Nujeen

by Nujeen Mustafa

  I’d like one day to go to England to see their castles and also the Tower of London because I heard about the young princes locked in it who disappeared, maybe murdered, like something Assad would do. I’d also like to go to New York and see the Empire State Building and to St Petersburg to see the Winter Palace where the Romanovs lived and held their grand balls.

  None of these things seem impossible any more. I’ve just been on my first ever school trip. We stayed two nights in a youth hostel in a park called Panarbora, an hour’s drive from Cologne, surrounded by forest and nature as far as you could see. It rained of course, so everything was very soggy.

  In the daytime the teachers took us out and told us the names of plants and trees and birds. They also wheeled us to the top of a big observation tower above the treetops, but all we could see was fog. Back in the hostel we played games like the Challenge – when it was my turn, I said I would name ten capital cities in a minute and a half while drinking hot chocolate. One of my classmates who is very slow at doing things said she would paint one of us and at the end we had to guess who it was – it turned out to be me!

  Then we did a Compliments Shower, where we got in a semi-circle and took turns to go in front and everyone had to write on a card what they liked about that person. In my case they said I spoke German well, was a genius at learning languages, had a nice smile and was funny and loving.

  I always wanted to have these memories of a school trip. They came late in my childhood but better late than never. I shared a room with three other girls from my class. Only one could walk. But I started to realize it didn’t matter. It was the first time I had ever slept in a place without anyone looking after me and that was a good feeling. The first night, though, I nearly cried because we had a camp fire and were given special German breads on sticks to grill, but I didn’t know how to and kept burning them. I hate to feel foolish or foreign, and of course when they started singing I didn’t know any of the German songs.

  When the bus dropped me back at Wesseling, my family asked, ‘Didn’t you miss us?’ I realized that actually I hadn’t because I was too busy with everything being new. The saddest thing was at the end of the trip when the teachers said we are going home. I thought what is home? There is no going back to my country.

  Of course I never forget Syria. Now we have TV and an iPad sent by fans of Days of Our Lives, and every day we watch events back home on the news or Facebook. One day someone posted film from our street in Aleppo, George al-Aswad, everything destroyed like a scene from Dresden, apart from our building, still standing as it was when my parents went back. Sometimes, as I watch yet more bombing, yet more innocent people fleeing, the war feels as if it’s in some far-off land, nothing to do with me.

  It might not have seemed possible, but everything there has got even more complicated. Shortly after we arrived in Germany, the Russians – who had been backing Assad all along – got more involved in our war, sending their air force and starting airstrikes, sometimes as many as sixty a day. They said they were attacking Daesh but mostly they seemed to be targeting rebels, and also hospitals. They got Homs back for Assad, which looks like a ghost town, and drove Daesh from the ancient city of Palmyra, then sent in a symphony orchestra to play a weird kind of victory concert amid the ruins. Now the town is under Russian control.

  Assad has launched a massive assault on Aleppo to take control, even if he turns it into dust, and is choking off all the roads in and out. That’s not all. He dropped so many barrel bombs on the town of Daraya near Damascus the day after the United Nations and Red Cross delivered the first food aid to starving people for more than three years that a UN official recently described the town as ‘Syria’s capital of barrel bombing’.

  ‘There is something fundamentally wrong in a world where attacks on hospitals and schools … have become so commonplace that they cease to incite any reaction,’ said Stephen O’Brien, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs. He told the Security Council, ‘The real measure [of success] will be when these medieval sieges are no more, when boys don’t risk sniper fire when bringing medicine to their mothers, when doctors can administer lifesaving treatments without the fear of imminent attacks, when Yazidi girls don’t have to scratch their faces out of fear of being bought and sexually enslaved. That is the disgusting reality in Syria today.’

  Yet Western politicians have started saying ‘better the devil you know’ about Assad, and it seems like the world has just accepted him after all the talk of his barbarity and him crossing red lines. The West only seems to care about Daesh because they have attracted so many of its young to fight and then return home and launch attacks on Western cities like Paris and Brussels. It keeps bombing them in Iraq and Syria and people say Daesh have lost a lot of their territory and many of their leaders and are preparing for the end of the Caliphate.

