The Other Side Quotes

“The first morning in Istanbul, I woke up and didn’t know where I was. Not the usual confusion of an unfamiliar hotel room. This was deeper. My body understood before my mind did. I opened my eyes, saw a white ceiling, felt the softness of a mattress under me, and something in my chest locked up. I sat up fast, heart pounding, and looked around the room. The window. The curtain. Morning light coming through. The door with no lock on the outside. The silence of a place that wanted nothing from me.I washed my face and looked in the mirror. I looked older than I expected. There were lines that hadn’t been there when I arrived in Qatar. More grey in my hair than I remembered. I looked like a man who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time. Because I had.”
― Muhsin Çetin Eraslan, The Other Side: A True Story of Survival and Hope Inside Qatar Central Jail

“One morning I came out of the mosque where I had been sleeping upstairs. A Qatari prisoner stepped out from the room next to it. His English was good. “Turk, come into my room. Don’t go downstairs. They’re going to execute a prisoner by firing squad. You can see it from here.” He had been in this prison for ten years, he told me, and had watched executions from that window more than once. He said it as if he were talking about the weather.”
― MUHSIN CETIN ERASLAN, The Other Side: A True Story of Survival and Hope Inside Qatar Central Jail