Sayragul Sauytbay

January 2017: the first interrogation

Before driving home around eight o'clock, I'd checked all the kindergartens. I was just making myself something to eat in the kitchen when I heard a noise at the front door, then a stampede of approaching footsteps. A moment later, three heavily armed Chinese policemen were blocking my escape route.

For a split second, the room began to spin, my mind raced. They're going to put me in a camp! was certain of it. "Come on," one of the men ardered me. "Where are we going? My voice was as thin as a breaking thread. "You don't need to know. Come with us! I was still holding my phone, but a moment later one of the officers grabbed it off me and handed it to someone else. I didn't have time to change: I was still wearing my blue Party uniform from work. They didn't let me put my coat on or pick up the bag I'd packed for just such an emergency.

Suddenly, everything went dark. They'd slipped a black hood over my head from behind. Outside, they shoved me onto the back seat of their car, and the next moment I was jammed between two armed men. The third was at the wheel. My heart was icy. Are they going to lock me up for good? Will I ever see my children again? What do they want with me? What did I do wrong? The journey took about an hour. When they jerked the hood off my head, I was in a small interrogation room. Where was !? Maybe in a secret police building?

I had no idea. In the middle was a dividing wall made of glass, while two chinese police officers-a man and a woman were seated on the other side. He asked the questions, she jotted everything down. In front of me was a table, and on it a microphone with a button. The questions pelted down."Why did your children and your husband leave for Kazakhstan? Where do they live? What are they doing there?" If I hesitated for even a second, the woman would jump on it instantly. "Why aren't you answering? What kind of devious ulterior motives are going on inside your head? Are you an enemy?

Talk"Endless accusations, barked like orders. "What was the purpose of your family travelling there? I chose my words
but then my children really liked the area, so they decided to stay and go to school. When they realised I was sticking to my story, they tried to find other things to pin on me. "Do you have something against the Chinese education system? Is there something you don't like? your children to school in Kazakhstan?" "No, no, I'm not against anything."

I protested, feeling like a fish squirming on a hook. I didn't want to give them any grounds to bring charges against me.

The two of them kept checking my phone to see who I'd been in contact with. "What is your husband doing in Kazakhstan? Does he have connections to any political organisations there? What enemies of China is he working for?" The man kept reformulating the same questions. "He went to Kazakhstan with the purpose of working with some kind of separatist organisation, didn't he? You can't pull the waal over our eyes. We know everything, we have people everywhere, including in Kazakhstan."

I responded truthfully. "I don't know!" Gradually, however, my temper got the better of me, and I lost my cool. "If you know everything, and you can do all these things, then you can find out for yourself!" Eventually, they gave me explicit instructions to bring Uali and the children back. "Your husband has been a Farty member since 2007. He's a traitor. You should divorce him," they told me. "He has to come back and hand in his papers."

After that, my family would never be allowed to leave the country again The interrogation lasted four hours. Then they put the hood back over my head and pushed me back into the car. On the journey back, the man next to me growled, "You will tell no one about this interrogation Understood?" "Yes," I heard myself reply. At one o'clock in the morning, they finally dropped me back home. Standing in the hallway, I was gasping for breath like I'd just run a marathon.

I was filled with disgust. For years, I'd spent every day working for the Party and the government, slaving away and kowtowing morning, noon and night; I'd done everything they asked, to the best of my ability; I'd never put a single foot wrong. Yet the Party was treating me like dirt. Why? What was the point of all this? I hurled my jacket onto the floor.

There was worse in store for me, I knew. I could sense the fiery rage in my heart turning into all-consuming hatred, so I pulled out the photo of my father and sat down on my bed, confiding all my troubles and listening to his advice. Never lose faith in the future. The most important thing is that you're still alive. You'll see, there are better times ahead. Keep your chin up! I could either give up and die, or fight -- and maybe survive. From then on, I went to bed every night fully clothed.

By the end of that year, they'd hauled me in another seven or eight times. Every morning when I woke up at home in my bed, I thanked God I was still alive.

A year of psychological terrorism

In March 2017, the CCP made Xi Jinping - "chosen by history-president for life. In doing so, they elevated him to the blood-stained throne formerly occupied by Mao. There was no one in the country as powerful. xi, then sixty-three years old, acted the part of the kindly, self-sacrificing yet strict father in propaganda, while the Party was the caring mother. Meanwhile the indigenous population was shown no mercy.

The night-time interrogations always followed the same pattern Suddenly, I would find myself surrounded by police - in the bathroom, the corridor, the living room, around my bed. The hood would already be over my head. Only the interrogation rooms and the faces of the officers were different every time.

Sometimes there was only one person grilling me. When there were two of them, however, one would usually stand next to me, watching while the other asked the questions. Those men were sinister. Terrifying. My mouth was dry and my heart raced, shallow and rapid. They enjoyed watching me tremble. During one of these interrogations, they hit me. On the head and in the face. As hard as they could. And not just once. I didn't let them see how much it hurt, but eventually the tears came of their own accord. Each time I would crawl back out from under the table, straighten my back, and take my seat.

"Are you still in touch with your family in Kazakhstan?" or "Did you tell them to come back yet?" "How can I do that? We're forbidden to contact them ..." They were bellowing at me so loudly all the time that I barely dared to raise my voice above a whisper. Then they started beating me again until my cheeks were swollen. I kept howling back, "How should I know what they're doing?" Soon I was back under the table. "You've got to get them back immediately!" Next time, they were bitterly angry with me. "Did you know your husband and children have received Kazakhstani citizenship?"

I was genuinely surprised. "No, that's news to me. And although I was afraid, at that moment I was inwardly elated. At least my loved ones are safe, I thought. The Party can't do anything to hurt them now. The officers started berating me again. "Be honest: you knew, didn't you?

They probably assumed that the ceaseless interrogations would grind me down, like grain beneath a millstone. That as soon as I got back, I'd find some way to contact Uali and beg him to come home - that I couldn't stand being terrorised any longer. Later, they would force prisoners like me to call their relatives living abroad during interrogations and feed them lies to lure them back to East Turkestan. Things like: "Come home quickly, your mother is seriously ill."
In China, family is a common means of gaining leverage.

They will threaten students, pensioners, or even relatives who have been living abroad for decades: "If you don't come back now and de-register properly, your parents or your sisters back home will end up in jail." But anyone who does return to protect their relatives from harm soon finds themselves in handcuffs. I realised now that I was being held in Xinjiang as a hostage. At all the interrogations they asked me similar questions. It was clear they'd discovered where and how my husband and the children were living. "You know all about this, you're just lying! Do you think we're idiots? Why don't you tell us the truth?"

A few hours later, the police car dropped me off outside my front door. Before I got out, they gave me back my phone. When I switched it on in the apartment, I saw I had seventy missed calls from my mother. "Why haven't you got in touch? Where are you? I'm so worried! Please call mer All of them had come in during the last interrogation My mother had to wait until midnight before I finally called back. "Where have you been all this time?

I kept calling, but you didn't pick up. Has something happened? Her voice sounded so anxious that my heart ached more than my bruised body. I had told no one about those night-time interrogations. Yet my mother sensed something wasn't right. "What happened, my child?" Trying not to upset her, I spoke gently. "Everything is fine. I just had to work at the kindergarten tonight.

And I forgot my phone at home. I'm sorry it's so late, but I only just got home." Her voice sounded different than before, as though something inside her had broken. "Go to sleep, my child. Relax! You need to rest."

June 2017: secret meetings

The most senior positions in East Turkestan were occupied by Chinese, and they were endlessly legislating to forbid more and more things. We were crushed under the weight of all these prohibitions. It was like a landslide, squeezing and smothering us until we were gasping frantically for air, unable to move so much as a finger on our own.

I sat bolt upright in the auditorium among the other head teachers I knew from Aksu, listening to the unbearable. Nobody was allowed to share religious content, such as Koran verses, via their mobile phone. Tibet and Taiwan were taboo from now on."official documents must be handed over to the relevant office in person, not via computer or telephone," they informed us. That made it easier for them to cover their tracks. "If we catch any of your staff doing any of these things in future, we will hold you responsible," they warned us menacingly.

Inappropriate behaviour on the part of our employees was to be reported immediately. It was unmistakeable: they were telling us to denounce them. Like my other colleagues in senior roles, I never denounced anybody. Instead, I'd warn them in secret. "Watch what you say! Don't talk about Tibet anymore, or you'll get us all into big trouble."

Again and again, we saw the Party dredge up ancient history to paint people as traitors to their country. Between 1988 and 2000, there had been a brief wave of religious freedom, and many mosques had been built. Countless individuals had donated money or a piece of jewellery, helped out with construction, or given a lamb to the workmen. "You will find out who was involved," they instructed us. Seventeen years later, we were being ordered to question hundreds of employees about their participation Their instructions can be roughly summarised in three steps.

First: Ask nicely. Second: If the person insists they are innocent, force them to disclose information about another colleague. Third: If the person isn't willing to speak, pretend you have official evidence against them.

Preparing my evening meal at the table that night, I found myself muttering agitatedly out loud. "How pointless! How unnecessary." I noticed too late that I had chopped the peppers and potatoes virtually into pulp. It wasn't until much later that I understood why they were doing all this.

Diligent as honeybees, they were gathering justifications to put indigenous people in camps. This way they always had a reason for imprisoning someone behind those silent concrete walls. Only, the reasons were as random as they were insane. Muslims weren't innocent until proven guilty anymore: soon it was the other way around.

Propped up on my elbow at my desk, my chin resting in my hand, I rapidly took stock of the situation. All my older employees were bound to have donated something or been involved somehow. How could I warn them without my chinese colleagues getting wind of it?

Noticing a truck drive into the courtyard with a large delivery of medical supplies, I was struck by an idea: moments later, I was rushing downstairs to round up the people I was worried about
"You need to help me unload the truck. We had already come up with a secret code for emergencies so that our Chinese colleagues wouldn't immediately figure out what was going on. If you wanted to warn someone, for instance, you said, "The weather's turning cold tomorrow."Occasionally, we also exchanged secret notes, which we used to pass on brief or coded messages. "This all needs to go to the basement." I told my teachers, because I knew they hadn't installed cameras in there yet.

As we unpacked weighing scales, eye tests, and measuring devices and put them on the shelves, I hastily brought my colleagues up to speed. "I'll tell the authorities that none of you were involved in the fundraising," I explained. If the Chinese interrogator tried to pretend that I had given them their name, they shouldn't believe them. I clasped my hands pleadingly. "Don't confess anything or we'll all be taken away. Permanently."

Three days later, I and the other head teachers handed in blank lists to the authorities. The next morning, we were all given a warning and told to investigate more closely. Again, we didn't offer up any names. Straightaway, we were summoned to another meeting. "You're all liars!" one of our bosses harangued us. "We know exactly who supported building the mosques. The imams gave us a list of donors. You're going to have one last chance to give us the names yourselves!"
As we left, they issued a final warning: "Lie again, and you'll be arrested." This time, they only gave us one day.

That night, I sat at my kitchen table for ages, thinking. I'd known my older employees for years; some were close friends. If I denounce them and put their names on the list to save myself, what will be left of me as a human being? I wondered. The next morning, I submitted a blank list. Again, they gathered all the head teachers and brandished the pieces of paper in front of us. "A commission will begin investigating tomorrow. And woe betide anyone who's lying..."
Next morning, there was a long queue outside the offices of the education authority, and I joined the others at the back. Everybody was holding a list. When I noticed that some of them actually contained a few names, I whispered, "What are you doing?" They defended themselves, hissing back softly, "Didn't you hear? They know the names anyway. If we deny it, we'll end up in prison ourselves.

Speaking under my breath, but still sharply, I shot back, "oh really, they've got lists? Seventeen years ago there weren't any detailed computer records, and the imams would have got rid of the handwritten lists ages ago. The ones who actually collected the donations would either be dead by now or have moved away. It's an empty threat Gradually, the mood changed. People in the queue started discussing it among themselves. "She's probably right." And: "We're such idiots.

They went straight back to their schools and drew up new lists. Without any names. If a commission did come, we decided we would all stick to the same story: "We're innocent. If you have any proof, please show us." In the end, it turned out there had never been any such list of donors. But they arrested the people anyway
According to the data in the China Cables, 15,683 people in East Turkestan were interned within a single week.

Worse than a mental hospital

"All these measures have been put in place because of the risk of a terrorist attack,"our bosses told us. Sometimes my staff and I had to spend several nights in a row at school so we could be available at any time.

All night long, Chinese inspectors in yellow body armour swarmed through the building like a feral swarm of wasps, searching. If one of them showed up at the office and couldn't find the person they wanted to speak to, that was reason enough to march them off for "refusing to work. The stress was indescribable.

busy in the surveillance room, keeping a twenty-four-hour watch on CCTV footage of the whole area. Other than their colleagues with truncheons, they never saw anyone. Every two to As a head teacher, it was my job to supervise the whole process.

