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I am the older brother. There's older kids everywhere like to say I was the boss. So when I decided I had to leave the wacky religious cult we were raised in in my late teens, after the smoke cleared, my brother abandoned the cult as well.
Later, I started school at Grand Valley State University. My brother immediately enrolled at Grand Valley State University. There, I stumbled across an incredible program that sent me to rule Japan for a year, all expenses paid. A little while later, my brother attended the same program, right after I did. Later, I decided I wanted to live and work in Asia for a few years. My brother reached the exact same conclusion for himself. And after a while...
I planned to return back to the States. But this time, my brother decided no. No, instead he was going to move from rural Japan to big city Tokyo. Neon lights, fancy people, nightlife. I hugged him, wished him good luck before flying back alone on the jet plane. This is why I wasn't there when he had a mental breakdown on the streets of a foreign city.
A city he didn't know that didn't know him. This is why I never knew he had been locked up for ranting, wild-eyed on the street. This is why his new friends didn't know to get in touch with me. And when I consider what he was doing there in the first place, thousands of miles from home, thousands of miles from help, after everything that happened, I can't but wonder if I was a good brother to my brother.
Because in the end, like all little brothers, he followed me. Today on Snap Judgment, another brother story of a sort. We probably present the spoon and rusty nail. My name is Glenn Washington. I thought I was my brother's keeper. When you're listening to Snap Judgment. Snap Judgment is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
You chose to hit play on this podcast today, Smart Choice. Make another smart choice with AutoQuote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. Welcome back to Snap Judgment. We begin in the middle of the 2010s.
China began rounding up hundreds of thousands of people, possibly a million or more. Uyghurs, members of an ethnic Muslim minority, flagging them as potential terrorists and sending them to massive detention centers. We know this mostly from brave people who made it out to tell the tale, but even attempting to escape can land you in a much worse position than you started. In the day on our show, one young man tries anyway. Isabel Cockrell from Kota's story has the tale. Snap Judgment.
When Hashim was 16 years old and living in Xinjiang, China, his favourite TV show was a Turkish telenovela that he watched with his mum. I mean, I knew it was just a TV show. But I started to wonder whether I might be able to live like them too. The show was called Adanali. It was about a police officer turned vigilante who takes down corrupt cops. We'll take you to a police station.
He helps people who are being unfairly persecuted by the police. And at the very end, he exposes this big villain among the police. It kind of impacted me. The soap felt worlds away from Hashim's daily life in northwest China. This was 2014.
And all over Hashim's hometown, police checkpoints were springing out of nowhere. The police would check your ID, ask where you've been and what you have been up to, and just make you feel really uncomfortable. It was painful. You just never felt at ease, even in your own neighborhood. Hashim's friends were starting to disappear.
After the police raided his boxing gym, Hashim began to worry about his mother. As a young man, I was the target. They were starting to arrest us more. I realized I was becoming a burden for her just by being there. So I decided that I should leave. I wanted a full life, not this half-life. He felt there was no other way but to get out of China.
The Chinese government doesn't allow most Uyghurs to travel or have passports, so that left Hashim with only one choice. He packed up a few things, said nothing to his mother. I knew that if I told her about my plans, she would tell me not to go. So I didn't tell her. Thinking once I was gone, then she could hear about it.
He traveled to a border town near Vietnam, where he contacted a group of human smugglers. You know, like a Toyota? Those normally carry five or six people at most, but the smugglers will manage to squeeze 15 people inside. They will pack everyone in and drive extremely fast. At one point, I was sitting in the front seat next to the driver and I watched his speedometer, which never dipped below 60 miles an hour.
The car bounced along twisty dirt roads, navigating steep drops and treacherous passes through the jungle. You had this feeling that no one had ever passed through this place before. As if you're the first person in the world to go through here in a car.
Hashim was taking an infamous route that traffics goods and people through Vietnam, then Cambodia, Thailand and onto Malaysia. They call it the smuggler's road. I never heard anyone call it anything else. It works like a relay system. Smugglers in one country hand you to the smugglers in the next country. They'd nearly made it through Thailand. But when they reached the border with Malaysia, the car suddenly stopped.
Hashim and his fellow passengers stepped out into a clearing in the jungle, already full of people, men, women, children. There were 73 of us, young and old. And we decided to surrender ourselves to the police. There's this big rumour flying around that if you handed yourself into the Thai police...
