‘My escape from a Chinese concentration CAMP'

Sayragul Sauytbay was committed to a ‘re-education’ centre in Xinjiang province alongside thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic groups. She tells Damian Whitworth how she survived the horrific conditions, and then went on to expose China’s atrocities to the world

- Damian Whitworth

After two days at the internment camp, Sayragul Sauytbay heard the screams for the first time. She had been sent to work as a teacher in one of the centres where China “re-educates” Uighurs and other ethnic groups in the north-west province of Xinjiang. Already she had seen that the “living dead” inmates, with shaved heads, black eyes and mutilated fingers, were chained together in packed, stinking cells.

The sounds of distress resonated through the halls of the “concrete coffin” in which they were housed. “I’d never heard anything like it in all my life. Screams like that aren’t something you forget. The second you hear them, you know what kind of agony that person is experiencing,” she wrote later. “They sounded like the raw cries of a dying animal.”

She learnt that the screams came from the “black room”, a chamber with chains on the wall and no cameras, where prisoners were dragged by guards for a huge range of supposed transgressions. Some prisoners emerged covered in blood; others did not reappear.

Sauytbay knew that if she showed dismay at what she heard, or put a foot out of line, she might end up there herself. Then one day a new group of prisoners arrived, including a grandmother of 84 from a shepherding family in the mountains. Spotting Sauytbay – a fellow ethnic Kazakh – among a sea of Chinese faces, the trembling old woman threw her arms around her and appealed for help. Sauytbay thinks she may have returned the embrace. The old woman was led offand Sauytbay, suspected of conspiracy, was whisked into the black room.