WJ:

When Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani speaks to the United Nations Wednesday, I will be thinking about the events of 1988, which the regime has tried to erase from history. In school our lessons contained no reference to that summer of blood. But I heard one firsthand story in 2012 from Maryam Akbari Monfared while we were both being held in Tehran’s Evin Prison for our political activities.

“They brought my brother’s belongings—a bag containing his clothes, bloodied and torn from torture,” I recall Ms. Akbari saying. “I will never forget that moment. My parents had gone to visit him, returning instead with his effects. Neither of them could talk. As if they had no words to describe that horrible scene.” By 1988 her brother had been a prisoner for eight years. She said he had been arrested at age 17 for distributing the opposition newspapers of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK.

The look on Ms. Akbari’s face conveyed the whole scene: the grim mother and father, with no corpse to bury or grave to mourn over. “We will not let this be forgotten,” she whispered.

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