They'd send you straight on to Turkey. We were ready to believe anything. So we voluntarily handed ourselves over, believing they would send us to Turkey in a few weeks. They're quickly arrested. The women and children are taken one way...
Hashim and the other men are taken to a detention center. I mean, at that moment, we were convinced it was just going to be only 15 days there. But 15 days passed and nothing happened. Then one month, two, and we began thinking, this plan is not working out. Hashim is living in a small, narrow cell.
with a dozen other guys. They're all crammed in on top of each other, monitored by cameras 24/7. One of them, a man named Mohamed, was on the car journey with him. Mohamed was older than me and he tried to lift my spirits if he saw that I was feeling low. He would say, "Hanging there." And whenever he did that, it felt like a weight lifting off my shoulders.
Mohamed had fled with his wife and children, and he and Hashim bond over being apart from their families. I was in a pretty bad place mentally after running away from my parents. He consoled me and made me feel better. He said, my little brother, now that we've met each other, let's just be like family with one another.
As we began to realize that we were stuck there and no one could really help us, we kind of settled into the routine of prison life. We spent our time reading, eating the meals they brought us, chatting and studying the Qur'an. But we also worried, will they send us back to China?
So our days were spent in uncertainty. There was no daylight in our cell, and our arms and legs would become stiff. So we would walk for an hour or two. We would walk in circles, like if there were people sleeping on the edge of the cell, then the middle would be empty to walk up and down. My thoughts keep just running over the same idea.
Is this my life now? Will it soon feel like I never even had a life on the outside? I wondered if I would ever get out of there, ever get to walk on the road outside the prison. That was the main feeling eating away at me. When they brought us food each day, it came in these plastic bags. We wouldn't throw them out though.
Instead, we would stretch these back out and make a makeshift rope. There was this little see-through vent at the top of the sail where you could catch a glimpse of the outside world. We would tie the rope to the steel grill of the vent, climb up, and dangle from the top of the sail so we could breathe in the fresh air. And as we looked outside, we could see that Thailand looked like paradise.
It was totally green, like it was summer all year round and the landscape was so beautiful. It had been so long since we'd seen anything that green. We would gaze out day and night. After seeing all that green, our desire to go outside became unbearable.
It gradually dawned on us that we were not going to get out. At least, not without Allah's help. When Snap returns, Hashim and his cellmates take the only way out there is. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Snap Judgment. The last we left Hashim, he and a dozen other Uighur cellmates were languishing in a Thai jail cell. Almost a year had passed.
If we didn't make a run for it, there would be no other way to save ourselves. It was the only thing on our mind. Escaping became our main priority.
Hashim tries to talk to Mohammed, his spiritual big brother who he'd met at the beginning of his journey, whose wife and kids were also in Thailand, trapped in a different jail. So I told him, big brother, I want to run away. What do you think? He told me to go ahead, to do it. But since he had his own family, he couldn't think about escaping himself. Hashim and the other guys are determined, and they don't have to wait long for their opportunity.
because there is already a hole in the roof of their cell. Yeah, it was in the ceiling of the restroom. They noticed water dripping from the ceiling and there, above the toilet, a small hole. It had apparently been made by prisoners who'd been in the cell before. It was still open, but it wasn't possible for a person to fit through there. So we made it a little wider and easier to get through.
The plan is to use just their hands and carefully scrape away the crumbling cement. They weave together a long rope with plastic bags and clothes and move quickly. Our cell was on the second floor. Using the ropes, we climbed down. Well, when the first guy went down the side of the building, one of the officers saw him. They came straight to our cell to investigate.
The very first person out manages, miraculously, to get away. But a few of Hashim's cellmates are beaten by the guards, and they find the hole. Yes, they transferred us to a new building in order to repair the ceiling. This new detention centre is even more remote, surrounded by mountains and jungle. But it is closer to Malaysia, just a mile from the border. Malaysia has always been Hashim's goal. From there, he can get safe passage to Turkey.
The guards started threatening that they would send us back to China. Every time they said China, we felt dread. Security seems lower here. Hashim realises that if they're going to mount another escape attempt, this is the place and it needs to happen now.
The thing about Thailand is, because it's so hot, the walls are very thin. One day, one of the guys found an old nail in the cell, about 10 centimeters long. He scratched the wall a little with that nail and realized how soft the cement was. There's a sort of ringleader among the Uyghurs, a young guy nicknamed Imam, because he leads their prayer sessions. I'm an imam.
