美国国家公共电台 NPR Names Written In Blood And Rust: Documenting Syria's Disappeared

 

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

By many measures, Mansour Omari should not be a free man. The Syrian human rights activist¹ spent years documenting the many abuses of the Syrian government, keeping track of the tens of thousands of Syrians who have disappeared in the civil war and ended up in secret prisons. Then in 2012, Mansour Omari became one of those prisoners. He was held for nearly a year, starved and tortured.

MANSOUR OMARI: For example, in the morning you'd get two, sometimes three olives.

MARTIN: Three olives. That was your breakfast?

OMARI: And half a bread or something. We were getting thin. Me, for example, I lost 35 kilos. You turn into a skeleton inside, and your skin is covered with wounds because of the beatings. Our gums were bleeding all the time. We never saw the sun for nine months.

MARTIN: Even so he kept working, documenting the names of the other prisoners, their names written in blood on scraps² of cloth. With help from the U.N., Mansour was released. When he left, he took those pieces of cloth with him. The fabric³ is now kept in Plexiglas boxes, part of a new exhibit here in Washington at the Holocaust⁴ Memorial Museum that opened this week.

Has it been strange for you to just walk through that exhibit and hear your voice coming out of those speakers?

OMARI: It's emotional, really, and overwhelming.

MARTIN: I met Mansour Omari in a quiet back corner of the museum's theater. He is soft spoken, recounting the details of his imprisonment⁵ with a forced detachment.

OMARI: I couldn't memorize the names of all the people with me, and that's how we started to think to find something to write with and something to write on. After many attempts, one of us took a piece of plastic bag, nylon, and he went to the bathroom area and came back with red liquid in it, and it was his blood. He squeezed his gum and spit it.

MARTIN: And that was the liquid that you could use?

OMARI: Yeah, exactly. We tried the liquid on a piece of shirt and it didn't fade away. Later we also mixed it with rust⁶ so we got perfect ink, really. And we used a sharp chicken bone to dip in the liquid and write the names.

MARTIN: There's something optimistic about the idea of collecting those names, though.

OMARI: Exactly. Hope, you know, hope is the secret for Syrians. I think with all the disasters going on in Syria, with all the killings⁷, the bombings, what's keeping them alive is hope.

MARTIN: Can you describe how you hid the pieces of cloth? How were you able to keep them from the prison guards?

OMARI: We thought of many ideas, and at the end we settled on hiding them in the cuffs⁸ and collars of a shirt.

MARTIN: One particular shirt?

OMARI: In one shirt, yeah. We took a shirt. One of the group, he had a dress shop and he knew how to...

MARTIN: Sew.

OMARI: ...Sew. He plucked a few threads of this collar and cuffs, and he inserted those shirt pieces. And the same threads, he got them back inside the same holes.

MARTIN: The prisoners devised a plan. Whoever was released first would wear the shirt and smuggle⁹ the names out. After nine months, the guards came to the prison door and called out Mansour Omari's name.

OMARI: I just remember it was - I don't know how to describe it. It was a really emotional moment. They were saying to me, of course, please tell the world what we are suffering. They had hope. They had hope that if the world knew what they are suffering, the world would move. They believe in humanity and the values. They think if that the world knew exactly what they are suffering, the world would want to stand and look. The world would help. I don't know what to tell them now, of course, after what happened in Syria. And nobody's doing anything, but...

MARTIN: So you walked out of there with a lot of pressure on you.

OMARI: Yeah. Yeah, it was many feelings, mixed feelings. I was scared because I'm wearing the shirt and I don't know if I will be searched, one thing. I was saying goodbye to my friends. I spent a long time with them. And I was feeling guilty also somehow because I'm taken out and they're not. So it was very - a lot of feelings I couldn't handle.

MARTIN: What were the conversations like when you started contacting the families of the men whose names you had documented?

OMARI: Actually, I couldn't imagine that it would be so painful to contact mothers and wives and brothers and fathers. Each time I'd locate a family, the first thing was to build a trust because the family don't know who Mansour is.

MARTIN: Right.

