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For 5 days John Schlapobersky stood on the brick – with meal and toilet breaks while a team of six men working in pairs interrogated him in four-hour shifts.

‘I talked to them in an open voice, but in another inner voice I talked to the brick without revealing it, and the brick and I continued the ordeal together. … The brick and I would discuss how they were abusing us … and I imagined the brick talking back to me saying, “Don’t worry they’ll pay for this!”

As the sleep deprivation accumulated so Schlapobersky became increasingly confused, unable to understand what was being said, dozing on his feet before falling off the brick and walking into the wall –

‘… there were roars of laughter from somewhere, but I could not get my eyes to focus and see who was laughing. … Sleep deprivation made me psychotic – I saw and heard things that were not there. … I was unable to tell the difference between a mad present and a threatening past [his time at boarding school].’

After 5 days, he was stretchered out, and sent to a prison where he slept.

‘Then I began to read the Bible … I had been at a Church of England school [and] had had a religious upbringing as a Jew … Because concentration was difficult and because I later found the amount of violence in the Old Testament difficult to tolerate, I chose to read only from the New Testament in the morning when I was at my worst. In some of the Gospels I found a benevolent spirit uplifting, but was unsettled by accounts of Christ in front of Caiphas … I was brought face to face here with my own experience. I kept the Old Testament for the afternoon, and was again unsettled by its more punitive passages.’

Writing on a piece of toilet paper to his girlfriend – a letter that couldn’t be sent, but parts of which survived. Schlapobersky wrote:

‘This place is so horrifying that the sensitive parts of one’s self close up to shut it out, like certain flowers do at night. If one remained here for long enough, these parts would never be able to open again. But there are birds singing in the trees outside. Their songs penetrate even the heavy locks and unmitigated gloom of captivity.’

With no sense of any future, he found on day 11 some consolation in Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8 ‘To everything there is a season’. ‘.. I could even pray if I were religious. Ecclesiastes blew me away and I withdrew into a state of reverie’. Pressure from his parents enabled a visit and this became a turning point and Schlapobersky found a passage in Chronicles to mark this first sign of hope.

‘David: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners … Our days on earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding” (Chronicles 29:15). This became ‘a touchstone through my life’.

And calling on this and Psalm 39: 4,5, 12 became something that Schlapobersky turned to years later when teaching others about therapeutic work with refugees and victims of torture.