When we were 10 years old, one of our friends said that he had heard the adults say that Aleppo was going to turn into a war zone in less than year, and we felt such fear in our stomachs. We said, ‘No way, that’s never going to happen.’ But soon after that, our...
Although my mother is Jordanian and I was born in Jordan, my father is Syrian and in Arabic countries we follow the citizenship of the father. Every year we used to go to Syria for holidays, and every year my father would say, ‘Just one more year and then we’ll move...
I was always dreaming that there must be a place where we could live better than the life we had in Israel. At the time, I thought it was like living in a prison, as we weren’t rich enough to be able to travel to Europe and we couldn’t travel to the surrounding...
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...
