The Ghosts of Fara'a

by nora barrows-friedman

i have almost no words. can’t really articulate yet what i saw, but i’ll try.

the ghosts were visible, audible, tangible. in the burning sun, they assembled in particulate matter and tangled behind ears, through hair, sweeping up my arm as i tried to hold the microphone up to capture the story of a man who was once a child who was five times sent to this place -- this black place, he said -- over the course of several years, beginning 20 years ago.

this is the place where we were blindfolded and handcuffed, he said. a small white hallway bearing the original blue paint through ragged scuff marks. it was all painted blue when the israelis used this place--this black place--as a full-on torture center for palestinian children.

and this was the place where we took clothes from a box, all blue jumpsuits like in guantanamo. some were dirty and some were clean. there was no size we could choose. i was fourteen.

next, we stood in line for hours waiting to see the “doctor,” he says. we followed a red line that took us to the doctor’s office. we stood for hours under the sun or the rain until our name was called. we were made to undress completely. there were female israeli soldiers behind the glass watching us. we were asked by the doctor what kinds of illnesses we had, whether we had had any surgeries or treatments for anything. i had abdominal surgery as a child and still had a scar over my stomach. i figured out later that the doctor told the interrogators what my weak spots were exactly, so that they could beat me in the places that hurt the most, like my abdomen. they used this kind of information to break the children, to find out their weaknesses and use that information during torture.

next we were led into a courtyard, and forced to stand against a wall with rough stones, with our faces toward the wall. an israeli soldier would shout at us in hebrew, which we didn’t understand. we figured out that he was shouting at us to tell him our names. i said “raed.” and i was beaten against the wall and given a number -- in hebrew -- instead of my name. my face was beaten against a wall and we had to remember this number instead of our name.

we sometimes were made to sit on a concrete bench, blindfolded and hands and feet tied with plastic ties. if you struggled with your hands, the ties would get tighter and sometimes our wrists bled or the circulation was cut off and our hands would swell up, he says. there is one remaining concrete bench and he demonstrates how the children were forced to sit there, sometimes for days on end, he says, during the blistering heat or during the freezing cold and rain.

now, raed says, we go to the x’s. the x’s are where they put children in a sort of confinement -- they were “put away” for an indefinite amount of time. we went away and didn’t know when we were coming back, he says. the x’s are about 12 rooms, each one 4 feet by 12 feet, and a tiny window. he says that he stayed here, everyone stayed here at some point, for months at a time, with six to eight other boys in one room. no toilet, just a bucket that would regularly get tripped over and spill its fetid contents. every day, if they were lucky, the boys had one minute to empty the bucket and return back to their x.

we marked the passage of time on the wall. everyone had a different system of counting the days. we scratched drawings and games into the wall.

we could hear the sounds of the generator outside. we could hear the sounds of the adan [call to prayer] from the local mosque. we were disoriented and couldn’t breathe in the x’s. there is still the heavy iron door. this sound we still can’t get out of our heads. this was the sound of the x’s.

this wall was where children were forced into metal boxes and repeatedly tortured. 3-walled metal cabinets, about 2 feet by 2 feet and six feet tall, were lined up against this wall. children were put inside. they scratched their names into the plaster. they scratched their village or city names into the plaster. israelis would enforce sleep deprivation for these kids in the boxes, kicking in the door when the child tried to sleep. or throwing rocks on the top to startle a child. in the blistering heat and the chilly winter. music was turned up full blast and only 30-second snippets of a song was played over and over again. sometimes animal sounds were played. this is where the will was broken, torn, smashed, cracked. for days and days on end.

next. the interrogation center. here is where children were tortured and beaten and manipulated into confessing things that they did not do. israeli interrogators would dress in traditional Palestinian clothes, they would speak perfect Arabic. they would put posters on the wall of Palestinian leaders and weapons. M16s, kalashnikovs, Ak-47s. tanks and jeeps and rifles and molotov cocktails on the wall. they would play good cop-bad cop, get the kid to trust them after days of torture and see if they would either confess to something, like a political affiliation, or if they could break them enough to transform these kids into collaborators, who would then work with the israelis to manipulate their fellow prisoners into doing the same.

how do people come back from this? what cellular transformation occurs that allow these former prisoners, these adults now walking around, living their lives as normally as possible in an audaciously abnormal situation, a life beseiged from day one under this occupation and ethnic cleansing project, memories crisp and clear like it was yesterday of being beaten and tortured and humiliated and broken?

how does one come back? and keep waiting for justice, an explanation for their recurring nightmares, for the wasted time and heartbreak, for the inability to trust?

we were broken here, raed says. this is the black place. under a vivid blue sky, with no breeze to sweep the scorching sunlight from his skin.

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Nora Barrows-Friedman is a co-producer of Flashpoints on Pacifica Radio. She blogs at www.norabf.com.