Occasionally, party officials would allow us a few hours' sleep, and we set up a guard room with about five cats for this purpose. Some of the teachers on guard duty ended up so exhausted that they nodded off where they stood. Suddenly, however, the "yellowjackets" would pounce on them, screeching, "What are you doing? You're on duty! Take him to the camp."

If one of my colleagues gave into the call of nature while one of the inspectors happened to be looking for him, they'd start demanding, "Where is he? Why's he sitting on the toilet when he's supposed to be on guard duty? He's defying the state!" Then they'd grab him on both sides and drag him off to the camps as a subversive.

Crazy, isn't it? My main office was situated in the largest kindergarten the other four buildings were smaller, located three or four kilometres apart. I stayed there until midday preoccupied with bureaucratic red tape and paperwork, and then I'd hop in the car and drive from one kindergarten to the next, checking that everything was in order.

It was like I was doing endless laps around a roundabout, never reaching my goal. Some of my teachers had to take up position outside the entrance at 7.00 am, standing ramrad-straight like guards outside the Queen of England's palace, wearing helmets and holding their truncheons in front of their chests while the children streamed into the building. other members of staff were on the street, brandishing their truncheons at cars and mopeds. "Where are you going? What are you up to? Turn back around!"

No sooner were all the children in the building than our guards would hurry in after them, scrambling to take off their gear as soon as possible and reappear at the front of the classroom on time, now in the guise of teachers. As soon as the bell rang, they dashed off again, picked up their helmets and sticks, and kept watch in the schoolyard. Soon they weren't sure whether they were teachers or soldiers. Did we even have time for lessons anymore? We were all so incredibly confused.
In a system like that, the only thing that gets you through is tunnel vision. You have to be under strict control at all time, carefully monitoring others to make sure they're conforming, too. Lack of sleep ground us down relentlessly.

Many people got sick. We weren't even allowed to eat in peace. My teachers ordered fast food, and would spend their shifts on guard duty snacking on bags of chips. This, too, was grounds for arrest. "We don't care if you're on a break," the inspectors lambasted their victims, or if you're sick or tired. When we're there, you've got to do your jobs." Life at school was worse than in a mental hospital.

If the higher-ups did give me a break, i'd run home for two or three hours, shower, change, and rush back. The CCP turned us into compliant, obedient drones. We accepted their orders. If they told us something was wrong, then we simply took that at face value, even if the order was rescinded the next day. We were absolutely under their control, thoroughly manipulated and unable to think for ourselves. We were puppets. How did I cope for so long? First, I'm not the kind of person who's easily steamrolled. Second, despite the wretchedness of the situation, I never stopped hoping that I would one day get my passport back - that I'd one day see my children and my husband again.

The final nail: physical control

If anyone had assumed things couldn't get any worse, they were wrong. In October 2017, the authorities instituted a program for Kazakhs and Chinese called "Becoming a Family", designed to teach us more about Chinese culture.

Indigenous people had to live with a Chinese family for eight days once a month-or, alternatively, Chinese people could live with us. The Chinese were allowed to choose which option they preferred.

The authorities assigned one Muslim from our area to every Chinese household. As usual, they dressed it up in the Party's sweet, cloying jargon, pretending that the whole thing was being done out of consideration and for our protection. "You'll eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together, just like a member of the family," they told us. You had to eat whatever was put in front of you.

If they shovelled pork onto their Muslim guest's plate, so be it. Hosts had to document all shared activities by snapping a photo on their phone and sending it to the authorities. "Aha, they've eaten dinner together," the officials would nod, ticking that off their lists.

If my teachers were on guard duty, they had to give the authorities plenty of advance warning: "I'm afraid I can't do my family duty that day. But I'll make it up later." The important thing was that you crossed off your eight days per month. And what did that look like in practice? Well, during your lunch break you'd rush off to your host family's home, cook, then head back to work.

In the evening, you'd do the Chinese family's housework and spend the night. If it was a Saturday or a Sunday, you'd spend your free time with them. For us Muslims, that usually meant doing their chores - mucking out pigsties, cleaning, caring for the elderly. And at night we had to go to bed with the hosts.

The following month, the authorities would send us to the next chinese family, or another chinese person would be standing on our doorstep. Can you imagine what that was like for young girls, wives, or single mothers like me? The men were given the same rights of access to our bodies as to those of their wives. That was the final nail in their appalling plan: to take away our control over own bodies. We're talking about the rape of an entire ethnic group on a vast scale.

If a woman or a girl resisted, the Chinese host was supposed to complain to the authorities. "She's not fulfilling her duties!' Then the police would snatch the girl and take her to a camp, where they would teach her to be more obedient.

At night at the kitchen table, I chatted softly to my father. "If I work even harder, make myself indispensable, then they can't send me to a Chinese family for eight days - I'll get out of it... Father, what do you think?" But I couldn't hear his answer over the blaring sirens of the police cars outside, bathing me in blue light as they passed.

A campaign of "friendship that sows hatred

Outwardly, the campaign was designed to promote friendly relationships with the indigenous community. In reality, it was sowing hatred. We lived in a constant state of panic.

Every day, every minute, every second we were afraid. The photos and video recordings taken by Chinese families were intended solely for the authorities, to prove they were adhering to the program, so I've no idea how they found their way overseas. People must have shared them and passed them on.

You can find countless such images online, showing indigenous women in the arms of Chinese men. Sometimes they're lying next to each other in bed, the sheets just barely covering their naked bodies. There have been instances of women who killed themselves out of shame because the photos were seen by their relatives.

I saw some of them myself when I got to Kazakhstan. Video recordings, for example, showing two chinese men getting drunk and tearing off a grandmother's headscarf, laughing or constantly refilling the glass of an elderly Muslim man with a white beard and forcing him to drink.

One shows a girl around fourteen or fifteen. By the end of the recording she's very drunk, and is made to dance for the Chinese. Her mother and father sit silent and motionless on the sofa, looking on as one of the men kisses their daughter. The authorities used these recordings as evidence that a chinese person had adequately fulfilled their role in the Muslim family.

The region around the Altai Mountains was known for its rebellious population News of two cases in the area, which is situated in the far north-west, made its way to Aksu. At one school, four hundred Muslim students refused to eat pork, and all of them were arrested. On another occasion, a Chinese person was assigned to a Muslim family that included a grandfather and his sixteen-year-old granddaughter.

After a while, the man wanted to have sex with the girl. The grandfather told him he had a right to do so, but that first he wanted to show him his best horse outside. Like all Kazakhs, this old man was a first-rate rider. Swinging onto the back of his horse, in a flash he lassoed the man around the neck, then dug his heels into the horse's flanks.
Galloping away, he dragged the man behind him through the sand until he was dead. As punishment, the elderly grandfather and his entire family were taken to the camps.

And then, for the first time, the friendship' campaign found its way to my doorstep.

"Let's figure this out..."

Sitting at my desk, I stared fixedly at the man's address. I knew he was an affluent, single businessman in Aksu. How was I going to get through the day? A Muslim woman alone in a house with a man whose intentions I didn't know? Our honour and our pride are sacred to us. By that time, they were the only things keeping us going, cherished at our very core.

That night, on the way there, with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I kept running through in my mind how to save myself - what was the smartest tactic here? I was concentrating so hard that I didn't even notice my feet turning towards the apartment block, my legs carrying me up the stairs to the second floor, or my finger pressing the bell. Shocked, I took a step back when the door opened. "Oh! It's you" said the man, astonished. He was tall, roughly thirty-eight years old. He knew me, too, of course, because I was also a well-known figure in Aksu, and had run and hosted quite a few major events. Clearly, he wasn't aware which Kazakh the authorities had assigned him, and he greeted me politely.

First he invited me into his kitchen, where we had a cup of tea together: this was required by the guidelines, which he had already received in writing. My cheeks were burning, as though I'd been sitting too close to a fire. I had to take several deep breaths, and then everything I was feeling came tumbling out in one go: "You know us Kazakhs and our culture, and you know the way we live now." His probing eyes rested on me while I fought for my honour. "I'm Muslim, and you're Chinese. We've both been forced into this situation. You know what an immoral position this is for a Kazakh woman like me." He nodded and agreed. "Yes. Right now, we need this new policy in Xinjiang. It will bring more stability. But I understand what you mean."

Then he invited me into the living room of his spacious, four or five-room apartment, where we sat down opposite each other. Again, I watched him with anxious interest, like a cornered animal, gathering my strength so I could get out of this terrible situation. "Let's figure this out so we can both emerge unscathed..."

Chinese participants in the campaign were obliged to fill in a form every day, detailing the duties their Muslim guest had performed: having breakfast together, having lunch together, and so on. The piece of paper was on the table between us. I tapped it with my finger. "Please show me some sympathy and say I've done all those things. Nervously smoothing my trousers, I rushed to describe my situation. The words spilled out: it was like I couldn't breathe if I didn't blurt them all out at once. "I'm a wife and mother living alone, a head teacher - "He cut me off impatiently. "Yes, yes, I know you. I'm aware of who you are."

Moving stiffly, I drew my purse out of my handbag "How much do I need to pay you? I could see from his thin smile that I had judged right. "If you give me 20 yuan a day, that's fine," he replied. It wasn't a huge sumn: you could maybe eat at a restaurant twice for that amount. Wordlessly, he rolled up the notes and listened as I continued. "I'll pay you that sum every day. In return, I want to leave the house around midnight and go home. I'll take the back exit. Nobody will see me. The next morning, I'll come back early, before sunrise.

"Agreed," he said, his expression unmoved. For a moment, I sank back into the armchair, taking a deep breath of relief. I showed my gratitude by immediately setting about fulfilling the other expectations of the campaign, one chore after another stuffing his dirty laundry into the machine, ironing his shirts, mopping the hallway... When I was done, we sat back down at the laid table. "You only have to eat what you want," he told me, taking out his phone, "but let's take a quick photo as evidence."

He walked around the table. "Okay, now take some of that pork and act like you're eating it..." I lifted the fork to my mouth and held it there until he'd snapped enough pictures. He'd also documented all my other jobs and sent them straight to the authorities. He was one of the Chinese people who adopted only those parts of the system that they felt benefited them. The rest they accepted as long as it didn't harm them or stop them earning money.

Many of his compatriots were silent accomplices of the system: they had bought into the Chinese dream that the Party was always talking about, and were intoxicated by the idea that they would soon be part of the world's ruling elite.

After about seven hours, I crept downstairs like a cat in the middle of the night. Outside there were guards and cameras everywhere. Putting one foot cautiously after another, I kept glancing anxiously over my shoulder, taking a circuitous route home via small passageways and side streets. Every shadow looked like danger.

Was that someone clearing their throat? I pressed myself up against a tree, holding my breath. There was a long, fearful silence. Under normal circumstances, it was only a kilometre, but I took so many detours I walked at least three times that far, until at last, feeling like the devil was nipping at my heels, I dashed the final few steps into my house, shut the door behind me, and leant against it, gasping for breath. Without switching on the light, I tiptoed into my bed.

Sleep was impossible - my heart was thudding too loudly. Early the next morning, while it was still dark, 1 hurried back to his apartment block via the same meandering route. Although no one hit me or mistreated me, those eight days were torture.

Every night, 1 dropped twenty yuan onto the Chinese businessman's table, and I was finally allowed to leave. The Party and the government used that campaign to destroy our young girls. Who could they confide in about the awful things that had happened to them?

Anyone who was open about the abuse ended up in a camp. In any case, our culture forbade any discussion of rape. They had besmirched the honour of our girls and women, even though we ourselves were blameless. Many of my young female co-workers at the kindergartens came to me sobbing, throwing their trembling arms around me and crying until the collar of my Farty uniform was soaked with their tears. I tried to find the words to comfort them, but everything sounded macking in my ears. So we were silent, our heads resting on each other's shoulders, until our eyes were red.

So far we had put up with all their cruelties. Not being allowed to speak our own language anymore, not being allowed to practise our traditions or be who we truly were. Yet this humiliation was beyond everything else. They were violently forcing themselves into the core of our being, trying to subjugate us, to break us. I can't even find the words - how do you describe a situation that's indescribable?

Nobody outside wanted to talk anymore. Trust within families had been destroyed, because the Party exhorted everyone to denounce everyone else. Betrayal was often the only way to save your own life or your own job.

A twenty-four-hour hotline had been set up specifically for this purpose. Following orders, I gave this number to all my employees. They also installed a brand-new postbox outside the kindergarten entrance, with a sign encouraging people to anonymously report suspicious activity.

There was no shortage of reasons to defame someone. Some Chinese people got jealous because a Kazakh had, on the basis of better education or performance, been given a more senior job than them.

The Party had now provided those people with a highly effective means of getting rid of unwelcome competition. All it took was one complaint. For instance: "The local manager is damaging friendly relations between Kazakhs and Chinese.

He's keeping us Chinese down and favouring his own countrymen. The accused would soon find his papers stamped with the words 'dangerous nationalist, and he would be taken to the camps for re-education.

