Stories
Gulzira Auelkhan
Captured 2017
Gulzira and her family are ethnic Kazakh.
She was born and raised in Xinjiang. In 2017, she went on what she thought was a round trip from Kazakhstan back to China, but instead was stopped by Chinese authorities and imprisoned for 18 months in the “vocational” camp system.
The guards would give you pills and stick their fingers in your mouth to make sure you swallowed them in an effort of forced sterilization. All women were forbidden to be pregnant.
This experience was only the beginning of the brutalization.
She would force women to strip naked and handcuff them before leaving them alone with Chinese men. Afterwards, she cleaned the rooms. Some of the women who left their cells never returned.
If she disobeyed these orders, she would be threatened. If she spoke with other inmates about the organized rape, she got punished. As punishment, she got put into a “tiger chair,” a medieval device used to inflict severe pain whenever the occupant attempts to move, even slightly. “I thought I died that day. I felt my soul had passed.”
As a result of her detention, she physically suffers from various health issues. They design these horrendous experiences to destroy everyone’s spirit, and it’s something she still has a hard time understanding.
She has since been released and now lives in Midland, Texas. She continues to talk about her experiences and is applying for asylum so they can obtain permanent residency.
“The Chinese men would pay money to have their pick of the pretty young inmates. My job was to remove their clothes above the waist and handcuff them so they could not move. I would leave the women in the room, and a man would enter—I sat silently next to the door, and when the man left, I cleaned up and took the woman for a shower.”
All Stories
Tursunay Ziawudun
Tursunay was captured in April of 2017 and spent the next ten months inside China’s network of internment camps without ever being charged for a crime.
Mihrigul Tursun
At the beginning of 2015, life was good for Mihrigul. She was happily married with triplets (Moez, Elina and Mohaned) and finishing her studies in Egypt.
Gulzira Auelkhan
In 2017, she went on what she thought was a round trip from Kazakhstan back to China, but instead was stopped by Chinese authorities and imprisoned for 18 months.
Tell us your story
We want to hear your story. The CCP’s cruelty knows no limits. We will not be silent. We must share our stories for the world to hear.