Hannah Jaffe-Walt

The two reporters who collected voice memos for today's show, Roxana Saberi and Fatima Jamalpour, also managed to get messages out during the last blackout.

Dozens of people inside Iran found ways to send them rare firsthand accounts, images, videos, medical records, that suggested that the IRGC and other security forces shot protesters at close range, targeting their heads and chests, their eyes.

The protests and killings in January haunted some of the voice memos we got, even as people try to continue living, going about their normal routines.

Amin is in his 20s.

He's a professional bodybuilder in Tehran.

He joined the protests.

One of his friends was shot and killed while protesting, Mehdi Zatparvar.

He was a well-known champion bodybuilder.

Anushirvan is a doctor in the north of Iran.

He's young, in his mid-20s.

He spent January treating hundreds of wounded protesters, some of them shot with military-grade weapons, sometimes at close distance, sometimes in the head.

And while he was treating people, plainclothes security agents roamed the hospital.

So if someone needed an x-ray, Anushirvan and his colleagues would personally escort them to radiology so they wouldn't be detained.

They showed people how to leave at the back door of the hospital.

As he worked, Anushirvan began saving x-rays and photographs and notes in a panic that the regime, through its blackout, would succeed in hiding what it had done.

In a lot of ways, it has.

And now, in another blackout, an endless blackout, Anushirvan is just still doing his job, getting through each day.

Anushirvan spent more than half of his monthly salary on a VPN.

Then he got online, finally, and was devastated.

He saw some of what was being said about Iran in the wider world.