My Life as a Traitor

It was part youthful zeal and part teen crush that led Zarah Ghahramani to join a student protest movement. But dabbling in student politics was to lead to disaster when one day she was bundled into a car and taken to Tehran's most notorious prison: Evin. Far from her comfortable middle-class home, Zarah had to find refuge from her ruthless interrogators in a windowless concrete cell. Day after day she was humiliated and viciously beaten until all she wanted was simply to die, her spirit broken. In "My Life as a Traitor", Zarah tells the story of her horrifying ordeal and her eventual release, and describes the ways it changed the naive nineteen-year-old she once was into a woman of courage and determination.