One day the secret police came to our apartment, ransacked our house and turned everything upside down. They said, ‘We’ve been following your wife and we know she’s been attending an underground church. If we ever see her attending again, your daughter will...
I am Austrian and my husband was Italian, but we met when we were both working in a hotel in Geneva. Because we couldn’t speak each other’s languages, we had to speak to each other in French! We liked our life in Switzerland, but we would have had to reapply for our...
My parents lost a baby in the Gulf War because the hospital was attacked. After that, they fled Iraq to Libya, where we lived a relatively peaceful life until 2011, when everything turned upside down. One day it was a protest, the next it was the Arab Spring, then the...
While I was doing my degree in Psychology in Singapore, I fell into depression for a year. It was a pretty tough time. I failed a couple of units and I started thinking, ‘God, my dream is over now.’ I ended up spending a lot of time playing video games – it was my way...
In 2011, when the war began in Syria, we didn’t realize that it would affect us in Aleppo, but in 2012, it came. At first, it was a bit far away. Then, it began to cover the whole city. When we were at home, we could hear bombs, tanks, and snipers, and we were very...