OMARI: And why are you contacting us? Maybe you are intelligence - because we have this culture of fear inside Syria. After building the trust, I start to tell them the conditions in the detention¹⁰. Many of them, it was the first time they knew anything about their sons, and they don't believe me because it was a shock for them. It's, like, been maybe years they didn't hear anything about your sons, and I come, like, out of nowhere and telling them, hi, I was with your son, and he's alive. And that was shocking for them, of course.

MARTIN: Do you know if any of those men survived?

OMARI: Out of the 82 people, I now confirmed the news about 11 of them only. And those 11, four of them are dead. And the others are either released or sent to central prisons. That means better prisons. The others, we don't know anything about them.

MARTIN: Mansour tells me that after traveling so far with those pieces of fabric, after living with them for so long, their meaning has changed.

OMARI: First I was thinking of them as names, mere¹¹ information. But later, the relation really developed. Those are not information anymore for me. Those are souls of people. Each name represents a soul of a detainee.

MARTIN: Do you feel like you did what you promised you would do, even if those people are not here till this day, you gave voice to their experience, you named them?

OMARI: In part, in part. When I came today and I walked into the exhibition, I directly remembered their words to me. They wanted the world to know their situation, to know what they are suffering. And after all these years of working, for me it's I fulfilled a part of my promise that your story will be told.

(SOUNDBITE OF NABIL AZZAM SONG)

MARTIN: Syrian human rights activist and former prisoner, Mansour Omari.

(SOUNDBITE OF NABIL AZZAM SONG)

1 activist   

n.活动分子，积极分子

参考例句：

• He's been a trade union activist for many years.多年来他一直是工会的积极分子。
• He is a social activist in our factory.他是我厂的社会活动积极分子。

2 scraps   

油渣

参考例句：

• Don't litter up the floor with scraps of paper. 不要在地板上乱扔纸屑。
• A patchwork quilt is a good way of using up scraps of material. 做杂拼花布棉被是利用零碎布料的好办法。

3 fabric   

n.织物，织品，布；构造，结构，组织

参考例句：

• The fabric will spot easily.这种织品很容易玷污。
• I don't like the pattern on the fabric.我不喜欢那块布料上的图案。

4 holocaust   

n.大破坏；大屠杀

参考例句：

• The Auschwitz concentration camp always remind the world of the holocaust.奥辛威茨集中营总是让世人想起大屠杀。
• Ahmadinejad is denying the holocaust because he's as brutal as Hitler was.内贾德否认大屠杀，因为他像希特勒一样残忍。

5 imprisonment   

n.关押，监禁，坐牢

参考例句：

• His sentence was commuted from death to life imprisonment.他的判决由死刑减为无期徒刑。
• He was sentenced to one year's imprisonment for committing bigamy.他因为犯重婚罪被判入狱一年。

6 rust   

n.锈；v.生锈；(脑子)衰退

参考例句：

• She scraped the rust off the kitchen knife.她擦掉了菜刀上的锈。
• The rain will rust the iron roof.雨水会使铁皮屋顶生锈。

7 killings   

谋杀( killing的名词复数 )； 突然发大财，暴发

参考例句：

• His statement was seen as an allusion to the recent drug-related killings. 他的声明被视为暗指最近与毒品有关的多起凶杀案。
• The government issued a statement condemning the killings. 政府发表声明谴责这些凶杀事件。

8 cuffs   

n.袖口( cuff的名词复数 )v.掌打，拳打( cuff的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• a collar and cuffs of white lace 带白色蕾丝花边的衣领和袖口
• The cuffs of his shirt were fraying. 他衬衣的袖口磨破了。

9 smuggle   

vt.私运；vi.走私

参考例句：

• Friends managed to smuggle him secretly out of the country.朋友们想方设法将他秘密送出国了。
• She has managed to smuggle out the antiques without getting caught.她成功将古董走私出境，没有被逮捕。

10 detention   

n.滞留，停留；拘留，扣留；(教育)留下

参考例句：

• He was kept in detention by the police.他被警察扣留了。
• He was in detention in connection with the bribery affair.他因与贿赂事件有牵连而被拘留了。

11 mere   

adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过

参考例句：

• That is a mere repetition of what you said before.那不过是重复了你以前讲的话。
• It's a mere waste of time waiting any longer.再等下去纯粹是浪费时间。