Prison Memoirs of Azam Haj Heydari from the book The Price of Being Human — Part Nine
In this ninth installment of the prison memoirs of Azam Haj Heydari, published in The Price of Being Human, the author writes about the extraordinary spirit of her fellow PMOI women, their resistance under brutal torture, and the hunger strike in Evin Prison.
At the time, Azam was a young teacher in her early twenties who had entered the path of resistance. She spent five years imprisoned in the Temporary Judiciary Detention Center, Evin, Qezel Hesar, and Gohardasht prisons, where she endured savage torture at the hands of Khomeini’s Guards.
Resisting Savage Torture
One day the ward door opened and another new prisoner was brought in. She could barely walk, bent over from the severity of the torture she had endured.
She was a tall, dark-complexioned young woman with a worn face, yet there was something strikingly kind and compelling about her. I was drawn to her immediately.
I went over to her. Her legs were in terrible condition.
“Would you like some help?” I asked.
She looked at me and smiled.
Her face seemed familiar, but I could not place her.
“Azam, don’t you recognize me?” she asked.
I felt embarrassed. She knew me, but I did not recognize her.
She smiled again and said kindly, “It’s Sima. Have you forgotten? I can’t blame you. My face has changed, but I’m still the same person.”
She mentioned a few occasions when we had worked together in the Association of Teachers Supporting the PMOI.
Suddenly I recognized her.
“Sima? Is that really you? You’ve changed so much!”
It was Sima Hakim Ma’ani.[1] In the span of a single year, she looked as though she had aged more than ten years.
Before June 20, 1981, we had worked together extensively. Sima was the only child of a relatively well-off and educated family. She lacked nothing in life, yet she chose the path of struggle and remained steadfast until the very end.
Her legs were in terrible condition. Her wounds had become infected, and the infection had spread into her bloodstream. As punishment for her refusal to surrender, the executioners deliberately denied her medical treatment.
The pain and torture had caused her to lose twenty kilograms. She was extremely weak and moved around in a wheelchair. Yet even in that condition she could not sit idle for a moment.
Through relentless effort, and with the help of the other prisoners, she managed to regain some use of one of her arms so she could perform certain daily tasks herself.
Whenever the others urged her to rest, she refused.
“I don’t have much time,” she would say. “There isn’t much time left.”
In the end, they sent her before a firing squad in that same condition.
Another of these remarkable women was Shahrbanu Ghorbani.[2] The executioners tortured her with such fury and hatred that no one could recognize her face when she arrived in the ward. Her appearance shocked everyone.
Looking at what Shahrbanu had endured, I came to understand how precious and powerful human ideals truly are. Only something of immense value could give a person such limitless strength to withstand torture and make such a terrible struggle bearable.
Three days later they removed Shahrbanu from the ward.
I never saw her again.
About a year later I heard that she had been executed, though I never learned where or under what circumstances.
Standing Against the Collaborators
After some time, I and several other prisoners were transferred to another ward.
When I arrived, I was delighted to discover that I knew many of the women there.
Most had previously been taken away under the pretext of interrogation or accused of maintaining their political stance or organizational ties. We had lost all news of them. As I walked through the ward and saw them alive before me, my sadness at leaving my former friends disappeared completely.
I had believed many of them had already been executed.
Seeing them alive felt like being handed the world.
Among them were Parvin Haeri, Maryam Golzadeh Ghafouri, Homa Radmanesh, Azam Taqdareh, and many others.
All of them had the death sentence, and the regime eventually executed every one of them.
Perhaps the authorities had gathered them together in one ward in hopes of breaking them psychologically while they awaited execution.
That plan failed as well.
Not one of them surrendered.
All were eventually executed.
Parvin Haeri was known throughout the prison for the way she carried herself—with strength, dignity, and unshakable resolve—as well as for her extraordinary resistance. Both the collaborators and the interrogators knew exactly who she was and what she represented.
Because of her tall stature and remarkable strength, the prisoners had given her the nickname “The Colonel.”
The informers and collaborators visibly bristled whenever anyone referred to her by that title.
Houriyeh Beheshti-Tabar held a master’s degree in economics. She taught economics to the other prisoners with remarkable enthusiasm and dedication and never allowed prison time to be wasted.
Her efforts earned the hatred of the prison authorities.
Every encounter between Houriyeh and the executioners ended with insults and abuse. Their hostility was proof of how valuable her work was.
Everyone loved Houriyeh.
She was around forty-five years old at the time. Her eyesight was extremely poor, requiring glasses with a prescription of eight or ten diopters.
The executioners, the ward Guards, and the collaborators repeatedly tried to break her with vulgar insults rooted in the reactionary culture they embraced.
On at least two occasions they accused her of fabricated and degrading moral offenses and flogged her on a bench in front of her fellow prisoners. The painful details of those scenes deserve a story of their own.
Another hero was Homa Radmanesh.
The executioners could barely tolerate the sight of her.
She was physically frail, probably weighing no more than forty-five kilograms, yet she possessed extraordinary strength, dignity, patience, and love for every prisoner around her.
You never saw sadness or defeat on her face.
That alone filled the regime’s agents with resentment.
They would accuse her of secretly encouraging resistance among the prisoners.
In truth, they were right.
Simply having Homa Radmanesh in a ward inspired others to remain steadfast.
From the moment I arrived in this ward, we were constantly in conflict with the collaborators assigned to it.
We protested their presence and demanded to know why they had been placed among us.
“We are prisoners,” we argued. “If there are issues to address, we will deal directly with the Guards and prison officials—not with collaborators.”
The regime, however, wanted to place collaborators between us and the authorities. That way it could hide behind them and claim that the prisoners were merely fighting among themselves.
To protest this policy, we launched a hunger strike that later became known as the Thirteen-Day Hunger Strike in Evin.
The strike began when the collaborators brought food to distribute.
We refused to accept it.
“We do not recognize them,” we said.
The food remained untouched in the pots until the next day, when it was removed and replaced by a new batch.
The standoff continued.
The collaborators attacked and beat us, backed by the Guards and prison officials.
Each day they left food at the entrance to the ward and departed.
Each day we refused both food and tea and ignored all demands.
The hunger strike continued for thirteen days.
Some prisoners, especially Homa, became dangerously weak.
Unable to break the strike, the executioners eventually transferred seventeen of the prisoners to another ward.
At first, they were taken to the Evin infirmary ward.
About two weeks later, they were transferred again to a different section of the prison.
To be continued…
[1] Sima Hakim Ma’ani was a 24-year-old economics student and an employee of Iran’s Ministry of Oil.
On December 1, 1981, she was identified by a collaborator and arrested by an Evin Prison strike-force patrol. She was subjected to brutal torture and was executed by firing squad on March 10, 1982.
[2] Shahrbanu Ghorbani, born in Semnan, was a natural sciences student. She was executed in Evin Prison on September 20, 1984, at the age of twenty-six.
