Other Forms of Water Torture
- Supposedly, the Rasphuis in Amsterdam, a 17th-century institution that attempted to rehabilitate young male criminals through labor, contained a "water dungeon," the so-called Waterhuis. If prisoners refused to work they were placed in a cellar that quickly filled with water after a sluice was opened, and were handed a pump that enabled them to keep from drowning. Geert Mak and other authors, however, point out that there is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of this room and this punishment.
- The House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary, shows examples of water torture used by the Nazi and Arrow Cross Parties against the Jews. One involves a sunken cell filled with ice cold water; the prisoner must stand on a tiny metal plinth in the centre of the room. When the prisoner becomes tired or falls asleep, they will fall from the plinth into the icy water.
Read more about this topic: Water Torture
Famous quotes containing the words forms, water and/or torture:
“Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended
lying,
Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,
Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism ... is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politique.... Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)