By: Nasrin Parvaz

Denial

I heard about denial of the Holocaust, but I never understood it well, till I saw a DVD about a museum in Iran called Admonitory. In Farsi it’s called the Ebrat Museum of Iran and it has its own website. The film shows the building from inside. Then it takes you to the other rooms which were used as torture chambers or dormitories to keep prisoners. Its name during monarchy, when it was a detention centre, is bold. It shows how the Islamists were tortured there before they came to power. It gives you an overview of the life of those kept in the prison or museum. It shows you the way they tortured prisoners. The film shows you the different kinds of torture that men had to endure. It was made for Reza Shah by Germans in 1937, as part of army building. Then in 1971 it became a detention centre for political prisoners.

The museum shows the life of this building from the beginning up to the time when the Islamic regime took power. But nothing is said about its use during the Islamic regime. It states how severe tortures were used during the Shah’s time to extract information from prisoners. Though showing the names and pictures of some of the prisoners of that time, it fails to show or exhibit the names of all the prisoners. Because many of them were not religious, and therefore should not be mentioned.

However the use of this building as a prison was not stopped by Islamists taking power. They don’t say what has been going on in this building since they came to power, till now that they have made it a museum. Contrary to what they tend to show, it was used in a more severe form by Islamists. As soon as the Islamic regime came to power this building became one of the most useful prisons for them, because it is and was in the middle of Tehran and people were arrested for their opposition to the regime and were taken to prison near to their homes. There was though a difference in their use of this prison by these two regimes. During Shah, prisoners were tortured in this prison to extract their information, but Islamists tortured prisoners there first for extracting information, then to make them penitent. Some of the TV confession shows which were broadcast during 1980s, were the result of torture in this prison.

I wonder how they could cover the blood stains on the walls and the handwriting and carving on entrances and exits of prisoners in each cell. How could they take away the smell of blood, the moaning that was locked there and the sweat from the walls of all those cells?

I was in this prison for nearly six months. I witnessed people who were tortured to death and now they wipe out part of the history. The history of this building, now museum, once prison during Shah’s time and during Islamists in power cannot be aborted.

It is not difficult to show the Islamic Holocaust in this prison when people wash the coating or the outer painting of the cells and corridors to see our marks with dates. The day will come when people will scratch the surface of these walls and see many scars on the walls with dates when the Islamists were in power. The dates of people’s arrests and their execution or the time they died under torture in this prison are during the very time of this regime.

If you wash the coating of the cell number 8 on the first floor, you’ll see my drawing of a tulip that has two flowers. One that is bending under its weight and its petals are falling, and another that is just blossoming! You may also smell the infection of people’s feet due to the torture, specially that mother who could not walk due to infection. If you keep your silence you may hear the cry of a five-year-old boy who grabbed his mother’s feet and cried loud every time his mother was taken to interrogations.

Each cell of this prison has many stories of resistance during the Islamists’ time in power. The regime can re-write the history, but people’s history is written by people. There are many prison memoirs of Islamic prisons where the name of this prison is mentioned. The regime will say they are lies, and they now say the same about the Holocaust in Germany. However, their denial is not due to shame, because they are doing the same in Iran at the moment, not only in prisons, but factories and other work places which are like prisons.

A few days ago the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad talked about the Holocaust saying that the killing is all a lie. Is his claim to cover the Iranian regime’s killing of people because of their belief? Or is it because of the killers are backing each other all over the world? After all this is another meaning of globalisation, that the torturers help each other whenever they need each other. When a regime like the Iranian regime is trying to white-wash the crime of such as the Holocaust, it is not only because they are in favour of killing Jews, socialists or gay people. It is because they are carrying out the Islamic Holocaust themselves and they need the world to ignore its duty as the world did during the European Holocaust.

The denial of this prison and turning it to a museum is not the only attempt by regime to cover its crimes. For some time now the regime has been trying to demolish a mass grave in the name of reconstructing it and making a proper cemetery. It is only due to the families of those executed who are laid there, that the regime could not take away all the bones yet. However it has its plan to change the appearance of Khavaran, the mass grave of 1988. It is one of the mass graves that people found. All the others will be known after the collapse of Islamic regime.

Khavaran was found by families of prisoners who were denied visiting their loved ones in summer 1988. People were alert, they had fear of losing their loved ones in prison due to execution. For the first time all the visits were cancelled until a further notice. Families were going to prisons and asking about their children. One day some families heard that some burials took place during nights in a field near Bahaie’s cemetery. They rushed there and mothers of some prisoners dug the soil with their bare hands. A body appeared and people were terrified to find their children there. A picture was taken of the scene, which shows half of a young man’s body. One could recognise his face. People continued digging the soil when guards attacked them and some of them were arrested. People dispersed and a lorry with more soil came to cover the mass grave.

Since then families of those who were executed during the mass killing of prisoners in 1988 gather in Khavaran. People join them and now some people in Iran know about this mass grave and regime is trying to get rid of it. Now the Islamic republic authorities deny the Holocaust that took place during 1930s and 40s. It is a gesture to further their denial of Islamic Holocaust that they committed and that is still going on.

November 2005