As head teachers, we no longer had any room for manoeuvre at work. Every task had to be done according to a strict timeframe and reported to the higher-ups as complete. Colleagues were no longer allowed to exchange any personal information.

There was no scope for compassion, no You look pal, can help you? Instead, we were supposed to harangue people. Have you completed all your tasks yet? Slowly but surely, people all over Aksu were developing psychological problems. I didn't see anyone who had completely lost their mind or gone berserk, but nor did I see anyone behaving like a normal individual.

Lots of business owners, for instance, lost the will to keep running their shops. People sank into apathy. Everything stagnated; life turned sluggish. "Why should I earn money if I could be sent to the camps tomorrow?"

The following month, the rules of the "family campaign were tightened. The authorities had got wind that many Kazakhs were paying bribes to avoid spending the night in a stranger's bed. Keen to dose the final loophole, inspectors started calling Chinese families in the middle of the night and ordering them to put their Kazakh guest on the phone.

Everyone had to keep their phone on them at all times so that the officials could locate them anywhere. Finally, they stationed uniformed guards overnight outside Chinese families' front doors. If you were a female Kazakh trying to go home, you'd end up with a black hood over your head.

I was lucky. I wasn't affected by the stricter regulations, which came into force in October 2017. Not long afterwards, I was sent to a camp myself.

A secret visit in the night

I happened to overhear a few snippets of a friend's conversation. "You'll never guess - an old married couple in the next village got permission to go to Kazakhstan for a funeral. The news hit me like a bolt of lightning.

Officially, indigenous people were only allowed to cross the border if they could find a relative who would guarantee their return- using their life as collateral. Unofficially, travel was forbidden. Still, I instantly sensed an opportunity to get a message to Uali through the couple.

But how could I persuade these strangers to help? And how could I get there without someone catching me? Two days before they set off, I secretly rented a car, which I parked far away from my building. I couldn't let anyone recognise me, so one night I took a jacket and a pair of trousers from Uali's wardrobe, hid my long hair under his hat, and jumped behind the wheel, dressed as a man. I knew I was in mortal danger, of course, but my life was increasingly dangerous anyway.

On the outskirts of the village, I switched off my headlights and pulled up near a duster of trees. I made the final stretch on foot, in the dark, keeping off the road. There were no lights on in any of the houses. I tiptoed into their courtyard like a thief and knocked on the couple's door.

Two drowsy but frightened senior citizens answered. "Please, it's important,"1 hissed, the words coming out in short bursts as I puffed and wheezed. Their hands clapped to their mouths, they glanced all around before hustling me indoors. Without even taking a breath, I blurted everything out at once: "My husband is living with our two children in Kazakhstan. I've not had any contact with them for ages. I held out my letter like a beggar. "Could you please give them this?

They were eyeing the envelope as though it was a poisonous snake. "No, it's too dangerous they said, their voices hoarse. Still, I was at least able to convince them to take a piece of paper with Uali's telephone number. Please, call him when you're in Kazakhstan, and ask where he's living and how the children are doing. The conversation lasted no more than five minutes, and then I was back in the darkness outside.

A week or two later, a Kazakh woman I didn't recognise came to pick up a couple of children from the kindergarten. She waited in the garden for me until all the parents had left before approaching "Excuse me, I'd like to speak to you about these two children." Then, leaning close, she quietly introduced herself as the daughter-in-law of the elderly couple that had gone to Kazakhstan. "My relatives weren't allowed to go home," she hissed. Apparently, there had been problems with their papers at the border.

I answered out loud, "The children are very hardworking!" she smiled and replied, "I know," then added softly, "Your husband has bought a house in a village near Almaty. Your children are going to school there. They're fine." "They should keep plugging away at Chinese," I emphasised in my loud voice.

Nodding eagerly, she quickly took the opportunity to pass me my husband's new address. Finally, I had discovered where Uali was living. Now I just had to find a way to reach him in Kazakhstan. Maybe I'll be out of here in a few days, I thought. In fact, however, I had no chance of escape. My pursuers already had me in their clutches ...

CHAPTER 6 The Camp: surviving in hell

Late 2017: arriving at the camp

Towards the end of November 2017, I was disturbed late one night by the telephone ringing. Who could it be? Suspicious, I lifted the receiver to my ear. "Take a taxi into Zhaosu city centre immediately,"instructed a male voice. "Someone will pick you up there." "Why should I go there?" I asked uneasily. "Who are you?" "Don't ask questions!" But the words tumbled out of my mouth. "Why should I go anywhere at this time of night?" "You shouldn't ask questions. You're being taken for retraining." "What kind of retraining?" "No need to worry. Tomorrow you'll be taking part in a seminar in another city."

Was that true? Why did I have to set off for retraining in the middle of the night? But maybe I was getting het up over nothing, and it was just another secret meeting. It took about an hour to reach the address they'd given me, dutching a bag with my toothbrush and basic essentials in my lap. "We're here," said the driver, stopping in the middle of a wide street. It was midnight. As agreed over the phone, I pulled out my phone underneath a streetlamp and texted the number they'd dictated to me: "I'm here."

Frightened, I lowered my phone and hunched my shoulders. It was too late to run away. Anyway, where would I go? They could find me anywhere. Then I saw the lights of a police car. The doors burst open, and four policemen with machine guns jumped out. Seconds later, they had grabbed me by the sleeves, thrown a hood over my head, and shoved me into the back seat. I'd been taken in before, of course, but this time I knew. It's finally happening They're taking me to a camp. My life is over.

As I sat in the back between the armed officers, fabric covering my face, I started to cry. For a while, I lost control of myself my body convulsed, my tears ran, I sobbed and sabbed. The policeman next to me kept jabbing his rifle into my side, snapping, "Stop that! Why are you wailing Keep quiet! If you don't stop, we'll really give you a reason to howl! You want us to pull over?" At that, I froze. I knew they could do anything they wanted to a woman. The journey took about two hours. Suddenly, the car started driving very slowly, then stopped.

I saw nothing, but could hear the front window being opened. "We're dropping someone off," the driver said. Then they parked the car, forced me out and dragged me away, gripping my upper arms. Heavy doors were unbolted, opened, and closed behind us. Our footsteps were more muffled: we had to be inside a building. My knees felt weak; my legs could barely carry me. Two or three times we paused, and one of the officers repeated, "We're dropping her off.' Panicking, I tried to figure out what was happening. Those are checkpoints, and what's in store for me here is worse than a prison. I clenched my jaw to stop my teeth chattering

Once we'd entered a room, someone jerked the hood off my head. It was so bright that I blinked in the unexpectedly dazzling light. Gradually, my eyes adjusted, and behind a desk I saw a Chinese military officer with various insignia on his epaulettes. A colossus of a man, he was in his late forties, medium height, with a broad, ugly, frog-like face and glasses. On his head he wore a cap with more military insignia, and tall lace-up leather boots on his feet. Maybe a colonel with some kind of special unit, I guessed, but my chest was so tight I could barely think.

It must have been about three in the morning by the time I sat down opposite him. Between us were the heavy table and his computer. Not bothering with a greeting, the man outlined the situation in sharp, clipped military jargon "You are in a re-education camp, and you will work here as a teacher..." My head began to whirl. Not as a prisoner? As a teacher? Why me, of all people? What did it all mean? Was I saved or doomed? "From now on, you will be giving Chinese lessons to the other inmates," he instructed, gazing at me the way a cat looks at a mouse. "And you will not refuse to take on other tasks as well." He shoved a document towards me. "Just to be clear: you will tell no one what you have seen and heard here. Sign this!" I barely had time to skim the beginning of the three or four pages. The rules of my new job were listed one after another:

This contract is strictly confidential. It is forbidden to speak to the prisoners. It is forbidden to laugh, cry, or answer questions without permission.

It was a struggle to put pen to paper, because it was written in black and white that anyone who made a mistake and broke a rule would face the death penalty. My heart sank even further. "Sign it!"he barked. I had no choice. I signed my own death sentence. My hand was shaking as though all the fear in my body had collected inside it. "Give her the clothes," the colossal man ordered a subordinate. As I turned towards the guard, my eye was briefly caught by the signs on the wall: the twelve guiding principles of Xi Jinping, which were ubiquitous in the offices of all senior figures, and were also displayed in my kindergarten.

It included things like: "Everybody must speak Chinese ... everybody must dress like a Chinese person... everybody must think like a Chinese person, regardless of whether they are Uighur or Kazakh ... everything you da must be in the service of China... no indigenous person is permitted to have foreign contacts ... All of it could be summarised in one sentence: anything remotely different has to be made Chinese. It was supposed to sound like paternal advice, but was phrased like a series of orders.

Carrying a military-style camouflage uniform in my arms, I followed the guard into the hallway. Afterwards, I saw the officer another couple of times when new prisoners arrived at the camp. He was probably one of the higher-ups in charge of special assignments. I would end up going to his office from time to time to drop off some forms about the health of particular prisoners.

The first night

When you're in a state of shock, adrenaline makes certain areas of the brain switch into high gear. From that point on, I committed everything to memory with absolute precision, because I knew I was one day going to tell the world about it. From the outset, I clung to that thought like a lifebuoy.

Ahead of me and slightly to the left was a small hall. Inside was a glass-walled sentry box. On the left, a corridor roughly twenty-five metres long branched off from the hall, with twelve cells on either side. Later, I noticed that men and women were kept on separate sides. The door of each cell was triple-locked and secured with an additional iron bolt. Two guards were assigned outside, working in shifts, 24/7. The reason they went to such extraordinary lengths was because they were terrified that prisoners might break out and bring their atrocities to light. I averted my eyes as I was led right in the opposite direction, down an equally long corridor. Here, too, there were cameras on both sides. Every two metres. Not a single nook or cranny was left unobserved. There were no windows anywhere. This half of the storey housed the administration block: six offices, one behind the other.

After a few metres, we stopped outside the fourth door, which- unlike the prisoners' cells - did not have a hatch in the middle through which to pass food. Evidently, I was going to be treated better as a teacher than the inmates. On the bare, roughly six-metre-square concrete floor was a plastic rollout mattress as thin as two shopping bags, plus a flimsy pillow and a thin plastic blanket. A camera was in every corner. "Go to sleep now!" they ordered me, before the barred steel door slammed and the key turned in the lock. For a moment, I just stood there, staring at a small double-barred opening on the wall in front of me, so high up that I couldn't see out. How long do I have to stay here? What's going on? I was racking my brain feverishly for answers I didn't have.

Since I had been repeatedly interrogated by the secret police already, I assumed they hadn't yet found a reason to arrest me. But now I had a nasty thought. They must have brought me to the camp under the pretext of wanting me to teach so that I would finally slip up and they could lack me away in this place for years. Don't cry, don't talk, don't show emotion ... Thinking of the rules I'd signed, I realised how easy it would be to make a mistake - but I didn't want to give them the satisfaction! I lay down on the plastic blanket and stared up at the ceiling, where a fifth wide-angle camera was pointed at me. Every millimetre of this grey concrete bunker was being recorded. The light was glaring. It never went out.

Daily routine

Shortly before six, a loud, screeching bell shrilled through the building. Where was I? I started awake, my pulse racing, saw the camera above me, and felt as crushed as when I fell asleep. A moment later, someone was banging at my door. "Get ready! Quick!"
In front of me, on the left, partitioned off by a hip-height wall, was a toilet area with a hole. A camera was pointed at this, too. On the right, by the door, was a small sink beneath another camera. I hastily turned on the tap, but only a thin trickle came out. I splashed my face and cleaned my teeth. There was no soap or comb.
I'd slept maybe two hours, but minutes later I was standing bolt upright like a guard outside my door, hands by my sides, wearing my camouflage uniform and matching peaked cap, with the jacket buttoned up to my chin At six on the dot, all the doors on both corridors opened automatically. For a moment, I was winded. From the open doors of the prisoners' cells came an abominable stench of sweat, urine and faeces, wafting across the hall and permeating the whole block. The blue-uniformed guards in the wing opposite wore masks whenever they entered the cells.

At this point, I didn't yet realise that the regulations stipulated each individual should have one square metre of space. In reality, however, they would cram up to twenty people into sixteen square metres: approximately four hundred prisoners per floor. They only allowed one plastic bucket with a lid per cell, which served as a toilet. The prisoners were only allowed to empty it once in a twenty-four-hour period. If, after five hours, the bucket was full, the lid had to stay on. So even if the prisoners' bladders were bursting or their bowels were rumbling, they had to wait until the bucket was empty. Over time, this led to terrible organ problems in some individuals, and the air was so foul it made everyone extremely nauseous. My attention was diverted from the prisoners, who were lining up outside, because I was directed to join a queue of about six administrative workers and other employees.

At times it was longer or shorter, depending on the meal break. Conversation was forbidden. It rapidly became apparent that several very different groups of workers were employed on this floor, ranging from the cleaning women in simple suits with jackets to high-ranking officers who wore black balaclavas like bank robbers, revealing only their mouths, eyes, and nostrils. Even the Chinese employees were clearly afraid of these masked, machine-gun-brandishing men in their tall leather boots. I soon found out first-hand what their job was. Every single procedure in the camp was organised down to the most minute detail. It was like an anthill. I'd estimate that around one hundred people were employed on my floor, working in shifts.

