Thuds and clinks echoed alongside each footstep as we traveled down the long, cold hallways. Even my own breathing was loud. The air smelled like metal, blood, sweat, and God knew what else. If suffering had a smell, it would have smelled like this place.

When one guard opened a door, the other pushed me over the threshold. I emerged into a world awash in piercing light and stumbled blindly until another shove brought darkness back. Blinking, I found myself in a van, sitting on a low wooden bench along one side. A large black canvas hood stretched over the space, blocking my view of the outside, and the sudden pitch of the vehicle as it started to move almost threw me from my seat. The prisoners packed around me prevented me from losing my balance as the van rumbled through the streets of Warsaw.

The drive didn’t take long. When a merciless grip pulled me out, I stood before Aleja Szucha 25—the Gestapo headquarters on Szucha Avenue.

I squeezed my eyes shut, unable to bear the sunshine or the massive building with billowing Nazi flags, harsh red against gray stone. One guard said something about Polish swine and marching, so I followed the Pawiak inmates through the courtyard, inside, and downstairs, descending into damnation. Each step down the narrow, dingy gray halls took me deeper into the bowels of Szucha until we reached an empty cell. A guard grabbed me, sniggering when I shied away, but he removed my handcuffs and told me to file toward “the tram”—I assumed he meant the row of single wooden seats, one behind the other, facing the back wall.

The iron door clanged shut. The tiny space reeked of blood and urine, the smells of terror, so pungent I stifled a gag, and the wooden floor was slick with both.

I was the youngest prisoner.

I sat on a small, hard seat behind a woman whose left arm was swollen, bruised, and hanging at her side. Broken, probably. I stared at the back of her head, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

From the corner of my eye—I didn’t dare turn my head—I noticed something etched into the black paint beside me. Maybe a name. Maybe a heroic message about freedom or independence. Maybe nail marks from a prisoner as he was dragged away for another interrogation, a prisoner terrified that he’d break this time.

Another sound pierced the shallow breaths around me. I lifted my eyes to a small open window, where I heard fervent voices from upstairs. An interrogator’s yelling, a prisoner’s petrified murmur, then cracks, screams, and sobs. Listening to torture was almost worse than the thought of experiencing it.