my leg finally healed, I went to Tehran to reconnect with the Organization, but I was arrested…”
From the way she described it, we all became almost certain that her husband and her three-year-old son had been killed in the attack.
In the winter of 1982, another woman named Shahin was transferred from Ward 246 to ours. One day, as we sat talking about little Ali, the brilliant toddler who had once been in our ward, Shahin said, “We had a three-year-old boy in Ward 246 for a short time, too. His name was Hanif, he had blond hair, and he paced back and forth like a grown man, thinking all the time…”
As she spoke, Farzaneh’s eyes suddenly lit up. Shocked, she asked:
“When you called him Hamid, would he answer?”
She went on to describe a few more details about her son. Slowly, in utter disbelief, she whispered:
“That means… he’s my child. Hanif is alive!”
And then, from sheer shock, she fainted.
When she came to, she anxiously asked Shahin more questions, terrified that she might be giving herself false hope. But the more she asked, the more certain she became: the boy Shahin had seen was her Hanif.
Sometime later, Farzaneh’s parents came for a visit, and she managed to tell them that Hanif was alive and being held in Evin.
For more than eight months, her parents went to every state and non-state office they could think of, from Montazeri’s office[4] to every possible institution, but everywhere they were turned away. Finally, after spending a large sum of money in the Ramsar courthouse, they found a file. Inside was a recording showing that after the guards burned their home down, Hanif had been taken alive to a sham court.[5] In that recording, they asked him:
“What happened to your mother?”
And little Hanif replied:
“My mother went to buy bread.”
Yet even with this proof, up until 1986, at least to my knowledge, there was never any news of Hanif again. It was as if he had become a drop of water swallowed by the earth.
Prison Inside a Prison
In late winter of 1981, a prisoner returning from interrogation told me she had seen Zahra, a student activist from one of our networks, completely broken under torture and now collaborating with the interrogators. The news was shocking. On one hand, it meant my own file might be exposed. On the other, I wondered what they had done to her to force such cooperation.
Fortunately, she didn’t know my real name or my family name. We met after June 20 when everyone used aliases.[6] By early August she had been transferred elsewhere. All she knew was my face. But if she found out I’d been arrested, I had to assume she’d give the interrogators everything she knew about our activities after June 20.
I discussed the situation with Zahra and Zohreh.
Time passed until, five or six days before Nowruz of 1982, Zohreh burst into our room, out of breath:
“Hosseini is coming with a traitorous woman—I think it’s Zahra—to identify prisoners. They’re headed toward our ward!”
I had only seconds to decide what to do.
Even some of my cellmates still believed I was “nobody,” just an ordinary person who had been a casual supporter back in 1980. Behind us, we had stacked several blankets, what we jokingly called the “sofa.” Zohreh said:
“Lie down under here. We’ll put another stack on top, so it looks like it’s all just blankets.”
They moved fast. I slid beneath, hidden. I could hear everything, but no one knew I was there.
But I had caught a terrible cold and was burning with fever. My coughing fits were nearly impossible to control.
That day, Zahra, the collaborator, came into our ward and checked every room. But hidden under the blankets, I escaped her eyes.
After that, though, I never again had a moment of real peace. Every time I went to interrogation or walked through the ward, I stayed on guard, terrified that Zahra might appear suddenly, see me, and ruin everything.
[1] “Landlord–Tenant Plan” – A repressive campaign by the regime in the early 1980s used as a pretext to raid homes and arrest suspected PMOI supporters.
[2] Revolutionary Guards – Members of the IRGC or prison security forces.
[3] PMOI – People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, the main Iranian opposition movement targeted heavily by the regime.
[4] Montazeri’s office – Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri was once designated successor to Khomeini; his office handled many complaints and cases.
[5] “Sham court” – The regime’s summary courts, often without due process, known among political prisoners as bidadgah. (courts of injustice)
[6] June 20, 1981 – The mass crackdown date when the regime launched a nationwide assault on the PMOI; after that, activists used aliases for safety.