Due to the emotionless way of describing this portrait of a torture prison can be read ★★★★☆

“About a year ago, one of the sergeants once stood in the shadow of a wall while airing a barrack. A mouse passed in front of him and he crushed the animal with his soldier’s boot. The mouse was crushed and died. Then the sergeant took out a tissue paper, picked up the tissue animal by its tail, and walked over to the prisoners who lined the square. He grabbed a random prisoner and forced him to swallow the mouse. He did. Since that day, the sergeants and policemen have spent a significant part of their time hunting mice, cockroaches, and lizards.’

The above is a passage from the recently translated The shell by Syrian author Mustafa Khalifa (1948), set in one of the many torture prisons in his native country. These are places that were built from the 1970s onward and were intended to wipe out political opponents of father and son Assad, the country’s presidential dynasty.

That means that on paper, especially members of the Muslim Brotherhood and communists should be imprisoned, but the practice turns out to be thousands of times more arbitrary. In 1982, besides wrongly arrested surgeons, professors and even children of 15, the main character of Khalifa’s novel ends up in camp Tadmor, one of the most notorious prisons in the country. A young man who had studied in France the previous years and on his return to Damascus is mistaken for a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Writer Khalifa was also imprisoned in this prison for thirteen years. In The shell he paints the sickening portrait of what must be one of the most horrible places on earth. During his captivity it is impossible for Khalifa to take notes, but in an attempt to dispel the madness, he begins to keep a diary in his head, the text of which he begins to repeat sentence after sentence in his head every day, like a kind of mantra.

After his release, he started writing those sentences down. For example, it can be read that the days in the camp are divided into two parts: twelve hours forced to sleep, twelve hours forced to sit, always without moving and in silence. Anyone who moves will be whipped. Of the three hundred prisoners who are together in a cell that is fifteen meters long and six meters wide, only one is allowed to move, namely to walk towards the latrine. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the prisoners are allowed to go to the air yard, but that is no reason for joy, because the executions also take place on those days.

“By listening to the crashing corpses at the bottom of the truck, we know how many people died that day,” Khalifa writes.

That’s not fiction. Between 2011 and 2015 between 5,000 and 10,000 inmates are said to have been executed in the military Saydnaya prison alone. And then Saydnaya is not even Syria’s most notorious military prison. That’s Tadmor.

If this book had been a movie, you’d love to watch it through your eyelashes, so much blood, torture and violence splashes from the pages. But the serrated, almost emotionless and blunted way in which Khalifa describes everything, which is probably necessary to survive in such a camp, not only do your eyes as a reader remain open, they flash in amazement and horror at every new page, looking for a moment to take a breath please.

“My reserves were exhausted, my ability to scream diminished (…) Lord, let me die. Let me die. Spare me this torment,” writes Khalifa when his main character is tortured for the first time with the whip and the skins on his feet hang so loose that he can see his own bones.

In between the beatings, Khalifa describes the interrelations between the prisoners, which are sometimes small and tender, sometimes even loving, but just as often cruel and bestial. They simply live in circumstances where the words ‘family’, ‘love’ and ‘friendship’ gradually give way to ‘whip’, ‘hunger’, ‘hate’ and ‘sadism’. It is an orchestrated form of dehumanization reminiscent of camp literature by Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the Soviet gulags and Primo Levi on the Nazi camps in Poland.

Even readers who are well acquainted with Assad’s tyrannical regime will find themselves The shell therefore often wonder how in God’s name this is possible. How is it possible that even at this moment – ​​now, while reading this book or while reading this review of this book – thousands of people are locked up under conditions you would prefer to call indescribable. Until you find out that Khalifa does describe them for 310 pages.