Inside Syria's notorious Saydnaya prison, families search for the lost: Reporter's notebook

Editor's note: This reporting contains graphic descriptions.

SAYDNAYA, Syria -- We've just been to the Saydnaya prison, one of the most notorious in the world, according to Amnesty International and other watchdog groups.

Outside, a man stands in front of a crowd calling out names, from a list found inside. Those gathered listen intently.

I ask someone whose names they are. "They were all hanged," he says, almost matter-of-factly. But he realizes I'm foreign and may have an answer for him, and I realize he's waiting to hear if he recognizes a name. "My brother," he says.

Others think I might be able to help. At least get the word out. Another man grabs my arm. "My son was 15 years old when they took him! Where is he?!" That was 11 years ago. The man is heartbroken. Furious.

Others join, and soon everyone is holding up their phones in front of me, each with a photo of the person they lost. Their grief is overwhelming. There are, sadly, many places in the world where horrific abuses are committed. There are few where they are alleged to go on for so long, in such secret, by a government on its own people.

Ropes tied into nooses and covered in what appears to be blood are held aloft for us to see. We find the hydraulic printing press these families believe dead prisoners were placed into and crushed for easier disposal. We see the tiny cells behind thick iron doors where inmates were said to have been kept in solitary confinement for decades.

I'm led through the maze of rooms by crowds of people, all desperate for answers. They group in the half-light over the endless documents strewn about the floor. Remnants from newly exiled President Bashar Assad's bureaucracy of terror.

We come across people digging. They use spades, sticks, their hands. They believe there are underground dungeons. The White Helmets, as the Syrian Civil Defence first responders are known, have said they don't think there are any more rooms to find. But these people don't believe that. They've never been able to trust anyone, and this is their moment now.

Everyone has a phone. They film, film, film. They want the world to know. They can't believe they're here, seeing with their own eyes what their hearts suspected was true.

Our local producer, Wissam, cannot believe it either. Earlier, we had walked into a government building in Damascus. He's 21, and he has wonder in his eyes. "Never in my life did I think I'd be able to walk in here," he says.

Every building, every room almost, in Assad's Syria had a picture of him. On the white walls of the television and radio authority, we trace the square dust marks of where those pictures once hung. The broken glass and defaced portraits of the now fugitive president crunching under our feet.

I feel in Wissam a realization that all this was a facade. The illusion of the regime's power was as important to Assad as Saydnaya prison, as the multiple branches of the intelligence services, military brigades and their brutal physical force. That's why when it was challenged without Russia and Iran to help, it literally vanished.

Where are all these people now? The secret service agents? The henchmen of decades of terror? Presumably melted back into society. Maybe running to neighboring countries.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the leading rebel group, has offered an amnesty to some, to those who might help identify secret prisons. But if you know what you did for Assad, would you stay? Would you run? Would you fight?

Wissam, simply, is in shock. He cannot believe Assad is gone. He finds it hard even to explain how he feels.

Censorship was real. But it was also internalized. It will be easier for younger people to come to terms with this than their parents, who for five decades have learned just to say "alhamdulillah" -- or "praise be to god" -- and little else when asked simple questions like, "How are you?"

But the people who lost loved ones in Saydnaya, they can at last tell the world how they feel.