  As for Manbij, after two years of Daesh control we hear it has been mostly taken back by our Kurdish YPG, working with some of the local Arab sheikhs and helped by US airstrikes. Unfortunately we hear some of the strikes killed dozens of civilians, including children. Around 45,000 fled but thousands of people are trapped inside without food. Manbij is a key supply stop for Daesh en route to their capital Raqqa, so losing it would be a big deal. The YPG, by the way, helped by the US, are responsible for almost all the territorial gains from Daesh in northern Syria, which makes us hopeful we will get our Kurdistan. But people are worried because President Erdoğan sent his Turkish warplanes to hit targets over the border. ‘Manbij does not belong to Kurds; it is a place where Arabs live,’ he said. ‘If needed we will take matters into our own hands.’

  We Skype every day with my parents back in Gaziantep. Yaba is sad. ‘I think my country is lost,’ he says. ‘Everywhere is fighting. I left behind my fields and my children don’t pray.’ He always complains we don’t pray, which is not true. I’m more religious than I look and was raised in a country where religious belief is very strict. My sisters are all fasting for Ramadan. But one thing I haven’t told him. My school sometimes takes us to church. I like the music, it’s awesome, but I don’t sing with the others in case I accidentally sing something that’s like a Bible verse. Everything in Islam has consequences. Going to church during Ramadan – what an irony!

  I am settling into school, speaking German and have even made friends who sometimes appear in my dreams instead of the bombings, though the teachers still complain I don’t socialize. The school arranged a new wheelchair for me which is blue, my favourite colour, and not so wide like the last one which I just sank into. The main thing is it’s much lighter and I can manoeuvre it myself, even up and down kerbs, and I have even started playing wheelchair basketball.

  Nasrine is now doing German classes every afternoon, so maybe I will lose my job as family translator. I don’t mind so much any more as I think maybe I can have other uses.

  Now we have a TV at home we all get together and watch football like the old days, even ordering in my favourite pizza. If it’s Barcelona and they lose, particularly to Real Madrid, I shout at Nasrine, ‘Get out, I don’t want to talk to you!’ She doesn’t like that, but I’m glad that despite everything I am still a normal teenager who can scream if Barcelona lose and that my spirit wasn’t killed. We supported our new country Germany in the Euros and were sad when they lost in the semi-finals.

  One day we went to Cologne Zoo and saw lots of the animals I have seen in documentaries like crimson flamingos, giraffes with no vocal cords and piranhas that can strip the flesh off someone in ninety seconds. A bird with a kind of skirt of colourful feathers came to look at my wheelchair as if we were both weird creatures. While we were there we met some Kurds – we Kurds always recognize each other!

  Now we are settled I have a long list of people I want to look up and investigate – Margaret Thatcher, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, also Einstein – was he a crazy man or a genius? I would also like to go back to the Alps in Austria and find the castle where there is a portrait of the r
eal-life Beauty and the Beast – the story which had been my favourite as a child. Back in Aleppo I once watched a documentary called The Real Beauty and the Beast about a man called Petrus Gonsalvus, born in Tenerife in the sixteenth century covered in hair from head to toe like a wolf. He was suffering from a rare condition called hypertrichosis which only affects men and there are fifty people with it in the world today. Petrus was taken from his home as a boy and given to King Henri II of France, and the queen Catherine de Médici had him married to a beautiful woman who didn’t know what he looked like. But she stayed with him and they had seven children so she must have loved his inner beauty. They were taken on a tour of European courts like curiosities and were painted. But when they had children the ones who inherited the condition were taken from them and given away to European nobles like pets.

  Speaking of curiosities, in June 2016 I was invited with a group of refugees to go to Berlin to meet a lady called Samantha Power, the American Ambassador to the United Nations. I went on the train with Nasrine and we laughed at how it’s become just normal for us to take trains. I was excited to see this famous city where until the year Nasrine was born there was a wall dividing it and where Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves in the bunker.

