"A tiger in a cage", "a monster splashed on the front page", "buried alive" with sport as "the only pastime because unfortunately I don't even have a book", and "two words" addressed every now and then "to the pigeon that lands on the windowsill outside the bars, the stool or the locker."
Ilaria Salis, the Italian arrested in Budapest on 11 February 2023, talks about the first weeks of her detention in a diary of which Repubblica has published some excerpts.
"Gyorskocsi Utca. Cell 615. Early March 2023. From the wolf's mouth I see some spiers and I imagine that it is a cathedral. Later I will discover that it is actually the Parliament. After
all, I spent just a few hours here in Budapest before finding myself in handcuffs and of the city nothing above all", he recounts the early days.
"Free time is the only time during the day in which I see other inmates. With some I can communicate in some more or less well-known idiom. The others scrutinize me from a distance as if I were a strange creature. Perhaps because of the bizarre boots I wear , perhaps because the local media have transformed me into a monster splashed on the front page and a sinister reputation as the 'scourge of the Nazis' precedes me, or perhaps simply because I am a foreigner", continues Salis who waits "impatiently for the much desired contacts with loved ones in Italy ".
March 9, 2023 is the "twenty-sixth day of captivity".
"Hurray! ET TELEFONO CASA", Ilaria exclaims in her diary as she finally manages to hear her words: "Speaking in my language, listening to affectionate voices and sensing the closeness of people triggers devastating emotions in me".
On March 10, 2023, she "was told that my arrest will be renewed."
Then she receives the news that her contacts "are forbidden, blocked by order of the General Prosecutor's Office of Budapest, the capital. ALL. Basically I can't even talk to my mother".
"I feel buried alive, segregated in an alien world, in a dark abyss 'where the sun is silent'".
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