The imam saw how easily the wall crumbled. He scratched it a few more times and the wall just started coming away. And so he thought, maybe we could make a hole in the wall. There are cameras dotted around the cell, but no camera is watching the bathroom area.
With the imam, we start brainstorming. Like if we gouge the hole from the side of the restaurant, would that work? Could we make it work?
After we found a nail, we also managed to keep back a spoon from mealtimes. They gave us toothbrushes in there. So we took three toothbrushes and bound them firmly to the nail with string. With the nail tip stuck out so that we could use it to dig. As for the spoon, the useful part was actually the handle.
like the end of it. That prison had a brick floor, so we sharpened the spoon handle using the ground to make a sort of blade to carve the wall. One by one, we slip into the bathroom and start scraping at the wall. So we begin by carving a kind of outline, making a hole wide enough for one person. We dug from the inside, chipping away.
And then we take a quick shower and come out, trying not to raise any suspicion. This escape attempt will be much more methodical, deliberate. And this time, Mohamed, who didn't want to join in the last escape, he's in too. He had recently learned that his wife and kids had been released and were safely in Turkey. By that time, we'd all decided that it was time to escape.
It takes Hashim and his cellmates three days to make the hole big enough. By the end of all those hours, my hands were all cut up and scarred. Then, a difficult decision. Who should climb out first?
There were 12 of us. Of the 12, there was the imam and then there was a man who was much older than the rest of us. We felt that those two should have priority along with another older guy who had fallen over in the restroom and hurt his knee. It was agreed, those three would get up first. That left nine of us. We drew lots by writing numbers on a piece of paper.
Whichever number we drew, that will be our turn to get out. We put the papers in the pile in the middle, turned them over, and drew them out one by one to see what number we had. Mine was number four. My heart started pounding like crazy. I will be one of the first to go out. One, two, three, and then my turn.
I couldn't shake off the anxiety, knowing that the police would brutally beat up anyone who tried to escape again. Another part of me was happy that I got number four, but my brother Mohamed got 11 or 12. 11, I think it was. After all they had been through together,
Mohamed has become so important to Hashim. He doesn't want to do this without him. Before drawing lots, Mohamed and I agreed we would stay together as we ran through the jungle. We had talked about that. But after pulling lots, we knew that would be impossible.
They would run early the next morning, before the sun came up. It was impossible to sleep that evening. I was so anxious, wondering if the police would catch us. And if they did, how they would punish us. Would they beat us?
I try to plan for every possible scenario, thinking if this happens, I'll run that way. If I can just get past this bit, I'll be able to do that and so on. We got up according to our lot numbers. So number one woke up first, then number two and so on.
They had gouged the wall out except for the very last thin layer of plaster so that from the outside the wall looked intact. Carefully, quietly, they push away this last thin layer and the outside air rushes in. Two or three people stood ready to help me through when I entered the hall.
There's barbed wire right beneath them. They throw blankets over it so they won't get cut up. Then, using a makeshift rope, Hashim pulls himself down the side of the building and jumps into the yard. After me, the guys kept coming one after another. After three or four minutes, most of us were out of the hole.
The thing about this detention center is that it's kind of half-constructed. They hadn't even finished building the surveillance tower. There was a gate, but they had left that unlocked. Once five or six of us got out, we all ran out of the compound. Then we crossed to the other side of the road and scattered.
Mohamed isn't with him, but Hashim doesn't have time to look for him. The guards are chasing them now. A few of the Uyghur guys are a bit too noisy. Hashim runs into the jungle, towards Malaysia. We go deep into the jungle, and after a while, nine of us manage to find each other. Mohamed isn't among them.
We quickly realized we can't move with a group this size. So two go one way and three of us, me and two other guys, go the other. And the group of four go in the third direction. We walk and we walk and it starts to rain very hard.
We continue pushing forward through the rain until we were pretty far away from the prison. We're making progress. It had been around 2 or 3 in the morning when we escaped and as we walked through the jungle, the sun starts to rise. Since it would be so dangerous to move in the sunlight, we quickly gather up some grass and branches and go to sleep. They lay low all the next day until dusk.
That jungle was so muddy and we had no shoes, so we would get all kinds of splinters in our feet. And there was this particularly spiny plant which would just cut us. Our feet were all ripped up and raw.
It's only a mile to Malaysia, true, but through a jungle and over a mountain range with no maps, no compass. And all Hashim has to survive on are a couple of biscuits and dates he'd stashed from the prison. We ate one date in the morning, one at noon and one in the evening. It was always raining in the jungle, so we were able to drink the rainwater.