  There were about a dozen refugees and everyone told their stories, which were heartbreaking, and I wished I didn’t have to listen. But they also showed how they were trying to make a positive contribution to life in their new country.

  There was a doctor called Hamber who had been a political prisoner in Damascus and was trying to get accredited to practise medicine in Germany. In the meantime he has been volunteering as an interpreter for refugees undergoing medical examinations in Berlin.

  There was also a young man called Bourak from Aleppo like us. He had been at the university like Nasrine, studying computer science, and of course, like her, his studies had been brought to an end. He was learning German and was desperate to go back to university and has designed an app called BureauCrazy to help asylum seekers navigate the application process and make the forms available in multiple languages.

  Ambassadors don’t have much time and we didn’t get long to speak. When it was my turn I told her, ‘We are just people who are dying every day for the chance to brush their teeth in the morning and go to school.’ I also said to her, ‘Everyone wants to speak to me because I am smiling – is it so rare to find a smiling refugee? Am I like an alien?’

  Bland, Nasrine and Nahda have all been granted asylum after going to a court in Düsseldorf and answering questions, and they have their residency papers. But I am still waiting, maybe as I am a minor. In my case instead of going to court I had an interview with my German guardian. She asked me about the journey and why I left Syria, if I had seen horrific things and whether I had any proof of the difficulties in my homeland. Nasrine and I laughed afterwards – doesn’t she watch the news?

  Nahda has applied for family reunification and is hoping her husband Mustafa can join them. It’s almost a year since they waved goodbye on the beach in Turkey. Nahra has been settled near Hamburg with her husband, waiting for asylum, and we hope to see her. Only Jamila is still in Syria, in Kobane, because her husband wouldn’t leave. They have electricity now and Daesh have gone, but life is hard and there are no schools open for her children.

  I know we are lucky. My cousin Evelin who travelled across Europe in the same group as Nahda is still in a camp set up in a basketball court. She says her things are stolen all the time – her phone, even her clothes when she hangs them up – and she has the same three pieces of bread, butter and jam for breakfast every morning. They queue for hours to collect pocket money. We also hear from friends in Berlin that they are scared to go out because of hostility. Some even want to go back to Turkey or Syria, but now it’s impossible. My brother Mustafa and his wife Dozgeen applied to go to America through UNHCR in Turkey a year ago but are still waiting for an interview date.

  No one is doing the journey we did any more. As Germany changed its mind about accepting refugees after the Cologne attacks, in March the European Union signed a deal with Turkey to pay them 6 billion euros to close their borders and coastline and stop the flow of migrants. Mustafa says there is lots of barbed wire now and Turkish military in tanks at Jarablus. A whole lot of people got stuck in Greece when the borders closed. More than 50,000 are still there, including in the camps on Lesbos, and some of our cousins who were at Idomeni, trying to get into Macedonia when Europe shut its doors.

  The only options now for those leaving Syria are Lebanon, which is stretched to the limit as one in five of the population are Syrian, and Jordan, which has 1.3 million Syrian refugees on top of its own population of 6.5 million and recently closed its crossing, leaving thousands stranded in the desert at the border. Our own journey here seems long ago. Though it was born from tragedy, I remember it as the biggest adventure in my life, a story to tell my grandchildren.

  Recently some fans of Days of Our Lives who had heard my story came to meet us with amazing gifts like blue headphones and the iPad and took me and Nasrine for a trip on a boat on the Rhine. To my surprise I realized Nasrine was crying. She told me she was remembering the boat to Greece. ‘It was all right for you, you didn’t have the responsibility,’ she said.

  The tiniest particle in the universe is a quark and that’s what I feel like in this big mass of migrants. Around 5 million of my countrymen have left Syria since the war started in 2011 and 1.1 million of them made the journey like us across Europe. Around 430,000 came to Germany. One-quarter of the total refugees are children like me aged seventeen or under.

