A conversation with a refugee.by Gwen Lindberg While spending ten days in Germany, the sophomore cla
A conversation with a refugee.by Gwen Lindberg While spending ten days in Germany, the sophomore class of LIU Global had the opportunity to go on a walking tour of Berlin led by a man from Syria. Another man from Syria, Husam Rajab, joined the tour, and I spent most of the following two hours, and the lunch and talk after, listening to him speak about his experiences in Syria. The following is my attempt to share with you his story as he shared it with me.Husam was living in Damascus at the time, studying medicine at the university, when bombed a funeral and killed six people. The people of Damascus were outraged. The entire city went to the next funeral, a total of more than 240,000 people. This was the first big demonstration in Syria, and it began a ceaseless tide of violence. Every week, the same thing happened; thousands of people went to a demonstration, there was a shooting, and the Syrian government attempted to keep the dead to prevent funerals and burial rights, as a sign of disrespect and an attempt to dissuade the people from continuing such behaviour. Husam wore a black armband in support of the people.He first went to jail in 2012. They came to his university and beat him and his friend in front of everyone. He was only in jail for one night, but he was beaten so much through those 24 hours that his entire body was blue. Afraid of what would happen if he was sent to jail again, he left school and joined the Red Cross.Assad’s regime attacked hospitals, first aid, first responders, and ambulances. After the first missile, Husam would run out into the streets with the Red Cross, while everyone else ran back inside. The second missile would come in five minutes. Each time this happened, with each injured person he found, he would make the decision: who lives, and who dies.In 2013, he was there during the first chemical attack. “It was a day I never want to remember,” he told me, as we crossed a street and walked around construction on a sidewalk. With the Red Cross, he watched people shake and foam at the mouth, and then die. There was nothing he could do. His friend went into a building to bring people who were hiding outside. “He went in five times, and each time he brought someone else back. The sixth time, he did not come out.”Despite what looked like emptiness in his eyes and voice, Husam somehow managed to convey a desperation that has kept something inside him burning. He told me how 1500 people have died from sarin gas. UN investigators were there, but they didn’t seem to care. He left the Red Cross at the end of 2014, after three years, because he couldn’t stay and continue under siege, working everyday with nothing. He tried to go back to finish his final year at school, after the university sent him a piece of paper granting him passage through the city.In order to get back to the university, he had to cross several checkpoints. He got through the first one by showing his paper, while people on either side of him were shot by a sniper. He was in a camp for two days, and the secret service took all his information, daring him to continue to study. During one of these examinations, a man went up to him and asked if his name was Husam. They talked for five minutes, and the man told him he was okay since he had his paper.He was taken out of the city and into a building where he was questioned for fifty minutes. The men were polite, clean, and respectful, before sending him with some other men down to the basement. There, he was told to put his face to the wall. The men beat him, though “it was nothing bad.” He didn’t understand why he was there.He was told to strip in front of a room with more than 300 people. He stayed there for nine days; “I never decided which was worse, sleeping or interrogation.” The men used his story against him, saying he would die there, and he would never see the sun again. Everyone had to sit in a very particular way, kneeling with their heads down and their hands behind their back, or else they were beaten by the guards. “There was the constant sound of men screaming. They would come back without clothes, bloody, dead inside. People were dying from nothing.”The second time he was taken out of the basement, they said his background checked out. He still couldn’t see anything, but he was moved to another room with sixty people, with two people taking up a square foot. He stayed there for two months, and nothing happened. “There was only reasonable hitting there—it was okay.” He didn’t see sunlight for three months. He kept telling the truth, but nothing worked. While telling this part of his story to the whole group, he joked about using those months to get fit. But earlier, when he was recounting this part just to me, he said those three months were death. “I was not alive, I was dead. So was everyone else.”After the three months, they told him he could leave, but he wasn’t free; he had to join the military. After explaining that all the police and jail keepers are corrupt, he told us he paid the officer more than 1.000 USD to close his eyes for a moment. He managed to escape, and he hid in Damascus with a friend for four months. After hiding from the regime for four months, he knew he had to leave Syria. He was told if he did something, the secret service would take his mother. If he joined the regime, they would set his family free. But he knew that the city of Damascus is like a big jail, with snipers and bombs at every corner; there was no way for them to get to his mother. They were just contradictory, empty threats, he explained; “If you go in[to the regime], you will never go out.” He managed to pay 1.500 USD for a new passport, and found a taxi that would take him, for 600 USD, through a checkpoint to a boat headed for Lebanon.The boat was actually going to Turkey, so he and 50 other people were forced onto an inflatable raft. He ended up in Greece, and then walked across the country to Hungary where he took a train to Dusseldorf and finally arrived in Germany. He spent the following 20 months being moved around Germany, and he is really excited to finally be settling in Hamburg where he can start studying in October. Traveling around for so long has been extremely difficult. The Germans “see all refugees as the same,” no matter where they are from, what they have experienced, or what skills they have, and those have been difficult preconceptions to overcome. He has been disappointed time and time again, as his Syrian medical license was not accepted in Germany, so he has to go back to school to get a new license. It is a new start, though, and he has hope that this time, things will be better.We thanked him for telling us his story. “People should know,” he responded. “People cannot know now, because they cannot believe that this is happening. Maybe this could help, this could go to the heart. We have nothing.”Twenty minutes after privately recounting some of the more brutal details to me, Husam sat listening intently to me and some of my classmates exchanging stories from the summer. Laughter filled our conversations, and with tea in one hand, forgotten napkin in the other, Husam was captivated by my friend’s account of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro this past summer. Thoroughly impressed by her commitment to such a demanding experience and laughing alongside her self-deprecating jokes, I was amazed and dumbfounded by how Husam could set aside his past, filled with brutality and pain on a scale I cannot imagine, and focus on the struggles and triumphs belonging to a completely different person on a completely different spectrum.And so, three months later, I find myself sitting here, writing this article. I hear his words echoing in my head. “It is a Holocaust, not a fight. We are just dying. There is nothing for us to do.”This is the one thing I can do. I can write what I remember. I can put words to the voice I still hear in my head, and I can try to help Husam tell his story. -- source link
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