This is not comfort literature. It is a record of what happens when life is reduced to bare survival—and what, if anything, in a person can remain unbroken.
The shock is not only cruelty. It is how quickly normal moral categories get pressured into silence: privacy disappears, time collapses into the next meal, and dignity becomes a contested resource.
And yet the question refuses to die: if everything external can be taken, is there still an inner freedom that cannot be confiscated?
That question sets the tone for everything that follows: meaning is not decoration. It is an operating system.