This is the story of a 16 year
old girl who spent two years in the political prison of Evin in Tehran.
These sad books,
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Chinese Cinderella and Prisoner of Tehran are
all descriptive of the streets of Berlin, Tianjin and Shanghai as well as
Tehran respectively, through the innocent eyes of children. I feel immersed
into the colorful streets, see the colors and heat the sounds of the traffic,
through the great descriptions. I reminisce about my time in Berlin and
remember the horror I felt at visiting one of the former concentration camps
just out of Munich and this story of Bruno all becomes poignant.
The Cinderella story takes me to
China, though I have physically never been there. It allows me to see how life
in the 1940s China was like and how war influenced the changes as well as the
resilience in the Chinese people.
Prisoner of Tehran breaks my heart.
No child was meant to be in a prison good lord. But humans are cruel and even
in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, small boys were dragged to concentration
camps and killed.
The innocence and beauty is destroyed
by war in China, the Holocaust in German and the war in the Middle East.
There are great history lessons,
narrated by children who lived through them, heartbreaking and bringing to
light the callousness of humans. They bring to mind other heartbreaking books
where wars destroyed lives of children like The Kite Runner.
As I read Prisoner of Tehran, I had a strange relation
to what was happening to the young people who protested against the Shah. They
said oil meant for all Iranians was sold and the money went into the Shah’s
account. Youths protested the corruption, the Shah ordered soldiers to shoot
them, rape them, arrest them or simply have them disappear. Oh how history
repeats itself, even on a different continent. Zimbabwe. Protest and get
killed. Arrested. Raped. Or disappear.
Prisoner of Tehran was written in this way
where one heartbreaking chapter in the prison cells of Evin was followed by the
beautiful chapter of reminiscences of peaceful Tehran and the cottages near the
Caspian Sea. This juxtaposition brought out the harsh changes in the lives of
Iranian children, the loss and the devastation.
Religion is a recurrent theme
throughout the book. How religion fueled violence instead of bringing peace.
How people killed in cold blood in the name of Allah.
Though a heartbreaking book, which
has infiltrated my conscious, making me wake up in the middle of a nightmare,
it shows resilience, bravery and that sometimes, it does get better, for
those that are lucky. This is one of the books, after Sylvia Plath’s The Bell
Jar, that has shaken me to the core.
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