Christina Goldbaum
speaker
92 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 1 Apr
Christina Goldbaum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
As we stepped into another room, there was also a woman who seemed to be just convinced that she was hearing voices on the other side of a wall. And she was trying to get the guys around her who had these pickaxes to tear through it. Because she was saying that she heard voices there, she heard them there.
She was looking for her son, who had gone missing 12 years ago. At one point, people believed that maybe there were hidden cells, like three stories underground. And so they started picking up pickaxes and hammers and shovels and just tearing into the floors, trying to find any kind of shaft or opening or room that might have been hidden and people were maybe stuck inside.
And as they were doing that, this kind of massive crowd started forming around them, because people thought that maybe they had discovered something, that they had discovered a secret door or a secret stairwell, and they wanted to get a glimpse of what was underneath.
And the few rebels who were there around them were screaming at the crowd, telling them to back up and give them space and let them work, because it was just such a chaotic scene. And Christina, did they find anything in all this digging?
So hours and hours after tearing up this place, the rescue workers who were there said that they didn't think that there were any hidden compartments underneath the prison and that all the prisoners who were there and who were still alive were released already.
But the next morning, there was also news that 38 bodies had been discovered in the prison and they were brought to a hospital at the center of the city. So my colleagues and I went to that hospital and to the morgue where there were forensic examiners going through each of these corpses. Trying to find any identifiable symbol, any tattoo, any birthmark, anything.
Taking photos of them and then posting them on Telegram so that families could look through and see if they recognized any of these corpses. The doctors believed that some of those people had died days earlier, but there were others that they thought had been dead for weeks or a month.
And you could smell that as they opened the kind of tarps and informal body bags they had, but this just stench that filled the room. tons of people started coming there, determined to get a look at these bodies themselves.
There were just throngs of women and men who were just shoving and trying to get into the examination room itself, saying that they didn't recognize any of the photos and they wanted to see the bodies themselves. And at one point as the day dragged on, one of the doctors just kind of gave up and said, okay, fine, if you want to see these people come in, open the doors.
And this massive crowd of people came into this refrigerator room and started opening the tarps of bodies and looking at them in just this kind of horror. Some of them had shown signs of what looked to be torture. There were red marks around one of the necks of one of these bodies.
Another had kind of puncture wounds that one of the doctors thought were from a hot iron that this person had likely been hit with many times. One of these bodies didn't have a face anymore. It was just this charred skull, just beyond recognition. It was incredibly intense. I mean, women were leaving that room in tears and screaming and cursing Assad and asking that he burn in hell.
You know, until that point, I think people had really believed that there was a way of finding folks alive, that there were some secret rooms or some other detention facility or, you know, somewhere where they'd be broken free from. And I think it's one thing to see the scribblings on the wall of this really grim prison.
It's another to see not just that people might have died, but how they died and what they endured before they died. No! No! No! But we did meet one family at the prison that day who got some answers. Their son had been released from Sinai when the rebels took the city. And so he was able to tell us the story of life inside the prison for the first time.
Thank you so much for having us in your house. So his name is Bilal Shahadi. He's 26 years old. And we met him at his house, me and my colleague, Reha Morshed, who's translating, and walked in and sat down on the floor of their living room. There was a small heater there too, because it was a pretty cold day.
And he was telling us about how he had grown up in the suburb of the city with a pretty big family. He's one of four brothers and a number of sisters, too. His dad worked selling fresh water to people in the neighborhood.
And, you know, he remembers when he was younger going to these amusement parks in Damascus with his siblings and going swimming and having barbecues on the hillside and this life that felt very peaceful and full of promise for him and his family.
And his parents got very nervous about everything going on, so they pulled him out of class. And pretty early on, the war started to take its toll on his family. Two of his older brothers were both arrested by security forces. His dad tried to get both of them back to their families without any luck.
And at one point, he was describing this to me and said how he had asked someone in the security forces for more information on one of his sons and was told that his son would be released in two hours after questioning. And now he stayed in prison for 14 years. But it has been over a decade since. And why were Bilal's brothers arrested?
So, like a lot of families in Syria, they never actually got a clear answer of what either of the brothers was accused of. And that's something that was pretty common under Assad's government. These kind of arbitrary arrests where people are picked off the street, thrown into prison, and families don't know where they went or what happened to them or what the charges against them are.
But I think his brother's arrest instilled a lot of fear in him. He was conscripted into the army when he was 18 years old, as men are required to do. And soon after, when he sees the horrors of the civil war and the risks that Syrian soldiers are facing, he deserts the military and goes back to his family. But deserting the army is what eventually gets him arrested by the police as well.
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