I was the only teacher, and the only Kazakh in a relatively senior role. Otherwise there was probably one indigenous person for every twelve Chinese employees, but they were always in more junior positions. Accompanied by two guards, a group of employees moved about twenty-five metres towards a double door, behind which we made a sharp left towards the kitchens. At the end of the corridor there was a window-sized aperture in the wall, through which a Chinese kitchen assistant pushed plates of food towards the people in front of me. It smelled great, and looked like a decent meal. My stomach growled. To my disappointment, as an indigenous woman I was given one piece of steamed, mushy white bread and a small ladle of cooked rice water with a few floating grains of rice.

Similarly, the Chinese staff weren't penalised even if they made the same mistakes I did: too hesitant, too nervous, too hasty ... We marched back to our rooms in rows. Before I hurriedly gulped down the bland, unsalted soup, the guard remarked insolently, "If we knock, bring the clean ladle back to the kitchen with the others. If we don't, you'll use it to get your food tomorrow." They always locked the door behind them. At seven, two more guards led me into one of the offices near my cell. Nobody was allowed to move around the camp unaccompanied there was always at least one armed guard following on my heels like a shadow.

The lesson plan

Unlike the previous office, this one was appointed with cheap chipboard furniture. Another Chinese man was waiting for me behind his desk to explain my job. I could never remember any of their faces, because they were different every time. Presumably, they simply switched people to different departments in the building: a security measure to prevent contact and conversation among colleagues.

"sit down," the man ordered me, pointing at a chair. Brusqueness was the standard approach in the camp. "During the lessons, you will speak only when instructed." For men like him, violence was a legitimate means of strengthening Chinese society and maintaining the respect it was due. He raised a warning finger. "You must never say anything except what is written in these instructions." He waved the bits of paper in the air. I would never be allowed to express my own opinion or to act independently. Turning to the door, where a guard was stationed - dutifully raising and lowering his head, hanging on the officer's every word - he added, "Men like him decide what is allowed and what is not He then leaned forward and handed me a multi-page document that specified in meticulous detail how I was expected to behave. I was to stand as motionless as possible and always speak in a sharp, snappish tone of voice. I was only allowed to approach the guards in specific ways.

I had already learned outside the prison walls that the art of surviving in a surveillance state entailed keeping a low profile and putting on a rigid mask. That way, the swarm of informers didn't have as much scope to read something reprehensible into your behaviour. "Repeat it back!" The man questioned me on the code of conduct as though I was a schoolchild, and then explained the topic of that day's lesson "Open it." The first four pages of the lesson plan dealt with an extract from the resolutions passed at the nineteenth Party congress. Taken together, the legislation was the length of a book, so I was only supposed to teach part of them to the prisoners every day. "Keep turning the pages!" ordered the officer.

The next two were about Chinese customs and traditions. How did the Chinese bury their relatives? How did they celebrate weddings? "This is your second topic of the day," he told me. He then gave me half an hour to get my mind around the content. I had to understand the meaning of the legislation myself and memorise parts of it before I could teach it to my students who included everyone from academics to people who couldn't even read.

I was allowed to take only a few notes to use in class. Simply reading aloud was not permitted. After absorbing so much information in such a short span of time, I was extremely tense and nervous. I hope I don't forget any of the details, I thought anxiously. Then they'd lock me up like an animal, too, trapped in one of those stinking cages. I tried frantically to block out everything else and concentrate wholly on the task ahead.

"That's enough." growled the officer, glancing at his silver watch. "Stand up and summarise all the topics!" It was the only way he could be sure I had understood everything the way I was supposed to. "Waite Taking out his phone, he photographed my notes. I was not allowed to handle any pieces of paper without them being checked. At the end of the day, they made sure I had returned all written materials to the office. No evidence, however minor, could be allowed to leave the building. Nothing, absolutely nothing could make its way outside.

Every day - sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night - I was taken into an office and given my new lesson plan. Each time, a member of staff would appear from the stairwell behind the glass wall, carrying notes not just for me but for all the other teachers on the other five floors as well. Once I realised that, I quickly worked out that at four hundred prisoners per floor, plus a basement, there must have been about 2,500 people held in total. "Take her into the classroom?' The man ran a hand through his black hair and waved me out with the guard. This time, instead of turning left towards the kitchen after passing through the double doors, we turned right, down a corridor. Along it were three or four larger rooms, one of which was my new workplace. I wouldn't leave that floor for the next five months.

7.00 am to 9.00 am: teaching the living dead

I'd scarcely set foot in the room before my fifty-six students rose to their feet, ankle shackles jangling, and shouted, "We're ready!" They all wore blue shirts and trousers. Their heads were shaved, their skin white as a corpse's.

I stood to attention in front of the board, flanked either side by two guards with automatic rapid-fire guns. I was so unprepared for the sight and so appalled that for a moment I almost tottered on my feet. Black eyes, mutilated fingers, bruises everywhere. A cohort of the living dead, freshly risen from the grave. There were no tables or ordinary chairs, only plastic stools meant for kindergarteners. For an adult, it wasn't easy to sit upright, especially if you were in pain, like some of the men in blood-soaked trousers, whose haemorrhoids had burst. Ten or twelve people crouched in five rows: academics, farmers, artists, students, businesspeople... roughly 60 per cent were men between the ages of eighteen and fifty. The rest were girls, women, and elderly people.

In the first row was the youngest, a schoolgirl thirteen years old-tall, thin, very clever. With her bald head, i'd first taken her for a boy. The eldest, a sheepherder who joined us later, was eighty-four. Fear was etched into every single face. All light in their eyes had gone out. No spark of hope to be seen. I stood there in shock, feeling my mouth tremble. All I wanted to do was cry. Don't make any mistakes now, Sayragul! I screamed inwardly at myself. Or pretty soon you'll be sitting on one of those kids' stools as well! One inmate after another spoke up. "Number one is present." "Number two is present."

And so on until number fifty-six. After the roll call, the guards handed everyone a pen and a small booklet. As the inmates were supposed to take notes, their handcuffs had already been removed when they went to fetch food, and now hung clinking loosely from one wrist. Over the course of the day, the prisoners filled out the exam questions in the booklets. At first I couldn't squeeze out a single word. It was like my throat was clamped shut-but compassion was forbidden. On pain of death. Spinning on my heel, I grabbed the blackboard and started writing in chalk, speaking in a rough voice. When I turned back around, I kept my eyes fosed on the back wall.

I couldn't bear looking into those faces. The walls were crudely plastered in grey concrete, like the walls of a factory. There was a red line drawn on the floor in front of me, which I couldn't cross without permission from the guards - and then only if I had something important to do on the other side. It was a way of avoiding any familiarity or relationship developing between me and the prisoners. I was never allowed to get close to them. A table and a basic plastic chair were provided for me, but oddly the guards moved them aside at the beginning of every lesson. Both women and men had to sit ramrod-straight on their stools, staring straight ahead.

No one was allowed to drop their head. Anyone who didn't follow the rules was immediately dragged away. To the torture room. "He's doing it on purpose! He's refusing to fall into line and resisting the power of the state!" -- that was the standard accusation. From 7.00 am to 9.00 am, it was my job to teach these poor, maltreated creatures about the nineteenth Party congress and Chinese customs. "When a Chinese person gets married or has a family, it's different than with us Muslims," I began, keeping it as simple as possible.

Many farmers had no idea, because in the mountains they'd never experienced anything except their own culture. For them, I had to explain every single step of these ceremonies. "At Chinese weddings, the guests always have to say the same set phrases when they congratulate the couple," I added. "For example, 'I wish you both much happiness and I hope you have a baby soon." They sat in front of me with dismal faces, those shaven-headed living dead, and there I was, teaching them ways to say congratulations in Chinese.

9.00 am to 11.00 am: checking

From 9.00 am to 11.00 am, I went through the material again so I could check it afterwards. "It's time for everyone to check their notes now!"a guard told me, and I translated for the prisoners. If anybody didn't understand something, they were supposed to ask. When a hand was raised, I first looked at the armed guard to my right, making sure the question was allowed. Once permission was granted, the shackled prisoner would ask his question in his mother tongue, assuming he didn't speak Chinese well enough. If so, I first had to translate the question for the guard and wait to be told if and how I should answer. I was constantly switching between Uighur or Kazakh and Chinese.

Occasionally, individual prisoners were called on by the guards to stand up and recite what they had learned. Those who made progress earned points. "If you learn well, you'll be released sooner," they were promised, so everyone tried to absorb the material as fully as possible; only the elderly and the sick, mostly between sixty and eighty, found it atrociously difficult. Most understood little or no Chinese. You could tell how badly they were struggling the characters danced before their eyes, getting mixed up and tied into knots.

It was an impossible task -how were they supposed to cope? How were any of them ever supposed to get out? They wanted to scream and cry, but all of them knew they had to conceal their inner turmoil. Later on, their answers would be checked by Chinese staff, who would decide who to move down. Anyone who broke the rules outside of class also lost points, which could eventually lead to them being taken to another floor. Infringements, according to the guidelines, were to be punished increasingly harshly. These included moving in the wrong way, not knowing something, or crying out in pain. Like the woman who had undergone brain surgery before being interned at the camp, whose untreated wound grew large and weeping. Or the people who couldn't sit down after being tortured - reason enough to drag them off and torture them again. Those who were moved up or down were assigned a different uniform and a different floor.

I soon noticed that prisoners in different coloured uniforms were being led away in groups. Those wearing red, such as imams or very religious people, were branded serious criminals. Less serious crimes were signalled by light-blue clothing. Those accused of the more minor infractions wore dark blue. On my floor, all the prisoners wore light blue, a colour that seemed uglier in my eyes with every passing day. One by one, the less educated and the elderly lost more and more points, until finally they were sorted out like bad peas. Their places were immediately filled with new prisoners.
11.00 am to midday: "I'm proud to be Chinese!"

At 11.00 am, the guards handed out one A4-sized cardboard box per prisoner, each inscribed with a phrase in colourful script. "Number one" held his over his head and said it aloud, and everybody repeated it several times in a row. "I'm proud to be Chinese!" Then the next person held up theirs. "I love Xi Jinping?

Those who were not Han Chinese were considered by the Party and the government to be subhuman. Not just Kazakhs and Uighurs, but all other races across the globe. Holding up the next box, I had to add my voice to the clamour: "I owe my life and everything I have to the Party!" Meanwhile the thought whirling around in my head was: The entire Party elite have lost their minds. They're all completely nuts. My gaze wandered aimlessly over their faces, when suddenly I froze. That man with the bald head - I knew him! Yes, he was a Uighur who had been arrested in Aksu in summer 2017 for celebrating a religious festival. It had caused quite a stir locally. At that moment I could see him still, a decent family man, roughly twenty-five years old, bringing his children to my kindergarten. Hed been such a genteel, happy person. And now? Who was he now? Dead-eyed, open-mouthed, screaming, "Long live the Party?

Suddenly, a guard jabbed me with his machine gun. "Why are you goggling at him like that?" Frightened, I shouted the next phrase even louder: "Long live Xi Jinping." Inwardly, I gave myself a good few mental slaps. There were two guards in the room, not to mention several cameras. How could I have been so stupid?

On and on it went. The Party, its "helmsman'Xi Jinping, China Everyone was screaming as though with one mouth: "I live because the Party has given me this lifet' and "Without the Party there is no new China!" Their plan was to reshape us into new people, to brainwash us until every single person was convinced. "The Party is everything. It is the most powerful force in the world. There is no god but Xi Jinping, no other almighty country, and no other almighty force in the world but China."

There were, of course, some weak personalities whose resistance dissolved as though in acid after a while in the camp. But I don't think this method really works. Lots of the prisoners were simply doing whatever it took to get out of that hellhole. They only pretended to change, acting as though their faith in the goodness and strength of the Party and its leaders made them happy. After the abuse they'd suffered, they couldn't possibly believe all that nonsense. Speaking for myself, I never lost my faith in God. Sometimes I risked a glance at the tiny double-barred window on the exterior wall. It was forbidden to look out, but you couldn't see much anyway. No patch of sky. Only barbed wire. As soon as one group was finished, the next one was led in. Sometimes the first group would stay, too, so there'd be more than one hundred pupils" in the room.

Midday to 2.00 pm: water soup and fresh instructions

From midday till two, the guards put all the prisoners back into their cells and the staff back into their rooms. Minutes later, I was in kitchen queue with the other workers, ladle in hand. This time, I was handed a small piece of real bread and bland vegetable soup that was more water than vegetable. Sometimes I'd even get a spoonful of honey. Every day, they alternated these three different meals, morning noon and night. For months.