We slept during the days, keeping still, and then would get going again after dark. One night, the police either heard us or someone told them our whereabouts. Little by little, torch beams and lights appear through the trees. Dog's barks get louder. I can hear them around me. Those barks are definitely loud. Hashim and his two friends scramble up the side of the mountain.
I'm consumed with panic and fear. We manage to climb up higher and then the sun begins to rise. And we just lie down on the jungle floor and stay as quiet and still as we can. With the police all around us, we think only Allah can help us now.
We're totally consumed by fear. What if they caught us? What would we even say if they did? Slowly, finally, the voices of the police and the dogs barking fade away. We were sure we'd get arrested there. It's basically a miracle we got through that night. Five days. That's how long they spend in the jungle before reaching the border.
Once they get there, they see a high barbed wire fence that they'll have to jump. As we jumped the fence into Malaysia, one of my friends was caught by the barbed wire and he got stuck. We couldn't see him because it was dark, so we left him behind. After crossing the border, our mood lifted.
All the tiredness draining out of our bodies. Hashim lives in Istanbul now. I think when we met last time, you were thinking about getting married and I wondered what's going on in your life right now. Yes, I did get married. I had a kid. I am very happy now. I was alone before. Now there are three of us.
So how is Mohamed Hashim? Have you spoken to him recently? When Hashim was in Malaysia, he saw a Thai news story detailing their escape, announcing how many had made it, how many were still being held captive. That's when I learned that my brother Mohamed didn't make it. Sure, sure.
So Hashim reached out to a group of Rohingyas at the Thai detention centre, who he knew had a contraband cell phone, and they shared their phone with Mohamed. I took it.
After I got married, he'd ask me, how's your family doing? How are your finances? What are you up to right now? We'd talk regularly, as if everything was fine. Hashim learned that during the escape, as the guards were storming the cell, Mohammed was still inside. He had wanted to say a prayer before jumping out of the hole.
He was praying, even though he had only two or three minutes to escape. He could have just not prayed. He must not have heard everyone was escaping, but he should have escaped. Even if he had to cut his prayer in half, he should have just got out. I felt great sorrow when I heard he couldn't make it.
After they first reconnected, Mohamed developed a problem in his stomach. The details are unclear. I don't have all the details, but this is what I heard from others. He himself never said he was sick. He never talked about that. That brother of mine has passed away. He died in Thailand.
In prison, the one thing that comforted our hearts was hearing about Islamic history. Muhammad Aqa would teach us about that, telling us how our ancestors endured all kinds of hardships. He would say, be patient. This is just how this road is for us.
Hashem was one of 20 Uyghurs who tried to break out. He's one of 11 who made it. According to the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, at the time of this recording, 48 are still being held in Thailand. All I feel I can do is pray for them.
But whenever I think of them, my heart breaks. Because we all slept so close together for three years, it bounded us and we became such close friends. We had all left our parents, our relatives, our friends, our real brothers. And even though we start out as strangers, we all became brothers.
Thank you, Hashem, for sharing your story with us. This episode was reported in partnership with Coda Story. English translation for Hashem was provided by Ezra. And I'd love to give proper credit and love to the Uyghur translators who helped us create this story. But they asked us to never use their names in order to protect their families. The original score was by Renzo Gorio. It was reported by Isabel Cockerell of Coda Story.
Produced by Isabel Cockerell and John Fusile. If you missed even a moment, know an entire world of Snap Storytelling awaits. In fact, we recently dropped a brand new series diving into the world of incarcerated women firefighters battling the flames in California, hosted by our own Anna Sussman. It's called Fire Escape.
on podcast platforms everywhere right now. KQED in San Francisco is Snap's orbiting hall of justice. Snap is brought to you by the team that always finds a way out of no way. Except, of course, for the Uber producer, Mr. Mark Ristich. He likes to put stuff in the way. Now there's Nancy Lopez, Pat McSuey-Miller, Anna Sussman.
Renzel Gorio, John Fusil, Shana Shealy, Taylor Ducat, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh, Marissa Dodge, David Exeney, Regina Periaco. At least it's not the news. No way, says the newsman. In fact, you could discover that for the want of a single rusty nail, the shoe was lost. For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For the want of a horse, the rider was lost. For the want of a rider, battle was lost.
for the warmth of the battle. The entire kingdom perished. All of this in front of your eyes while you sit there refusing to even lift a finger and you would still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is