  We don’t have a lot of choice. Of those who stayed in Syria, more than 250,000 have been killed. Some have been under siege so long they haven’t seen the moon for two years. In Germany they call us Flüchtlinge. Nasrine says it sounds like a bird, but I hate that word, just as I hate refugee and migrant. They’re totally harsh.

  Recently the trial took place of Frank S., the man who tried to kill Frau Reker, the mayor of Cologne. He complained that Germany was heading for ‘self-destruction’ by accepting so many refugees. ‘I saw it as a final opportunity to change something,’ he told the court. He’d even told one police officer after his arrest that he also wanted to kill Mrs Merkel. He was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. ‘He wanted to send a signal to the federal government about refugee policy,’ said the judge, Barbara Havliza. ‘He wanted to create a climate of fear, and influence policy.’

  Then, in the third week of July, when school had finished and everyone was getting into the holiday mood, Germany suddenly had seven days of terror. It started on a Monday when a seventeen-year-old refugee, initially described as an Afghan and later as a Pakistani, pulled out an axe on a train in Würzburg, wounding four passengers and a woman walking her dog, before police shot him.

  Four days later in a shopping centre in Munich, an eighteen-year-old German-Iranian lured teenagers to McDonald’s by promising free food and started a shooting spree, killing nine people. Two days after that came two more attacks in Bavaria. A twenty-one-year-old Syrian with a machete killed a Polish woman, while another one exploded a bomb in a backpack at the entrance to a music festival, killing himself and injuring fifteen people.

  Three of the four attackers were refugees, two of them Syrian. So once again everyone is looking at refugees. One Dutch politician even said the EU should refuse entry to all Muslims. ‘We have imported a monster and the monster is called Islam,’ he said.

  Words like that make us shudder. Actually these attackers are completely ignorant about the real spirit of Islam. But of course these attacks are making people suspicious of refugees. In some ways I am glad they blocked off the way and no one is coming any more.

  We’re worried how much endurance Mrs Merkel has. She has stood up so far to those who want to get rid of us but these attacks are on her citizens and, unlike in our part of the world, politicians in countries like Germany listen to
their people. No one is going to care for us if we are damaging their country.

  Poor Europeans, they are experiencing what we experienced. Feeling insecure is not a good thing. We still jump at bangs and at the sound of a high-pitched voice. I don’t want my new home to be like that too.

  The woman upstairs still doesn’t talk to us. But now we have found out that it isn’t just that we are refugees. I heard that the house was actually owned by a man who had two daughters and left them each half the house when he died. One of the daughters is the woman living upstairs and she wants to buy the downstairs and have the whole house but her sister’s husband won’t agree and rents to us.

  So here’s the thing as I see it. Yes, I know we are expensive. Looking after migrants in 2015 cost German taxpayers more than $23 billion, according to the Economic Research Institute in Munich. But give us a chance and we can contribute. If you don’t want to let refugees in for humanitarian reasons, what about the benefit we bring to the economy? You actually have to be quite resilient and resourceful to navigate all the way here, through all those people wanting to rob and cheat you or close off the way. Most of us who have fled are skilled or educated. I know I didn’t go to school but I speak fluent soap-opera English.

  Germany for example has the world’s lowest birth rate and its population has been shrinking for years. By 2060 its population will have shrunk from 81 million to 67 million. To keep its industry going so it can remain Europe’s largest economy it needs our foreign labour. Germany has already given asylum to 240,000 Syrians, including my brother and sisters thought not yet me. As for the European Union, that has 500 million people, so like I said before, even if they took all 1.1 million Syrians who came to Europe that would only be just over 0.2 per cent – far fewer than were taken in by countries after the Second World War that everyone keeps referring to. Some countries have accepted only small numbers. The UK has only taken 5,465, a quarter of the number accepted last year by the city of Cologne. I guess unlike Germany, the UK’s population has been expanding. Prime Minister David Cameron promised to take 20,000 by 2020 but had to resign after losing a referendum where people voted to leave the EU partly because they wanted to stop migrants coming.