The 359th Night of Memory – 3

Compiled by: Leila Rostami
Translated by: Fazel Shirzad

2024-11-26

Note: The 359th Night of Memory program was held on July 25 of 2024 in the Surah Hall of the Islamic Revolution Art Center with the narration of the freedmen of the Islamic Republic of Iran Army under the title of "Closed Door Period". In this program, Amirs Mahmoud Najafi, Hossein Yasini and Amir Brigadier Ahmed Dadbin shared their memories. Dawood Salehi was in charge of performing this night of memory.

The third narrator of the Night of Memory, Brigadier General Dadbin, began his speech by saying: When I graduated from the officer academy, I went to Kurdistan. The Democratic, Komala, Rozgari and Fadaei guerrilla parties were active there. There are about five thousand villages in Kurdistan and West Azerbaijan. Those parties had organized the people of these villages and given them to different parties. Iraq and America also supported them. We were on our own, but they thought they could liberate Kurdistan and take it over; but we fought and drove them out of our land.

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The fourth narrator of the program, Dr. Shahab Vahidian, was born in September 1959. He had dreamed of becoming a doctor since he was a child and entered the army as a “duty doctor” with this dream. In addition to the honor of being a veteran, he has been in captivity for many years. He began his speech by saying: One of the things that has always been a strange miracle of medicine for me was experienced during captivity. The first time I was a student and went to the operating room, one of my professors said, "Son! You're going to stand and wash your hands for 15 minutes." And I looked at the clock and washed my hands with a brush and betadine for 15 minutes until the doctor let me stand by the operating room bed and help. The surgery was for a 15-year-old girl who had suffered a concussion, and since there was no one to help, the doctor called me. This memory stayed in my mind until I was captured.

The first few days we were in Al-Rashid camp, a group of wounded arrived, one of whom was Jalil Daraya, whose name always made me happy. He had a bullet wound in his leg and a broken femur. His leg was almost free because his leg was in a splint or cast, it had become infected, and I always thought, "Oh my God! How can you fix a leg like that in such conditions?!" The same story of washing your hands for 15 minutes was always on my mind. There was nothing to wash the infection with. They gave us a few bandages. Every morning, we had several wounded men with injuries to their shoulders, legs, and various other parts. Jalil was my most seriously wounded man, and in order to drain the pus from his leg, I would often lift his leg, as the pus would pour out. Then I would bandage it with gauze that was only new the first time. The next time I washed the gauze I took off Jalil's leg with the washing powder they gave me and hung it on a clothesline to dry for the next day. His wound was such that I would put my hand into the skin of his leg from the back of his thigh and knee and insert the gauze into the empty hole on the back of his calf from which pus was coming out until the hole gradually filled up. Jalil's leg wound was bandaged with those bandages without washing it with Betadine for 15 minutes. Gradually, Jalil's leg wound closed after two months. I was always grateful and said that if such miracles existed, we too would be free. If the comrades remembered, I always gave the children hope for freedom and assured them that we would definitely return.

The narrator continued: Scabies was widespread in our camp. Two people were also diagnosed with scabies; a colonel and a lieutenant. The only medicine they gave was sulfur ointment, which was rubbed from the top of the body to the tips of the toes, and the person sat naked in the sun to get the sun and the sulfur ointment to take effect. Our colonel and lieutenant had blackened bodies because they had been sitting in the sun for several days. Sulfur ointment was used for treatment for years and years before I started school, and once, when one of the comrades fell ill and we had to take him to the hospital, I went to a commander named Raed. He was the most intelligent and kind of commander. I told him: "If scabies spread here, your reputation will be ruined. Let me go to the hospital and ask for scabies medicine." I went to the hospital with that prisoner. I encountered a scene that was like, "Wow, that hospital!" Our comrades and soldiers were lying in the hospital corridor in feces, diarrhea, urine, and vomit. The crowd of comrades was so large that I said: "Oh my God! Will these people survive or not?!" Anyway, I went to the hospital director's room or the hospital doctors' room. There were three doctors sitting inside the room. I said, "Scabies are rampant in our camp and you gave us sulfur medicine. Sulfur medicine is an old medicine." He said, "Ah! What should we give then?!" I said, "Why didn't you see gamma benzene?!" He said, "Oh...! Do you know gamma benzene?" I said, "We know it much better than you. When you didn't know anything yet, we had doctors and professors. We had the University of Jundishapur." They said, "So, excellent! You can speak English with us! We'll send it to you." They sent us a few boxes.

The next morning, I asked the camp commander to let me talk to the comrades. I asked the comrades who had symptoms of scabies to come and introduce themselves. Because the treatment is no longer the treatment of colonels and lieutenants. The treatment is a very simple treatment that I will only apply a medicine to you. 16 or 17 people came, 13 of whom had scabies, and we treated them. We would celebrate the blanket festival in the camp. During the blanket festival, we would boil the blankets and clothes in cooking pots that we borrowed from the kitchen. So that the medicines would not be forbidden, I would give the children medicine myself, and thank God, scabies left our camp. At the end of his memoirs, the narrator said: Jalil had developed three stones in his kidneys because of his stillness, slow movements, and perhaps his talent for stone formation. It had happened that these three stones were placed one after the other and there was no chance of his passing them. The talk was about Jalil going to the hospital and having an operation. Of course, I had not told the children anything about the hospital. I told myself that if someone were to go to that hospital, they would have a stroke. I said that if Jalil went there and they operated on him, he would die. Because the hospital was really an infection hospital. It wasn’t called a hospital, it was an infection ward.

I asked the guards for permission and went behind the barbed wire. I picked a lot of the sedge plant and poured water into one of those big pots where we boiled blankets. I made a very thick solution. My wife had left me a prayer before I went to the army, and I took this prayer with me. I ran to the Haft Sanatorium and said to Jalil, “Drink these three bottles and put this prayer under your head. God willing, God will help.” In the morning, the door to the sanatorium opened and Jalil came to me with difficulty with his injured leg. There were three stones in the palm of his hand.

The End