When Maziar Bahari left London in June 2009 to cover Iran’s
presidential election, he assured his pregnant fiancée,
Paola, that he’d be back in just a few days, a week at most.
Little did he know, as he kissed her good-bye, that he would
spend the next three months in Iran’s most notorious prison,
enduring brutal interrogation sessions at the hands of a man
he knew only by his smell: Rosewater.
For the Bahari family, wars, coups, and revolutions are not
distant concepts but intimate realities they have suffered
for generations: Maziar’s father was imprisoned by the shah
in the 1950s, and his sister by Ayatollah Khomeini in the
1980s. Alone in his cell at Evin Prison, fearing the worst,
Maziar draws strength from his memories of the courage of
his father and sister in the face of torture, and hears
their voices speaking to him across the years. He dreams of
being with Paola in London, and imagines all that she and
his rambunctious, resilient eighty-four-year-old mother must
be doing to campaign for his release. During the worst of
his encounters with Rosewater, he silently repeats the names
of his loved ones, calling on their strength and love to
protect him and praying he will be released in time for the
birth of his first child.
A riveting, heart-wrenching memoir, Then They Came for Me
offers insight into the past fifty years of regime change in
Iran, as well as the future of a country where the
democratic impulses of the youth continually clash with a
government that becomes more totalitarian with each passing
day. An intimate and fascinating account of contemporary
Iran, it is also the moving and wonderfully written story of
one family’s extraordinary courage in the face of repression.
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