Although the former civil servant and director of several pre-schools has now been granted asylum in Sweden, she continues to receive death threats from Chinese callers. Yet she is not intimidated: “I feel obliged to tell the world my story,” Sauytbay said.

In 2016, Sayragul Sauytbay became entrapped in the cogs of the Chinese apparatus of repression. “Her extraordinary strength should not hide the mental agony that has afflicted her,” says Alexandra Cavelius, who together with Sauytbay wrote The Chief Witness: Escape from China’s Modern-Day Concentration Camps.

The book is a haunting eyewitness account by Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national who fled China’s notorious internment camps, where countless Muslim ethnic minorities are held. “During the interviews, she sometimes had to tie her head around with a cloth so that the horrible images wouldn’t make her feel like her head was exploding,” Cavelius said.

It has been four years since Sauytbay, born in 1977 in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, was imprisoned in a Chinese re-education camp in Xinjiang province. Official statements by the Chinese Communist Party portray these camps as educational institutions where potential Muslim terrorists are taught Chinese language and culture.

However, Sauytbay, who trained as a doctor before becoming a teacher and being appointed a senior civil servant, reports of mass rapes, mock trials, suspected drug experiments — and a “black room” where she was imprisoned. That’s what she calls a space in the camp that contains an electric chair, in which inmates are tortured — and says she herself she was tortured to the point of unconsciousness there.

The camp is located in what is officially called the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, described by Sauytbay as the “largest open-air prison in the world.” Human rights organisations estimate that there are some 1,200 such camps there containing 1 million internees of China’s ethnic minorities, including the Kazakh and Uighur ethnicities. Speaking of a “cultural genocide,” anthropologist Adrian Zenz says, “Something unprecedented is taking place there. The systematic internment of an entire ethno-religious minority is probably the largest since the Holocaust,” Zenz said.

When the first re-education camps opened in 2016, hardly a day went by without someone disappearing — the reasons were incomprehensible, seemingly arbitrary. Sayragul Sauytbay tells us that, like so many others, she had a small bag with the bare essentials hanging next to her door. Always at the ready.

As a trained physician, Sauytbay was forced to work in the infirmary and witnessed how the inmates were given medication without any symptoms. She suspected that experiments were being performed, and that women were being sterilised. At an assembly, she witnessed guards raping a young woman in front of 200 inmates. Anyone who expressed emotion was subjected to further torture.

Sauytbay’s release from the re-education camp after five months was just as arbitrary as her detention there had been. Courageously, she fled to Kazakhstan, where she met up with her husband and two children again after two and a half years. Yet since she crossed the border illegally, she was not granted asylum there.

Instead, Sweden agreed to take in the family. How does she experience the newly gained freedom? Sayragul Sauytbay bursts into tears at the question. The 43-year-old is so grateful — and at the same time so sad that she is not even allowed to contact her relatives. Her children go to school in Sweden; she and her husband are learning Swedish.