The prisoners were virtually left to starve, although, unlike me, they were forced to eat pork every Friday. Initially, some Muslims refused. Their protests resulted in nothing but torture and unforgettable pain. After a while, these people ate the pork, too. Scarcely had I cleaned my ladle than there was another knock at the door. That meant I had to be ready in a matter of seconds. I had to be in an office next door until two, preparing for the afternoon session.

2.00 pm to 4.00 pm: a song in praise of the Party

From two till four, all the prisoners were gathered back in a classroom to sing Party songs for two hours. First, we all launched into the national anthem. Afterwards, there was another "red" song. "Without the Party, these new children would not exist. The Party has created these new children. The Party makes every effort to serve all the nationalities in the country. The Party has saved this country using all its strength..."

Hunched on their plastic stools, their notepads resting on their thighs, those poor inmates wrote down all the texts on the board. Writing, singing, writing ... learning a whole song in a single day was too much to ask, so we only practised one verse per day. Next day, as the prisoners trudged in chains to the kitchen, they had to sing the verse they'd just learnt. We were living in the twenty-first century. The world was advancing at breakneck speed: only in China did we seem to be spiralling backwards into our murky past. Back into the old barbarism and savagery of Mao. The Party and the government had gone to great lengths to erase that period from our memory and from the history books; yet this silence had condemned us all to relive the same atrocities and the same mistakes.

Like the omnipresent Xi Jinping, Mao - his great hero - had wanted to shape a "new man' by subjecting suspicious individuals to a brutal process of thought reform' in camps. Just as before, a new creation was to be born from our suffering. We would become passionate servants of the Party, free from all other convictions and ties, believing only in the goodness and holiness of the Party, committed to serving its epic rise to power and the great Party leader.

Today, I only have to hear a tiny snippet of the national anthem and I react aggressively. I start to boil up; I feel a burning loathing of the Party and the state. And I think of the tortured prisoners of all those innocent people transformed into soulless husks. Into patriots dedicated solely to the great rebirth of a superior ethnic group. Into the perfect Chinese. Every morning, the inmates had to repeat, "I am Chinese!" over and over. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand times. Before they were even allowed breakfast.

4.00 pm to 6.00 pm: self-reflection

In the eyes of the Chinese workers at the camp, the inmates weren't human beings: they were merely criminals with numbers. "If you hadn't broken the rules or revealed yourself to be a spy or a double agent, you wouldn't be here," they told them. That was how they justified the abuse. Anyone detained in the camp, they reasoned, deserved pain
The next two hours were primarily about sitting still and reflecting on one's mistakes.

This time, I remained in the background. The two heavily armed guards, plus two or three Chinese employees from other departments, planted themselves in front of me. One of them raised his voice. "If you acknowledge your crimes quickly and try to make them right, you will be released sooner." In case they didn't understand Chinese, I had to translate it into Kazakh. Evidently assuming that the prisoners didn't know why they were in the camp, the employees explained. They might, for instance, be guilty of praying, of holding quite ordinary religious views, or of harbouring negative thoughts about the Chinese language, Chinese customs, or the Chinese in general.

In fact, there were hundreds of different reasons why all these people had been arrested. A photo taken with the wrong individual was all it took. And there were plenty of those. Until quite recently, Kazakhstan and Xinjiang had been on good terms. During this period, lots of foreign artists, singers, and writers had travelled into the province. Hundreds of fans had had their picture taken with pop stars, or standing next to a poster of a celebrity.

Now, such photographs were considered proof of subversive thinking, and used as grounds to "purify the mind of such treacherous ideas".

After running through the various types of crimes, the staff suggested ways the inmates could determine which ones they had committed. You must ask yourselves: what did I do wrong in my former life? And how can I best express that?" When an employee called on the thirteen-year-old in the front row, asking, "Why are you here?" she jumped up like a shot and answered in fluent Chinese. "I made a terrible mistake and visited a relative in Kazakhstan. I will never do anything like that again!" The rest of the time had to be spent in contemplative silence, while prisoners judged their past behaviour and acknowledged their guilt. Anybody who maintained their innocence was not only punished, but found their relatives had been detained as well. And confessions had to sound believable.

A man might convincingly claim, for instance, "I was a believer, and I went to the mosque."Even if that wasn't true, he had to try to formulate his offence in Chinese during those two hours so that afterwards he could write it down properly. Prisoners spent late afternoons preparing their written admissions of guilt, which would be handed in that night. Nobody ventured to say a word. Everyone was quiet. There was no sound to be heard bar the rushing in my own head, like an impending flood.

6.00 pm to 8.00 pm: a break and an evening meal

From six till eight, it was time to eat. The prisoners lined up outside their cells: women on one side, men on the other. Down the middle of the floor ran a straight red line, framed either side by a blue line. They had to move unswervingly along this red line. Shackled at the wrist and ankle, they were only able to take small, shuffling steps. Anyone who stumbled or accidently stepped on the blue line was tortured. Once they reached the kitchen hatch, the guards unlocked their handcuffs on one side so that the prisoner could carry their food back.

Meanwhile I had to report to the office after my first day of class. I had made a mistake.

Mistake!

The door wasn't even closed, and already I was being grilled by a member of the administrative staff. "Did you recognise a familiar face among the prisoners? Why did you look so concerned when you were staring at that Uighur?" The staff in the surveillance room had caught my expression on camera. They were always on the lookout. How is she behaving? What's going on in her mind? Is she a traitor?" And the trap had been sprung.

For a moment, I was gripped by sheer terror. It's over - it's all over thought. I had signed a contract agreeing I would make no mistakes, or else I was dead. "No, no, I protested, trying disjointedly to defend myself - I could barely tear my tongue from the roof of my mouth. "That look on my face wasn't because of a person I just keep getting these terrible stomach pains. They hurt so much there's nothing I can do." "sit down!"he ordered, and handed me a pen and paper. I was supposed to write a confession and sign it, avowing that I would never look a prisoner directly in the face again. No sooner had I laid the pen aside than I was told to repeat the promise out loud: "In the future, I will never behave that way again."

The next day, the young Uighur was missing. They had probably deducted points and demoted him to a red uniform. I spent many nights racked with terrible guilt. They've sent him somewhere even worse, I thought, and it's my fault. How could I have forgotten myself like that? How could I have dragged someone else down with me? I tore myselfinto a thousand tiny pieces, berating myself over and over until nothing good remained - and it made me loathe the Party even more.

8.00 pm to 10.00 pm: "I'm a criminal!"

From 8.00 pm to 10.00 pon, the prisoners were dismissed into their cells to accept their crimes internally. This meant concentrating on them fervently and repeating their offences over and over in hushed tones. "I'm a criminal because I prayed. I'm a criminal because I prayed. I'm a criminal ..."Heads turned to the wall, their shackled, upraised hands resting against the brickwork. For two long hours. Cheek by jowl.

Meanwhile I was busy doing paperwork in one of the offices, organising records or filing documents. Under constant supervision, of course. Once a week, I drew up a handwritten report on what I had accomplished, carrying out a self-assessment. "I performed all my tasks to my complete satisfaction" They only allowed senior employees to use the computers. I wasn't allowed anywhere near them. My report was between one and three pages, depending on how much time I was given. I assume they compared it against the CCTV footage they'd recorded. Sometimes they would send me to the medical area, just two doors down from my cell, so that I could sort patient files. Every prisoner was initially examined by a doctor. Their condition, their blood group-every detail that evidently mattered to them was meticulously recorded.

Once a month, the prisoners donated blaad". All the inmates would be lined up outside the medical are, waiting to be seen. I had to participate as well, but they did mine separately. I only met one nurse on that floor who worked there for several months at a stretch. Judging by her accent, she was from a city in the interior, like nearly all the other staff members. She was roughly twenty-one years old with short black hair, and wore a camouflage uniform, like me. Other nurses, doctors, and carers were always called in from outside in the middle of the night.

"Hey, medic, over here they'd say. They paid special attention in the medical department to the files of young, strong people. These were treated differently and marked with a red X. At first, I was so naive - only later did I wonder why they always earmarked the files of fundamentally healthy people. Had they preselected these individuals for organ harvesting? Organs that doctors would later remove without consentIt was simply a fact that the Party took organs from prisoners. Several clinics in East Turkestan traded in organs. In Altai, for instance, it was common knowledge that lots of Arabs preferred the organs of fellow Muslims, because they considered them "halal".

Ferhaps, I thought, they were trading in kidneys, hearts, and usable body parts at the camp as well? After a while, I realised that these young, healthy inmates were disappearing overnight, whisked away by the guards, even though their point scores hadn't dropped. When I checked later, I realised to my horror that all their medical files were marked with a red x. A second reason they might be systematically rooting out all the healthy, strong people only accurred to me after my release. There have been numerous reports of people being transported into central China and used as slave labourers. Any company that benefits from this has a moral responsibility. They should be checking their supply chains very carefully for any breach of human rights.

We know from subcontractors' lists, as well as from research by independent think tanks and other scholarly sources, that tens of thousands of Muslims from East Turkestan have been sent to factories nationwide. For these people, leaving the camp does not mean escaping state control: they are housed in isolated accommodation with other workers, in complexes surrounded by barbed wire. Companies in the West-including Bosch, Adidas, Microsoft, and Lacoste - benefit from this slave labour. Firms such as Siemens supply crucial infrastructure, among other things, to these camps. Innocent people are being arrested, monitored, and detained using foreign-made cameras and scanners.

10.00 pm to midnight: written confessions

From ten till midnight, every inmate spent two hours hunched over their notebook on the floor of their cell, writing down their admissions of guilt. If you put something like, 'I committed a religious crime, because I fasted during Ramadan. But today I know there is no God," you had a good chance of improving your point score. Everyone had to hand in their work the next morning.

The system rewarded the best actors, the ones who were most convincingly able to pretend that they had "Freed themselves from dirty thoughts". One sentence was particularly important, and always had to appear in a confession: "I am no longer a Muslim. I don't believe in God anymore." Meanwhile I would be drawing up another report, or cleaning the corridors, various offices, and the classroom. Sometimes other employees would be assigned to the same tasks, but when it was my turn, I always had to work alone. There was no clear rota. Sometimes it was my turn every day. Sometimes I had to do it during the daytime; sometimes at night or in the evenings. For me, there was only one reliable rule: you don't get breaks.

As long as the prisoners were awake, the staff were trying to control their thoughts. Even when they were finally left alone, I don't know how so many people were able to rest in such a confined space. They had to sleep pushed up against one another, on their right sides, chained at the wrists and ankles. Turning over was strictly forbidden and would be harshly punished. I imagine it was like falling into a dark, bottomless pit-like dropping briefly into unconsciousness.
But my day wasn't over.

Midnight to 1.00 am: keeping watch

I was on sentry duty till one in the morning. At midnight, I had to stand in my assigned spot in the vast hall for an hour. Sometimes we would switch sides with the other sentries.

We were always positioned behind a line drawn on the floor. On rare occasions there would be a few inmates lined up there, too, but there would always be a guard by each of them. "We cannot under any circumstances allow a break-out" they insisted. Not that escape seemed likely. All of the doors had multiple locks. Nobody was ever getting out. If, by some chance, one of the prisoners did manage to escape, they continued, we were not to let the news spread around the camp. I stared at the glass-walled guardhouse opposite.

Behind it was the stairwell. I had quickly realised that there must be several lower levels, because administrative staff often took ages fetching things from the bottom floor, even when they were ordered to hurry. The stairwell was also near the black room", where they tortured people in the most abominable ways. After two or three days at the camp, I heard the screams for the first time, resonating throughout the enormous hall and seeping into every pore of my body. I felt like I was teetering on the edge of some dizzying chasm I'd never heard anything like it in all my life. Screams like that aren't something you forget.

The second you hear them, you know what kind of agony that person is experiencing. They sounded like the raw cries of a dying animal. My heart almost stopped beating. I felt like casting myself on the floor and covering my ears, but I knew I couldn't even think about crying. Otherwise you'll never see your children again, I reminded myself desperately. So I denched my teeth as hard as I could, and retreated ever deeper inside my own mind. Deep enough that I saw only hazy outlines and heard only muffled sounds. From that day forth, I heard those screams every day.

1.00 am to 6.00 am: sleep

After I was relieved of duty, I curled up on the plastic mattress, drew up my knees, and pulled the blanket over my head. The cold oozed up out of the concrete floor and into my bones. Usually, in an attempt to stay a little warmer and more comfortable, I kept my uniform on.

sleep was impossible, although I was utterly exhausted. The stench of the toilets, the screams still echoing in my ears, the unbearable things I'd seen - I was so profoundly shocked and frightened that every muscle was tense. I lay motionless, unresting. I kept picturing the prisoners' grave faces in my mind's eye. Their mute resignation. Questions swirled endlessly through my head. Why is this happening?

Why don't these people care about our pain? How can anyone be so stony-hearted? Our lives were worth no more to them than a beetle trodden heedlessly underfoot. At some point, I drifted off, and two hours later the bell shrilled again. For days, life in the camp was exactly the same. Artificial light twenty-four hours a day. Locked in a concrete coffin. Before long, you didn't know if it was day or night. Winter or spring. Had weeks passed, or months? Some days were similar to the first. On others, I received strictly confidential instructions ...

