Biography & True Stories
2020
There is a prison operating in present-day Ukraine, where horrific torture techniques are being utilized. This prison is, in reality, a concentration camp, beyond whose fencing no laws reach. Life there is lived in humiliation, fear, and uncertainty. Wounds and burn marks cover bodies that are filled with pain from broken bones and, often too, broken wills. The principal tasks here are surviving after the desire to live has forsaken you and nothing in the world depends on you any longer, preserving your sanity as you teeter on the brink of madness, and remaining a human being in conditions so inhuman that faith, forgiveness, hate, and even a torturer locking eyes with his victim become laden with manifold meanings. The journalist Stanislav Aseyev, imprisoned in this torture camp on trumped-up charges of “espionage,” wrote this frank, emotional, and probing memoir in an attempt to both survive and recover from the hell he was cast into. He offers more questions than answers in this book, as testament to the fact that the lives of those released from the prison at 3 Paradise Street will forever remain divided into “pre-” and “post-.”
