They escaped China’s crackdown. Now, they wait.
Friday, November 22, 2019 Emily Rauhala tracks the plight of a Uighur family that escaped internment in western China. And Michael Ruane describes a newly digitized wealth of recordings and documents from the postwar Nuremberg Trial. About Post Reports Post Reports is the premier daily podcast from The Washington Post. Unparalleled reporting. Expert insight. Clear…

Emily Rauhala tracks the plight of a Uighur family that escaped internment in western China. And Michael Ruane describes a newly digitized wealth of recordings and documents from the postwar Nuremberg Trial.
About Post Reports
Post Reports is the premier daily podcast from The Washington Post. Unparalleled reporting. Expert insight. Clear analysis. Every weekday afternoon.
In this episode
After detention in a Chinese internment camp, a new life
In Xinjiang, the Chinese government has targeted Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims by turning the vast region into a laboratory for mass surveillance. More than 1 million people are in internment camps, according to U.S. and human rights groups estimates.
Not many Uighurs escape the checkpoints and security cameras. Fewer still make it all the way to the United States. But by some miracle, says reporter Emily Rauhala, one woman named Zumrat Dawut survived internment and fled to the United States with her husband and three children. Now they live in the Virginia suburbs, where they are waiting to hear whether they will be granted asylum.
Dawut shared her journey with Rauhala this summer, but she was hesitant about the publicity it would bring her family.
“She was weighing her responsibility to her family and then this sense that she’d had when she was in detention,” Rauhala says, “of ‘why isn’t anyone doing anything about this, why isn’t anyone speaking?’ She said that’s why she ultimately decided to tell her story.”
- She survived a Chinese internment camp and made it to Virginia. Will the U.S. let her stay?
- First she survived a Uighur internment camp. Then she made it out of China.
- ‘Boiling us like frogs’: China’s clampdown on Muslims creeps into the heartland, finds new targets
- ‘Police cloud’: Chinese database tracks apps, car location and even electricity usage in Muslim region
Evidence of cruelty finds a digital home
Earlier this month, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington secured copies of rare recordings and documents from the postwar Nuremberg trials in Germany, after a years-long digitization process.
The dozens of films, hours of tape and a quarter of a million pages of documents were stored for decades by the International Court of Justice. They provide a firsthand account of the famous postwar Nuremberg trials in Germany.
“We’ve all read about these horrors,” reporter Michael Ruane says. “But to hear it from the perpetrators themselves — and the eyewitnesses — is really stunning.”
- Nazi war crimes evidence comes to the Holocaust museum in Washington
- Holocaust survivors are dying, but their stories are more relevant than ever
- Rare pictures of Hitler emerge from glass photo negatives, like parts of a puzzle
- Hitler’s girlfriend filmed Nazis relaxing and the fuhrer dancing. Now the footage is going digital.
About Post Reports
Post Reports is the premier daily podcast from The Washington Post. Unparalleled reporting. Expert insight. Clear analysis. Every weekday afternoon.