Lisa Hajjar reviews The Torture Camp on Paradise Street

Stanislav Aseyev. The Torture Camp on Paradise Street. Trans. Zenia Tompkins and Nina Murray. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, 2023. 299 pp.

Review by Lisa Hajjar

1 June 2023

Stanislav Aseyev’s reflections on the two years he spent in Isolation, a defunct insulation factory in Donetsk that was repurposed into a torture and detention facility, is an incisive addition to autobiographical literature by survivors. The Torture Camp echoes Jean Améry’s experience of struggling to put to words the distinctive violence and trauma that is torture.[1] Like Jacobo Timerman’s firsthand account of the regime of Argentine torture during the “dirty war,” Aseyev situates Isolation and the categories of people imprisoned or employed there in the broader context of Russian and Ukrainian separatist designs on the Donbas region.[2] His book has parallels to Mansour Adayfi’s rendering of Guantánamo as a topography of terror and dehumanization.[3] Like Mohamedou Ould Slahi, whose letters to his lawyers were published while he was imprisoned at Guantánamo, for Aseyev, a journalist, writing itself was a survival tactic and a means to memorialize the horrors endured and observed.[4] Writing “in captivity is powerful therapy” because paper can absorb fear, dejection, and despair, and harbor thoughts of freedom and revenge (p. 158).

Because Aseyev correctly feared that his writings would not make it out, he tried to inscribe these words to memory. That practice of memorization also helped distract from thoughts of what might happen to him next or what was happening at that very moment to someone else screaming in an interrogation room down the hall. Aseyev incorporates a reader-conscious sensitivity about the madness and malice of Isolation by weaving a vivid journalistic accounting of events, experiences, and characters with an ethnographer’s gift for analysis.

One crazy-making feature of Isolation was the imperative for detainees to hood themselves before their cell door opened. The impossibilities of sleep were compounded by fear that they might not get their hood on fast enough if someone banged into their cell in the middle of the night. Cameras served a panopticon function where prisoners never knew if they were being watched, but knew that it was a possibility at every moment. This, coupled with orders not to converse with cellmates, intensified the experience of alienation. Damaged, injured, terrorized, angry individuals were confined together under conditions that produced effects of isolation.

Aseyev deftly describes the range of feelings that are commonly lumped into the category of “fear.” He writes: “I came to know so many different shades of fear—from mortal dread, when I caught myself not even breathing, to general anxiety—that I wouldn’t venture to define the predominant one I felt. What I can say is that the deepest terror came not during the torture but afterward, as a mental aftershock in relative safety” (p. 36).

He intentionally avoids naming anyone—with one exception—because if other survivors were to read about themselves, it might add to their trauma. “As for the perpetrators, they can keep their names until they face justice” (p. 41). The exception is Palych, the “lord and master” of Isolation (p. 41). Aseyev resists the instinct to hyperbolically brand Palych “Pure Evil” because “that’s too abstract to describe someone who ground hundreds of lives into ashes” (p. 42). The portrait of Palych is rich because the devil is in the detail. He is a sadist, a rapist, an alcoholic, a skilled manipulator of inmates’ emotions and fears, and he has a wicked sense of humor. To Aseyev’s great credit, he gives readers a detestable yet comprehensible character whose bossy motivations and pathological actions are the mortar of this book.

When Aseyev is released, the freedom brings new traumas. How to cope with happy people after years in Isolation? How to remember that no one will bang into the room while you are sleeping and drag you off to be tortured? He has advice for readers: don’t give advice to survivors. “The worst and most trite suggestion to make to a liberated prisoner is that he or she should ‘forget all of it.’ . . . Along the same lines, don’t insult someone who has been tortured with electric shock and held in basements with the words ‘We understand’” (pp. 225, 226). Former prisoners of Isolation can’t even understand one another, despite their subjection to common abuses and deprivations. If you meet someone who has experienced the traumas of torture, he suggests, “hold back your empathy and just nod in recognition of his pessimism” (p. 227).

These admonitions notwithstanding, The Torture Camp is a gift for those who want to be made aware of the horrors of Isolation. In this world where torture is so pervasive, Isolation is not alone.

[1] See Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations of a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington, Ind., 2009), pp. 21–40.

[2] Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, trans. Tony Talbot (Madison, Wis., 1981), p. xi.

[3] See Mansour Adayfi, Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo (New York, 2021).

[4] See Mohamed Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary and Guantánamo Diary: Restored Edition (New York, 2017).