State secrets: the Three-Step Plan

Confidential information was always reaching the camp unexpectedly, usually in the middle of the night. Sometimes once a week; sometimes ten days in a row. A messenger would scurry out of the stairwell behind the glass wall and into one of the offices.

Which room the guard led me to and how many people were present seemed to vary depending on the importance of the message. I wasn't always told to attend, but I usually was. Not many people were privy to state secrets, so at most two or three senior officers would be present. These government officials mostly belonged to a new authority, the name of which roughly translates as "National Security. They wore uniforms similar to the police and military, although more expensive and of higher quality.

The most senior person in the room was given the information first, and then passed it to me. I was supposed to sit and read it quietly while officers stood behind and beside me. As I read, they studied my facial expressions. The first time I was still clueless about what to expect, so my dismay was written all over my face. Beijing likes to pretend that it's not responsible for what governors in distant Chinese provinces get up to. But these confidential papers were emblazoned with the words "classified Documents from Beijing". The truth is that the camps in East Turkestan were set up on orders from Party headquarters in Beijing. The documents they had pressed into my hands set out the government's Three-Step Plans

Step One: 2014-2015: Assimilate those who are willing in Xinjiang, and eliminate those who are not.

I felt dizzy. Planned mass murders? Each step consisted of a core idea and a bullet-point list of sub-items. As early as 2014, Beijing had started laying the groundwork by separating my homeland into two regions: northern and southern. The Uighurs in the south had been selected as the Party's first victims, because they were the largest ethnic minority. The northern region was populated mainly by Kazakhs, Kyrgyzstanis, and people of other ethnicities, who had been increasingly targeted from 2016 onwards. I was almost afraid to read on. Apprehensive, 1 hunched over the papers.

Step Two: 2025-2035: After assimilation within china is complete, neighbouring countries will be annexed.

Various countries, such as Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, would gradually be seized, including through the Belt and Road Initiative and generous lines of credit. The plan was to make these economically struggling countries indebted to Beijing. More and more Chinese would then move there and settle down and build factories, but also invest in media companies, publishing houses, and TV stations, paving the way for Chinese politics in those countries. On top of that, Beijing would send spies and informants into foreign countries to gather state secrets.

Step Three: 2035-2055: After the realisation of the Chinese dream comes the occupation of Europe.

My eyes were faced on the sheet of paper; I almost forgot to breathe. This meant that China's campaign of terror might not end with the Uighurs or the Kazakhs: they were seeking to bring the whole world to heel. And if other countries didn't twig in time, it meant this nightmare would be repeated for them, too. When I looked up, I realised from the officer's tight smile that he hadn't failed to notice my pale face and agitation "Why are you reacting like that?

What exactly are you reacting to?" "I'm intimidated by your authority," I stuttered, apologising meekly. "And anyway, I'm not sure if I've understood the content correctly and whether I'm allowed to ask you." Smugly self-satisfied, he lifted his chin and quizzed me on the content. "What did you understand from that?" if I didn't phrase my response using the correct Party jargon, he interrupted me -'No' -- and gave me the official interpretation. Repeat!" he barked, forcing me to repeat his version.

The goal was to recruit the poor souls in "class" as foot soldiers, pressing them into service for the government's fantasies of global dominance. To bring them onto the side of the Party, so that ultimately the nation would be like a beehive everyone would think alike, share the same beliefs, and work towards the same purpose. We were all supposed to work together to become the most powerful country in the world and "participate in the glory of the People's Republic's project. The prisoners were supposed to be the eyes and ears of the CCP.

Finally, they took the documents out of my hand, ordered me to stand up, and took me over to a metal bin in the middle of the room. In front of the eyes of the guards, one of the men took out his lighter and held it up to the paper. Another member of staff was filming a recording as proof, and didn't turn off his phone until the very last scrap had gone up in flames. The snippet of information I had glimpsed disappeared. But it was only a fragment of what the colonels knew, information that was electronically transmitted and much more detailed. When there was nothing left but a pile of grey ash, they let me sleep. Some people in the West don't believe any of this - it seems too monstrous to be true. But I've met another Kazakh survivor from a different camp who also learned about the Three-Step Plan. Clearly, they were teaching the same material in various camps, so there must be more witnesses to corroborate this.

Teaching assimilation: "How long do we have to stay here?"

The next day, class began with a song in praise of the Party. "The Communist Party has managed to re-educate so many people! This is good for the people as a whole, because we are one unified group! After that I moved on to the Belt and Road Initiative.

I passed on the government's confidential information in small chunks spread out over several days. The guards in the room checked whether the message had got through by quizzing random prisoners. Only then would they let me continue teaching"This new silk road already connects Xinjiang very successfully with Africa, Asia and Europe. This mega-scale economic and geopolitical project will transport not just our goods, but great Chinese policies as well." The message to the prisoners was clear: any resistance to this vastly superior economic, political, and military power was futile. They reacted anxiously to the part about assimilation in Xinjiang and the timeframe it laid out.

During the question period, they raised their hands. "You promised to let us go within five or six months. Does this mean we'll be here for another ten years? Or: "What do we have to do if we want to get out before 2035? As usual, I had to translate for the guards before I was allowed to answer. "If you do everything you're told, stay submissive, and continue to eat pork and do everything the Party representatives command, then you'll get out more quickly Was that really the truth? There is no clear answer. In the five months I spent there, not a single prisoner was released. And afterwards, in Aksu, I never heard of any friends or acquaintances being set free from a camp, even though most of the ones I knew had been locked up for years.

Even if a prisoner wasn't subsequently forced into slave labour, he or she would never be the same. With the best will in the world, I can't imagine that any of those maltreated people lived very long. The constant physical and psychological pressure would have scarred them to such an extent that they would have been incapable of feeling happiness during the brief time left to them. Their spirits broken, they were in a perpetual state of fear. Even a slightly raised voice set their hearts racing and made them uneasy.

Rampant malnutrition, abuse, infections, and medication meant that anyone who left those prison gates was deeply traumatised, with significant psychological and physical health problems. Many of them weren't themselves anymore; they were state-controlled robots.

Making the dead disappear

I've described one type of confidential document already - the type that ended up crumbling into ash. But some controversial subject matter wasn't intended for teaching, so they took a different approach. Not even the guards in the room were allowed to know what these documents contained, and thus one night I found myself standing motionless in a small office, silently reading Instruction 21.

Here, too, officers observed my facial expressions, trying to work out how I was reacting to the contents. But I'd learned my lesson. No matter how appalling the message, my face betrayed no response.

"All those who die in the camp must vanish without a trace. There it was, as plain as day, in bald, official jargon, as though they were talking about disposing of spoiled food. There should be no visible signs of torture on the bodies. When a prisoner was killed, or died in some other way, it had to be kept absolutely secret. Any evidence, proof, or documentation was to be immediately destroyed. Taking photos or video recordings of the corpses was strictly forbidden. Family members were supposed to be fobbed off with vague excuses as to the manner of death; and in certain cases, they explained, it was advisable simply never to mention they had died at all.

During my time at the camp, I didn't see them kill anybody, but I did know many people who disappeared. I saw people sprawled on the ground, close to death. The likelihood that human beings died at that camp is extremely high. Very few employees - only those with the appropriate level of dearance -- were told about the deaths and what caused them. Apart from them, no one was allowed to know a thing. It made sense to me that all this was kept from the prisoners. They could never be allowed to know that they might die at the camp - it might make them harder to control, or cause a mass panic. But why were they telling me? I looked up, bewildered. The officer held out a pen and paper. "sign this he ordered. By doing so, I confirmed receipt of the document and accepted responsibility for its contents.

If things went pear-shaped later on, they had my signature on a piece of paper they could use to hang me out to dry. I wasn't the one who was going to implement these orders- I was just an easily sacrificed pawn. In each of the camps, one person was required to draw up a daily report that was sent to Ürümqi. The city was the site of a secret central hub known as the "Integrated Joint Operations Platform', which gathered information on camps across the country. This included all the data on the prisoners, including DNA, passports, and ID numbers. The office also received instructions from Beijing, which it passed on to various other regions and camps. Once I had signed that directive about dealing with deaths, the officials would almost certainly have sent it to Urumqi.

Showering

After a while, the prisoners' clothes would stick to their bodies. They stank of sweat and dirt, but they were only allowed to wash once every month or two. As an employee, meanwhile, I was allowed to shower once a week or once a fortnight.

Two guards escorted me to the door with their automatic weapons. They would either wait there or come inside with me. The washroom was basic, with each shower separated from the main room by a curtain. I was always alone. No other women were present. Nobody was allowed to linger too close to me, and the water ran for no more than two minutes. I wondered whether the prisoners were allowed hot water, too. Probably not.

I didn't notice until later that the whole shower room was under CCTV surveillance. Once, when I was mopping the floor in the control room, where footage from all the cameras was playing on various screens, I saw two Chinese employees ogling naked girls and women. They were laughing loudly and cracking dirty jokes. "Take a look at that they guffawed. As I moved back and forth with my mop,

I watched as they zoomed in on particular body parts, focusing on their breasts and genitals. A few of the girls had clearly realised they were being filmed, because some of them only partially undressed and hurriedly washed their hair. The next time I was taken for a shower, I did my best to cover myself up. Cautiously raising my head, I examined the ceiling more closely, and noticed the camera lenses. They were so tiry it was easy to overlook them.

A list of the twenty-six most dangerous countries in the world

The next day in class', I was instructed to smear the USA - public enemy number one, as far as china is concerned. The Party had put together a list of twenty-one countries, sorted according to which ones were the most hostile to the People's Republic of China. No. 1: USA No. 2: Japan. Nos. 3 and 4: Germany and Kazakhstan, although I can't remember which order those last two were in. Anyone with contacts in these countries was considered an enemy of the state. The Party had made no secret of this list. They had used it as explicit justification for arrests.

I told the prisoners in glowing terms how "sacred and good" the Communist Party was, ending with how 'bad some of the European nations, and especially the USA, were. Any hardships experienced in China were the result of US policies directed against the Chinese people and designed to foment divisions, I explained, repeating what I had been told by the prison administration. Even if the Chinese tortured Muslims, the USA was ultimately to blame, because they were the ones who led people of other faiths to think incorrectly and act bady. This was the communist mindset. According to Beijing, Western-style democracy was a failed model descending into crisis and chaos.

Secret codes: first straw shoes, then leather shoes

Many nights, I received secret coded messages:
1. Deal with the 'straw shoes first and then the "leather shoes.
"Straw shoes" meant ordinary people, such as shepherds, farmers, and fishermen By "leather shoes" they meant government workers - for instance, those in administration, schools, and security agencies. "Dealing with the straw shoes" meant that indigenous groups had to be made Chinese first. Anyone who resisted or refused to play along would have their shoes removed" by force. That was the hidden meaning of this message.

I'm not 100 per cent sure why they used these secret codes. The Party follows its own logic. Maybe they didn't want everybody to be able to grasp the meaning straightaway? The messengers would deliver their communiques to a member of staff, who would then pass them on, creating a long chain of people with access to the information Because I was well educated and more able to interpret metaphors than most of the couriers, they evidently decided to communicate with me like this.

2. Categorise all households into three groups: 1. Main households; 2. Ordinary households; 3. Keliable households.
They were trying to establish levels of threat. "Reliable households were Chinese, and were left unmolested by the government. The other two households referred to Muslim minorities - those who, according to Beijing, required brainwashing. By ordinary households they meant families with maybe only one or two suspicious individuals. In a "main household on the other hand, everybody ended up in chains. After I had absorbed the content of the message, a staff member took out his lighter, and the document went up in flames.

The black room

During class", I noticed a number of prisoners groaning and scratching themselves until they bled. I couldn't tell if they were genuinely ill or had gone mad. As my mouth opened and closed - I was barely even listening to myself talk about our self-sacrificing patriarch Xi Jinping, who "passes on the warmth of love with his hands" - several of the students' collapsed unconscious and fell off their plastic chairs.

In threatening situations, human beings have a kind of switch in our brains that functions like a fuse in an electrical circuit. As soon as the level of anguish we're experiencing exceeds the capacity of our senses, we simply switch off to stop us going out of our minds with fear, we lose consciousness in extremis. When this happened, the guards would summon their colleagues outside, who rushed in, grabbed the unconscious person by both arms, and dragged them away like a doll, their feet trailing across the floor. But they didn't just take the unconscious, the sick, and the mad. Suddenly, the door would spring open, and heavily armed men would thunder into the room. For no reason at all. Sometimes it was simply because a prisoner hadn't understood one of the guard's orders, issued in Chinese.

These people were among the unluckiest in the camp. I could see in their eyes how they felt - that raging storm of pain and suffering. Hearing their screams and cries for help in the corridors afterwards made our blood freeze in our veins, and brought us to the verge of panic. They were drawn-out, constant, virtually unbearable. There was no more sorrowful sound. I Saw with my own eyes the various instruments of torture in the black room.

