They had also lined the walls with egg cartons to keep the screams from coming outside.
It's the torture room that the Russians had set up in the old police station.
"They used electricity, they left people without food, they beat them, they made seven people stay in these cells that were meant for two," said Dmytro Hranchak, the police chief of Izyum, in Ukraine, south of Kharkiv.
Those cells hadn't actually been used for decades and had also been abandoned by now.
The Russians took care of putting them back into operation: from the beginning of March they occupied the town to free it six months later, on 10 September.
The prisoners here were all civilians (in five other similar places the military were imprisoned);
there were men and women and"
Welcome to Hell.
If there is a city where the rules of war, if any, have not been respected, it is Izyum: hospital destroyed, buildings razed to the ground, mass graves, children deported, playgrounds bombed, churches devastated.
A concentration of "war crimes which are being investigated by international human rights organizations", underline the local civil and military authorities when speaking to journalists following a mission organized by the Ukrainian and Polish embassies to the Holy See.
Then there is a block of totally gutted buildings.
Here between 3 and 5 May the bombs killed 51 people, among them two children, aged 3 and 6.
The slide of the condominium playground is still there, with its bright colors standing out against the gray of the rubble.
Before February 24, Izyum had 50 thousand inhabitants, today there are half of them left.
From the early hours of the morning, some have lined up in front of the 'food bank', the assistance center at the entrance to the city, to get something to eat.
They lived for months in the basement with the little they had or managed to recover and they lost almost everything.
Roman Semenukha, head of the military district of Kharkiv, rattles off the figures of the tragedy: "a thousand civilians killed, 80 percent of the upper floors of buildings destroyed, as well as 30 percent of single-family houses. They were deported to Russia two hundred children from the region, of whom about eighty were taken in the city of Izyum alone".
But it is when you arrive in the wood just on the outskirts, dedicated to Shakespeare, that you are left speechless: the large mass grave still shows the holes from which 447 bodies were exhumed, 425 civilians and 22 soldiers.
The authorities show journalists the videos taken at the time of the discovery of the grave: bodies with their hands tied, or riddled with bullets in the back.
For every hole where there was a body there is a cross and here and there also flowers that someone has just brought so as not to forget these people.
But the desire to start over is all there.
Even in those who, in the midst of so much destruction, are completing a mural dedicated to Kozak, the favorite cartoon of Ukrainian children.
Or in the words of the army representative Semenukha himself who when asked about the most necessary things now replies: "Building materials, floors, windows, we need to rebuild quickly. Let's hope that next spring all those who have left will be able to return to the city. We wait for them."
(HANDLE).