Prison Memoirs of Azam Haj Heydari from the book The Price of Being Human – Part Four
In this installment of Azam Haj Heydari’s prison memoirs, published in The Price of Being Human, the author recounts her confinement in the prison boiler room and later in the Judiciary Prison—spaces deliberately designed to degrade and break prisoners under inhumane conditions.
At the time, Azam was a young teacher in her early twenties who had stepped onto the path of resistance. She spent five years in detention centers and prisons, including the Judiciary Detention Center, Evin, Qezel Hesar, and Gohardasht, where she endured brutal torture at the hands of Khomeini’s Guards.
The Prison Boiler Room
For twenty days, I didn’t even know which prison I was in. They didn’t take me to a regular cell. Instead, they threw me into the prison’s boiler room, a cramped, dark, filthy space unfit even for keeping animals.
It was a tiny chamber crawling with vermin—rats, cockroaches, and other pests—where there was no possibility of basic living. Black, foul-smelling water flowed across the floor. The air was suffocatingly hot. The summer heat of Tehran, combined with the heat, fumes, and smoke from the machinery, made the environment unbearable.
On top of all that, the room was pitch-dark and filled with the constant, deafening roar of engines and equipment. It was a place that stripped away even the smallest possibility of rest. Worst of all, no matter how much I shouted or pounded on the door, no one responded.
In that space, I couldn’t sit, couldn’t lie down, couldn’t even eat. After two days of hunger, they threw some kind of food at me in a filthy, dented tin container. They weren’t feeding me—they were trying to humiliate me, to break me, to force me into submission by treating me like an animal.
I refused to eat. For the entire week I was there, I didn’t touch the food. I survived only by drinking a little water from a tap in the room.
Despite becoming physically weak, I kept repeating to myself: “Enemy of humanity, I will never surrender!” That phrase became my source of strength.
After a week, the interrogators came and took me—blindfolded—to another location for questioning. There, they tried to terrify me into submission. One would grab my arm and say, “Watch out, you’ll fall! Don’t hit the wall! Walk slowly!” Others whispered ominously about the terrible fate awaiting me. They said things like, “Don’t worry, we’ll give you water before your execution,” while blasting the sounds of screams, cries, and tortured prisoners.
“This is the fate of all dissidents,” they said. “But you can still save yourself.”
After a while, I realized that my sister Mahin was being interrogated somewhere nearby. They were demanding information about me—from her—while I was already in their hands.
Transfer to Judiciary Prison: Filth and Disease
After a series of interrogations, I was transferred to the Judiciary Prison cells, which housed ordinary inmates, many arrested for drug-related charges. The environment there was extremely filthy and contaminated.
Within a week, due to the complete lack of hygiene, I developed a severe skin infection and fungal disease. During the twenty days I spent there, we were not taken to showers even once. We had no change of clothes and no access to basic hygiene supplies. We couldn’t even wash the clothes we were wearing. Filth was everywhere.
If one person got sick, the illness quickly spread to others. Skin infections were rampant. My condition became so severe that my legs developed open sores, and I could barely walk. I had to sit all day with my legs stretched out to prevent them from rubbing together and worsening the wounds.
The guards saw my condition, but when I asked for something as basic as soap, they ignored me. Every time I requested even the simplest necessity, they gave the same response:
“First say who you are. Then we’ll decide what to do with you. Maybe we’ll give you something, maybe not. If you’re one of them, you deserve to die. If you’re not, then say so!”
This was their answer to everything.
The Old Woman in the Cell
Our ward, as I mentioned, had previously held ordinary prisoners, but they had been removed before we arrived. Only one woman remained in a cell across from mine.
She had a deeply worn, sorrowful face. She looked seventy or eighty, but she was no more than fifty.
From morning to night, she clung to the bars of her cell, crying. I tried several times to speak with her through the bars—asking why she had been imprisoned—but she didn’t answer. I asked her name—still nothing. She only cried.
Eventually, the sound of her grief broke me too. I found myself crying along with her. She had been abandoned in that cell, completely alone, with no one paying her any attention.
Once a day, a guard would come—not to help her, but to hurl the most degrading insults. “You old hag, stay here until you die,” he would say. “You’ve lived too long already. This is what you deserve—unless you talk!”
After many attempts to reach her, she finally agreed to speak. When I asked what she had done, she said: “My child, no one has believed me—why would you?”
I insisted, and she finally told me: “They’ve accused my son-in-law of theft because he resigned from the committee[1] and supports the opposition. They’ve fabricated a case against him. Now they’re saying I helped him escape and that I know where he is. I’ve been here for four months. He’s in hiding. Every day they insult me—you hear it yourself. They tell me to reveal his whereabouts if I want to be freed.”
She continued: “In these four months, they’ve taken me to the bath only three times. My whole body is infested with lice.”
To be continued…
[1] Committee or Komiteh was an organization founded after the 1979 Revolution that served as substitutes for some of the governmental institutions no longer functioning after the fall of the shah, such as security and police.