The chains on the wall. Many inmates, bound at the wrists and ankles, they strapped into chairs that had nails sticking out of the seats. Many of the people they tortured never came back out of that room-others stumbled out, covered in blood. Occasionally, the guards took me into the cells so I could translate for them. I saw prisoners sprawled on the floor, so dreadfully injured after being tortured that they were unable to stand. How do I know so much about the various implements in the black room? I was tortured there myself.

Conspiracy: my encounter with an elderly shepherd

One night in January 2018, a large group of new prisoners arrived. Among them was a Kazakh grandmother with a short grey braid, a simple shepherd from the mountains. You could tell that she had been snatched unexpectedly. The police hadn't even given her time to put on shoes. It was winter and very cold, yet she stood there in her socks. She was eighty-four years old. Desperate for help, the old lady was casting around in all directions.

When she saw my round face among the implacable chinese guards along the wall, she rushed over with her arms outstretched, threw them around me, and begged, "Please, you're a Kazakh, you must help me! Please save me! I'm innocent, I haven't done anything! Please save me!" It came out of nowhere. At that moment, I didn't know what to do. I stood there in shock. She cried, trembling with cold and fear. Perhaps I put my arms around her for a few seconds.

I don't really remember what I did - it all happened so fast. But my reaction was definitely perceived as a violation of the contract I'd signed. The next moment, the guards had torn the old lady off me and dragged me away. Into the black room: the only place on our floor where there were no cameras, so that there would be no evidence of the monstrous things that went on inside. I was suspected of conspiracy.

Where evil lives

The space, roughly twenty metres square, looked a bit like a darkroom. A messy black strip about thirty centimetres wide had been painted on the wall just above the floor, as though someone had smeared it with mud. In the middle was a table three or four metres long, crammed with all kinds of tools and torture devices. Tasers and police cudgels in various shapes and sizes: thick, thin, long, and short. Iron rods used to fix the hands and feet in agonising positions behind a person's back, designed to inflict the maximum possible pain.

The walls, too, were hung with weapons and implements that looked like they were from the Middle Ages. Implements used to pull out fingernails and toenails, and a long stick - a bit like a spear-that had been sharpened like a dagger at one end. They used it for jabbing into a person's flesh.

Along one side of the room was a row of chairs designed for different purposes. Electric chairs and metal chairs with bars and straps to stop the victim moving iron chairs with holes in the back so that the arms could be twisted back above the shoulder joint. My gaze wandered across the walls and floor. Rough cement. Grey and dirty, revolting and confusing - as though evil itself was squatting in that room, feeding on our pain. I was certain I would die before dawn.

Two men were standing in front of me. One wore a black facemask and lace-up boots. It was dear from his accent that he was Han Chinese, and he was in charge of the interrogation. The first sentence he bellowed at me, repeating it over and over, was: "What have you done wrong? They expected me to confess my guilt and make up a crime, even though I hadn't done anything. His Chinese colleague wore a policeman's uniform and no mask. He held a taser in his hand.

I was terrified they would strap me into the tiger chair" with the nails or cut me open with a scalpel, but they had chosen the electric chair. They placed a close-fitting metal rad over my body so that I could barely move. "What did the old shepherd say to you? Why did she act like that? Do you know her?" "She begged me to save her," I replied truthfully. On the one hand, I wanted to save myself, but on the other I wanted to help the old woman, so I didn't tell them she had also said she was innocent. None of the Chinese spoke Kazakh, so if I had translated that part for these torturers, they would have punished her even more harshly. People in that camp admitted guilt-- they didn't dispute it. Suddenly, my whole body was shaking and twitching as though it was no longer my own.

At the same time, blows started raining down. My head hanging, I saw the lace-up boots in front of my face. Slowly, very slowly, I raised my chin "You're a conspirator! You're lying," the masked man roared. Then they hit me on the shoulder, on the head, the hands, until I collapsed again. The longer it took me to answer or to confess my guilt, the more they upped the current. I had to tell them what they wanted to hear. "Yes, I know that woman from before. She asked me to make a phone call for her to let her relatives know that she left the door of her hut open..."Every sentence was a huge effort. My torturers had no humanity, no sympathy or emotion.

They were like rabid dogs on a chain. Vicious and wild. Those men didn't see us as people - we were more like test animals or lab rats. I kept losing consciousness because of the electric shocks. It was obvious how much satisfaction they took in the suffering of others. They laughed while they were doing it.

The more they heard me whimpering with pain, the more clearly I saw the pleasure on the face of the unmasked man, and the more avidly they tortured me. You must not show your pain. I heard the voice of the mysterious healer in the taxi echo through my head, mingled with that of my father. It came from far, far away. Even when everything felt numb, when the blood was throbbing in my ears and the world dwindled into a greyish-black fog, I forced my heavy tongue to slur through the same words: "I know that woman from before ..." Each time, I tried to lift my head and let out as few moans of pain as possible.

After a while they lost interest, and I was spared further punishment. Three hours later, I was flat on the floor of my cell. Instantly, everything turned deep black. It was like night had mantled me in a black shroud. Yet, suddenly, there was a banging at the door. "Get up! Every movement was like a knife through my body, but somehow I had to get to my feet and do my job. Otherwise I'd give them another reason to torture me. And that would have meant death.

Endurance

That night in the black room changed me. It left me a bundle of nerves. I felt like an alien: disconnected, different. My footsteps were heavy, as though the ground was trying to swallow me up; 1 barely had the strength to lift my feet. The pain was past bearing. Yet I continued teaching. There was a din in my head, as though a pneumatic drill was boring through it.

The first time a member of staff in the classroom confronted the old shepherd with her crime - "You're a spy you made an international call on your phone'-she bitterly denied it. So they dragged that eighty-four-year-old woman into the black room and pulled out her finger nails. Afterwards, when they asked her why she was there, she struggled to form the words in clumsy Chinese, 'I called abroad on my phone." The woman had never even owned a mobile phone, let alone knew how to use one.

As an additional punishment for my unauthorised contact with the old woman, I went two days without food. No matter how little life was left in me, I never lost hope of escaping that godforsaken place. Never! To keep myself going, at night I used to imagine going for a walk with my children in Kazakhstan.

By now, I hadn't seen Ukilay or Ulagat for a year and a half. The separation weighed heavily on me, like someone was pressing a fist into my heart. Sometimes I'd toss and turn at night, until my father's voice reached me. Stay strong, my daughter. "Yes," I replied, and lay still-only my lips were moving "If everything goes well, father, in the future I will travel to other countries with my loved ones and experience precious moments of freedom." Dying wasn't an option, because I wanted to see my children again at least once more. And I was determined to escape the camp somehow so I could tell the outside world about the heinous atrocities being perpetrated. In a normal prison, you're detained on the basis of a court judgement. You do your time and then you're released. In the camp, however, you never knew whether you were getting out, even though you were innocent.

This process of extra-judicial arrests and systematic internment is one of the greatest crimes against humanity committed in the modern era Month after month, what kept me alive was the hope that there would be an outcry in the free world as soon as the truth about the horrors in East Turkestan came to light. Liberal democracies would realise the danger they themselves were in. And I imagined other heads of state intervening in Beijing's inhumane policies and making the world a better place once more. These were the thoughts that kept me going.

Preventing disease while cranking out sick people

Back on sentry duty one night, I saw a long queue of prisoners outside the medical area. "It's just a vaccination program!" the nurses assured them, so that people wouldn't hyperventilate or lash out. A doctor chimed in, 'It's simply a preventative measure to stop you passing on infectious diseases." That was as precise as they got. Nurses and doctors reached down and gave the inmates an injection in the upper arm. Some of them resisted, screaming with fear - "I don't want any injections!" -- but two medics held them down while the third gave them the jab. Afterwards, the prisoners who'd fought back were beaten by the guards in the black room.

If they were genuinely trying to stop the spread of disease, then why didn't they take much simpler and more efficient measures? Why didn't they disinfect the cells? Why did they jam so many people into a tiny space twenty-four hours a day, surrounded by urine and excrement? And why were they being given this drug in their upper arms? Why not other body parts? As a doctor, I knew that jabs were often given that way to children to prevent illnesses. But this wasn't necessary with adults, since they didn't offer the same protection.

So why were all the inmates being forced to have this "vaccination? There were so many sick people at that camp. The administration knew exactly the state of each prisoner's health, because they kept such meticulous medical records. Why did they have to be "vaccinated again nearly every month if they really wanted to help those who were urwell, why did they refuse them treatment and palliative care?

Why didn't they help the woman who had had brain surgery before her arrest and was now virtually driven mad by the pain? Why did they let a young diabetic woman spend the whole day on the bare floor of her cell, drifting in and out of consciousness? Because they refused to give her medication, by now she was suffering from the worst form of diabetes, and could no longer stand upright. I don't know what happened to her. When I left, she was still lying there.

Medical annihilation

After a while, they prescribed me medication, too. "It's good for you and helps ward off illness," the doctor told me. From then on, I had swallow a large tablet once a week, watched by the nurse they called Xiao chen. What else could I do? The first time I took it, I had terrible stomach problems and nausea.

After the second one, too, I found myself constantly battling the urge to vomit. The young chinese nurse adjusted her camouflage cap and eyed me sympathetically. She was in charge of handing out the medication. She had a slim figure, a long face, and a strong character. The next time I was standing in front of her in the dinner queue, she hissed into my ear, "No more swallowing! Poisonous!" The next time I was in front of her and the camera, I only acted like I was taking the tablet.

She confirmed on her sheet of paper that I had taken it, while I unobtrusively wiped my mouth and dropped it into the bin while I was tidying up. The administration did its best to stop employees fraternising or developing personal relationships - they didn't want people working together too long and becoming friends - so they were constantly reassigning staff.

But the Chinese nurse who helped me had been on my floor since my arrival and had known me for weeks, because I often sorted out the medical files and lent her a hand. Realising that there were a few individuals among the Chinese staff who had the courage to allow themselves human emotions made my heart race with joy.

Perhaps it was she, too, who had stopped me being vaccinated like the others? But they didn't stop at giving us only one tablet and one vaccination they prescribed numerous drugs. Some prisoners clamped their mouths shut out of fear, and others whimpered that they didn't want any medicine, but nobody was let off. The medics would forcibly open their prisoners' jaws and give them the drug.

After that, many of the women stopped having periods. Maybe they wanted to make us infertile, so we couldn't reproduce? After I'd observed this phenomenon, the nurse confirmed it, telling me, "You won't have any more children. Other ingredients turned the inmates into apathetic zombies as soon as they'd taken the drug. A person like that feels no longing, no longer thinks of their family or of a free, normal life. Then there were pharmaceuticals that permanently poisoned our bodies.

Once, as I was tidying up the medical bay and picking up rubbish Xiao chen was walking past me and asked brusquely, "Can I throw this piece of paper in?" Before she moved on, she gave me a tiny kick. I got the message, but I had to be careful before simply fishing it out, because there was a guard in the room. As I took out the bag of rubbish, I subtly picked up the small rolled-up note and hid it in my shoe, smuggling it into my cell that night. Lying on my plastic mattress, I pulled the blanket over my head, which I often did because of the bright lights.

My fingers trembling slightly, I unrolled the note and read it. "Don't take any medication or injections! Extremely dangerous They weren't experimenting on us. They didn't just want to make us numb or permanently insane. They were trying to annihilate us. I put the note in my mouth, chewed, and swallowed.

Even worse for women

Every day, we heard piercing screams coming from the black room. Every day, we hardened a little more. Torture has broken many strong men, but in the camp it was women and girls who had it worst. When I was working as a sentry or a cleaner in the evenings, I often noticed the guards fetching the youngest and prettiest girls from the cells, most of them eighteen or nineteen years old.

How were those helpless creatures supposed to defend themselves? If they had screamed or cried, they would have been tormented in the black room afterwards. The high-ranking employees had free reign over our bodies. Authorities at the highest levels in Beijing had given them limitless power. They were allowed not only to brutalise the prisoners, but to kill them. While I was cleaning their offices or drawing up my reports, I listened attentively as members of staff discussed the new guidelines around torture, repeatedly reassuring each other, "It's a good thing we've got it in black and white. Now no one can be punished for torture.

Two of them asked again, "Are you absolutely sure? "Yeah, yeah, we're protected. Nothing's going to happen to us. We can do whatever we want to them." When I heard conversations like that, I always tried to catch as much as possible so I understood exactly what was going on. These men were merciless and unafraid. Only people who aren't afraid of retribution are that cruel.

No court would ever hold the murderers acting out their sadistic fantasises in the camps to account.

The guards didn't bring the girls they'd taken back to the classroom until the following day. They looked pale and scared. Some had abrasions and swollen, blinking red eyes. Despite their exhaustion, you could tell how aghast they were and what horrors they'd suffered. One of these girls, who had only been brought back half an hour before the lesson began, seemed completely absent. Her arms hung limply by her sides.

