In a small apartment in Warsaw, two women are drinking tea and making a list of clothes and toiletries to give to compatriots imprisoned in Belarus.

“Oliya, we need to buy some things for an older woman…moisturizer, tights and pajamas,” said 31-year-old Evgenia Dolgaya. She worked as a journalist in Belarus. Now she runs an organization that delivers daily necessities, even sanitary napkins and toilet paper, to the penal colony in her hometown.

The women she helped were political prisoners who fell foul of Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorship. Her friend Olga Rittus, 45, has herself served a prison sentence. Like almost all political prisoners, she was arrested in 2020 following pro-democracy demonstrations across the country.

Four years on, the detentions continue. A new wave of arrests this year includes feeding the families of political prisoners, most of whom are women.

According to human rights organization Viasna, there are 1,406 documented political prisoners in Belarus. This number far exceeds the number of such prisoners in Belarus’s larger neighbor Russia, which includes about 175 women.

Some of the prisoners are public figures, such as Viasna’s own leader, 61-year-old Ales Bialiatski, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. Maria Kolesnikova, a 41-year-old opposition activist with distinctive blonde hair, red lipstick and a bright smile, is serving an 11-person prison sentence. Year. Her family and legal team have not heard from her since February 2023.

Ms Kolesnikova is not the only prisoner placed in solitary confinement. In Belarus, prisoners are unlikely to send text messages and videos to supporters the way Alexei Navalny did in his Russian Arctic penal colony. In Belarus, prisoners seem to be almost disappearing.

Luminaries such as Mr. Bialyadski and Ms. Kolesnikova are just a small part of a broader story. Factory workers, musicians, writers, lawyers, doctors, students and many others leading the most ordinary lives were detained.

Most of these people are women.

Olga ran a tourist hotel in Minsk before her arrest. She said she was savagely beaten by masked men and put in a cell with “no bedding, nothing.” She said she spent four months in a 10-square-meter cell in a Minsk prison along with seven other women. “The only thing we had in our cell was a red sweater… When new detainees were brought in, we gave them this red sweater to cover themselves.”

“The food there was completely inedible,” Olga said. She described prison bread as “spetzhleb,” or special bread, made from chaff and bran. Fish bone soup, nicknamed “Grave,” can make your stomach swell, she said. “We survive on food parcels [that people sent us]”.

Many women were sent to serve long sentences in a women’s labor camp near Homel in southeastern Belarus, where they were forced to sew uniforms for security forces in prison factories. They described cleaning the prison yard with rags and even standing outside in deep snow for long periods of time as roll call was called. Boots, thermal tights and thermal underwear are high on the list of essential items donated by donors.

Olga and all the other ex-prisoners we met spoke of the great solidarity among women. “When a cell starts singing, you can hear it through the barred prison windows. If one cell starts singing, another cell picks it up.” She described how the women shared a photo Postcards, passed from bunk to bunk, bring a pop of color to a gray room.

Many of the female prisoners are mothers who have been concerned that their children could be taken into state custody and raised in orphanages if other family members were also arrested.

One of Olga’s friends – Olga Skarshuk, who also lives in Warsaw – described her painful joy at receiving letters from her husband and children while she spent 16 months in prison . “Rivers of tears… because we don’t know when we will see them again. My son writes every week.” He wrote: “Hi Mom, Nana and I went to the water park.” I went down the slide, Swim in the pool and eat chips. Mom, I wish you could come home…Mom, we’d love to see you. “

For Olga Ritus, receiving letters from home is the hardest part. “My son’s handwriting is not good,” she said. “I remember how we tried to read his work together, the whole cell.”

Belarus is an extremely closed and secretive country. Since 2020, all independent media organizations have been closed. Many journalists are serving long prison sentences and thus are unable to obtain a clear and detailed picture of the situation in the country. Only women like Yevgenia, and the two Olgas now living abroad, can freely tell their stories.

new series Across continents Airs on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday at 9pm