She was unable to sit on her plastic stool or pick up her pen, so she slipped sideways off the stool and lay motionless on the floor. "Sit down!" the guard barked at her, but she simply could not. I was ordered to give her a warning and addressed her loudly by her number. "You, girl number .... sit down."No reaction. She merely replied with a single sentence: "I'm not a girl anymore."

Then the guards took her into the black room. You never knew in the morning how the day would end. You never knew if you'd be the same person that night. How the day's torment might change you. What things would get tangled up like barbed wire in your head, lacerating your brain overnight.

The final test

At the end of January 2018, they unexpectedly summoned about one hundred prisoners into a large room I'd never been in before. Lots of employees were already inside, sitting in semi-circles in several rows of plastic chairs. I stood at the back. Like the other prisoners,

I had no idea what the meeting was about.
A man in a black mask and lace-up leather boots stepped into the middle of the semi-circle and called one of the girls forward to confess her crime, surrounded by onlookers. She hadn't been there long: she was a little plump, and shaved bald like everyone else. She was maybe twenty or twenty-one years old.

As instructed, she made her confession in Chinese: "When I was in Year Nine, I texted a friend on my mobile phone to wish her a blessed holiday. It was a religious occasion and a crime. I will never do it again!" All our lives, it had been normal for us Muslims to send each other greetings on holidays. It's no different from Christians wishing each other "Happy Easter" or "Merry Christmas". Farty officials had found this years-old text while checking her phone.

"Lie down!" ordered one of the masked men.

The onlookers craned their necks in surprise. What was going on? The plump girl stared at them wide-eyed, then obeyed the order uncertainly, while two other masked men dosed in.

One of them tore off her trousers with a jerk, then unzipped his own.

"No!" screamed the girl, horrified, and tried to jump up, fending off the man with her hands, but a moment later he forced her to the ground and pinned her down with his whole weight. Panicking frantically, she stared at the onlookers and screamed,

"Help me! Please help me!" while the man above her started to pant and wheeze like an animal. At first, no one in the audience moved a muscle. We were frozen solid. Like naked people in ice. My temples were throbbing; my mind raced. Run, Sayragul, run away! My eyes flitted desperately to and fro, scanning for help, for an escape route, but there was nothing but closed doors. And everywhere the guards, watching our faces like hunters on the prowl. A few of the onlookers collapsed and cried out loud. Instantly, they were grabbed, still in their chains, and dragged away.

Suddenly, I understood why we were there. It was a test! They wanted to see whether we had been 'curedof our 'sick religious thinking" and brought into line with the Party. "Help me! Please help me!" Nothing was worse than being a helpless bystander witnessing this deranged torture. It felt like having a limb amputated without anaesthetic.

But anyone who revealed their true feelings had proven, from the camp administration's perspective, that they still harboured national or religious feelings towards their Kazakh compatriots. Stay calm, Sayragul, stay calm...

We were supposed to watch unmoved as the young woman's head whipped back and forth, frantic with pain and fear. When the first man was finished and pulled his trousers back up, like a hyena having eaten its fill, the second masked man set upon the abused body on the floor. Some of the male prisoners couldn't stand it anymore.

Leaping up from their seats, they shouted at the top of their lungs, "Why are you torturing us like this? Don't you have hearts? Don't you have daughters of your own?" Immediately, the guards grabbed them and led them away, while the girl screamed until she was empty, hollowed out inside, while the third man forced himself between her bloodied thighs.

A drop of sweat beaded on my forehead. By now, the girl had stopped screaming: all we heard was her rattling breath. She was their prey. They could destroy her if they felt like it. Some people couldn't bear to watch anymore and lowered their heads. The armed guards led away more than a few of the inmates. All of them disappeared. After that, I couldn't sleep.

I found no rest. Every night, I pulled the blanket over my head and buried my face in the thin plastic pillow so that no one would see me breathing jerkily. I couldn't think clearly. As soon as my eyes closed, I started awake once more.

And I found myself staring into that panicking face, hearing those screams. Please help me! Why won't you help me! But no one could help her.

No one. Even after I was free, I couldn't bring myself to tell that story for months, because talking about it made me feel like it was happening all over again. As long as I live, I will never forget it. I simply cannot come to terms with it.

A month and a halflater, something else unexpected happened.

CHAPTER 7: Better to Die Escaping Than Die in the Camp

March 2018: released

At midnight, I stood like a statue in the row of other sentries along the wall, watching out of the corner of my eye as several officers walked purposefully across the hall and disappeared into the office where the police had taken me on my first night. After a while, a guard emerged and ordered me inside. What did they want with me? I was always expecting the worst.

An unfamiliar officer sat hunched over the desk. He barked at me, "Your work here is over! You are going home today and will continue your job as head teacher at the kindergarten. You will tell your employees that you have been on a retraining program in central China" Going home? I didn't believe a single word that man said. Probably they were taking me to another camp.

He stared at my motionless face, his eyes narrow. "You will never tell anyone outside about this camp. Don't forget about your contract. The document I had originally signed lay in plain view on his desk like a warning. He was pressing his finger so hard against it that the nail went white. "Understood "Understood," I replied, adopting a military voice.

Then he waved me out of the door like an irritating fly. "Hand in your uniform, put your own clothes on, and pack your things! They would never release a witness like me. How is this going to end, Sayragul I wondered. I barely had time to change and get my phone back before they pulled a black hood over my head. Just as we had done when I arrived in November of the previous year, we passed through several checkpoints.

Several doors opened, and for a few seconds I felt the warm spring air on my hands as they closed the car door and two police officers got onto the back seat beside me. I had never seen the exterior of the building. To this day, I don't know exactly where it was, but there are maps and satellite images that prove the existence of several camps in this area. I assumed they were going to kill me at the next street corner. But before they did, they'd probably rape me first. When they pulled the hood off my head, I could scarcely believe my eyes.

It was the end of March, maybe four in the morning, and I was standing next to my house. "Tomorrow you will go to work, like always," the driver ordered me, following up with a threat. "Think of what's in your contract." I wasn't supposed to tell anyone what I had seen and heard. As though in a trance, I walked into the apartment, sat down on a chair in the dark kitchen, and remained there until dawn. Unanswered questions were whirring around in my mind, making me dizzy. What's going to happen now I was still incredibly tense, and couldn't shake the suspicion that something awful was about to happen. When I saw myself in the mirror next morning - for the first time in months - I was shocked. A pale mask made of skin and bone stared back at me. My collarbones were poking out like a skeleton's. I quickly put on some make-up, lining my eyes black and applying red lipstick, and chose my best clothes. My employees had to believe I'd just returned to the province from a big city, just like the Party had been pretending all along. I couldn't let anyone figure out where I'd really been, or I was a dead woman.

"How did you get so thin?"

"Oh, wonderful, you're back at last!" My colleagues hurried over and clustered around me, thrilled. The younger girls especially were over the moon. Which city were you in? What was it like there? Was it interesting?" At the same time they eyed me, worried: my clothes were practically hanging off me. "How did you get so thin?

I waved their concerns aside. "oh, I didn't have much time to eat, there was so much to do ... 1 had lost more than ten kilograms. For a moment, I had to brace myself against the wall, because my vision grew dim. But I did my best to hide my dizziness and weakness, brushing them off by saying I was exhausted after my long journey and had a lot of work waiting for me at the office. "Later we can sit down and have a quiet chat while I tell you all where I've been," I told them, explaining that I'd had enough for one day.

Next morning, too, I went to work, greeting everyone with a smile as before-but my head felt like it was packed in cotton wool. Along the way, I bumped into a Kazakh who had once held a senior position at the school. He shook his head sadly. "How do you manage to keep going? If I were you I'd have thrown myself off a three-storey building ages ago. Our kindergarten had three storeys. He probably guessed, like everyone else, that I'd been in a camp and was struggling.

That afternoon, a group of people from the education authority appeared in my office. One of them informed me that I was being removed from my post with immediate effect."You will go home,"they told me, "and await further instructions. The rest of the day, my head was pounding. Had someone denounced me? What were they playing at? I scrutinised my every word and action in my mind, over and over, beset by a nagging fear that someone had found a mistake I had missed.

They have nothing to accuse me of, I told myself and settled down to wait resignedly. About 9.00 pm, two policemen barged into my apartment, put a hood over my head, and bundled me into a car. Shortly afterwards, I found myself back in a cell at the police station, staring at a locked, barred door and the uniformed guard behind it, who leaned against the wall in his chair for about an hour until a second man in uniform joined him. They planted themselves in front of the bars. The newcomer asked the questions; the other kept his mouth shut. Probably, both were from the secret police. This time, I was sure they'd lock me up with the other prisoners in the camp.

2018 is the year when we start to purge those with two faces," the man began. Meaning people like me. "You are one of the worst traitors! Despite all the trust we have placed in you, you are wearing a mask. On one side you show a good chinese face, but on the other you've kept your evil Kazakh one." What had I done wrong? What had I overlooked? I was flabbergasted. "To this day you still have not recalled your family from Kazakhstan or divorced your husband. This proves that you still feel great affection for our enemies abroad." I would never have let them force me into a divorce. And even if I had, they still wouldn't have left me alone.

For half an hour, I tried frenziedly to defend myself. I've had no contact with my family. And I don't understand what you're accusing me of..." The officer's face twisted, as though he was looking at a cockroach. "How could you do such a vile thing to us? As a Party member and a head teacher in such a senior role?" He threw up his hands in a dramatic gesture. "You urgently need re-education. It will take up to three years to restore order to your sick mind." I was instructed to use the next few days to hand over my work at the kindergarten to my replacements and familiarise them with all the paperwork. "Get your affairs in order. Then await our instructions. You will be picked up." A punch to the gut? No, I had ceased to feel anything. At least, nothing but instinctive resistance, wild defiance, and profound disgust for the Party and the government, who wanted to "heal" us by getting us out of the way. By now I knew. If I went into a camp, I wasn't getting out. I would die there. Every night, I stumbled into the shower. Knees, feet, back-everything ached. Then there was the racing heart, the fear, the shortness of breath. Whenever the lights of passing police cars coloured the walls blue, I froze. It wasn't that I'd come back from the camp with a single, identifiable illness. I was simply broken. As the hot water rained down, something clicked. This isn't a nightmare, Sayragul. This is reality.

Better to die escaping than die in the camp

One night, I found myself moving from room to room like a sleepwalker. In the children's room, I opened the wardrobes, took out a few items of clothing, and pressed them to my face. A sharp, caustic sensation crept up my throat, and I began to cry. Loudly and helplessly. Slumping onto the bed, my fists clenched, I curled into a ball and lung to the children's clothes with both hands, sobbing.

It was the first time in so long I'd allowed myself to show my emotions. Everything I'd so painstakingly repressed over the past few months came pouring out. All those terrible images bubbling up like gas from a swamp. The prisoners' shackled feet, their tortured bodies, the girl's panicked, wide-open eyes. Please help me! I screamed and sobbed until I was numb. By morning, my tears had run dry, and I had made a decision. I was fleeing to Kazakhstan. I knew, of course, that from this point on every step I took might mean instant transportation to a camp, but I preferred to die escaping than in there. I had to be quick. Quicker than the security agents in pursuit.

thers had tried to reach me several times over the past few months. Nobody in my family knew I was in a camp. Like the others, they'd assumed I was in another city, retraining. As much as I missed them, I couldn't call them back. I was desperate to keep them from getting into trouble because of me. get my passport back. But I had no idea where they had taken all the documents they'd collected from teachers. I went to the police station the next day and asked, but they mere Then I remembered a close Chinese friend who might know.

I called him straightaway. "Do you know how I can get my passport back?" He muttered in a panicked voice, "Don't talk to me about stuff like that! Otherwise they'll chop my head off first, then yours."Beep, beep, beep... he'd hung up. Fine. I'd have to do without the passport. I'd come up with some way to cross the border. The main thing was not to waste time, and to get away as soon as possible.

A neighbour ran up to me when she saw me pulling into my driveway after work. "I still haven't had any news about my children. I've been trying to get a visitor's permit for six months," she told me, wiping the tears from her eyes with her sleeve. Her sons had been incarcerated since 2010. She pressed a handkerchief to her face. "I just want to know if they're still alive." What was I supposed to say? I laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. I'm sure they'll be released soon." But the truth was that we both knew better.

Scarcely had I clased the door behind me than my phone rang. It was a Kazakh friend who worked with the police. "I need you to lend me some money. About 30 yuan. Can you? I was taken aback by his unexpected request and the small sum. "I really need the money. "Histone of voice brooked no opposition. "I'm on my way to another city right now, but we can meet briefly."

I waited for him on the outskirts of the city, as agreed. When the young man arrived, he was behind the wheel of a police car, with two Chinese colleagues who spoke not a word of Kazakh chatting on the back seat. Leaning casually out of the window on his elbow, he beckoned me over and took the envelope of money. As he did so, he whispered, "In the next few days seventy people will be arrested and taken to a camp. You're third on the list."He had simply wanted to warn me.