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Syria's Secret Library

Page 23

by Mike Thomson


  Frederik and his senior producer, Claudia Otto, could not have been more helpful and Claudia had been fascinated by the secret library ever since first hearing my documentary. Like me they had become determined to discover its fate following the evacuation of Daraya: ‘I had heard your radio programme about the secret library on the BBC,’ Claudia told me, ‘and it made me very curious. I really wanted to know what had happened to it. I investigated a little bit further and then decided to try and go to Daraya with Frederik to find out.’

  Like me, Claudia had not found this easy at first. Getting into Daraya while it was under siege was next to impossible. But she and Frederik, who had been reporting from the Syrian government’s side of the front line, were allowed in around five weeks after the evacuation of the by-then wreck of a town. Determined to find the secret library they got in touch with a contact who had lived in Daraya during part of the siege and was able to give them some directions. Though they first had had to promise him that they wouldn’t take anyone else with them and would be careful to avoid being followed there by soldiers. The directions they got were rather vague, a factor made worse by the destruction of most of the landmarks their contact had given them: ‘We were told about the little side street it was in,’ Frederik said. ‘But it was very difficult navigating in that area because a lot of those small roads had debris all over them. Most of the houses had been bombed to rubble, and so even when we drove down that street we had problems finding the library. The only reason we eventually succeeded in finding it was because we spotted the little pick-up truck parked outside. We saw the guys carrying out lots of books–that’s how we knew we were at the library. All we could see otherwise was a small side entrance that went straight into a basement. We may never have found it at all if they hadn’t been there at that very point, loading all those books onto their truck.’

  Frederik suspected that the soldiers stumbled across it accidentally when doing house-to-house searches. Claudia was convinced that the uniformed men they saw were either Syrian government soldiers or allied militia men. She told me how the soldiers carrying the books out had left very quickly when they spotted the TV camera. Going by the shots I saw from Frederik and Claudia’s video, their activities amounted to vandalism and blatant daylight robbery, so their camera-shy reaction was hardly surprising. Although conquering armies have done this sort of thing throughout history, they did not have an international audience watching at the time. Claudia was clearly still outraged by what she had seen: ‘It was complete destruction. There was nothing left there. Finding the library would have been a big opportunity for them. Not only that, but they were going through everything elsewhere too. We even saw them ripping cables out of houses.’

  Claudia’s description made me feel for those who had been forced to leave behind almost everything they owned. Many desperately wanted to return as soon as possible, but given what I had just been told, I asked Claudia, would they find anything left if they did? ‘No, no, nothing,’ she replied. ‘Definitely not. It’s a complete ghost town.’

  Frederik, a senior international correspondent who must have seen many awful things in the course of his work, was equally appalled. Not just about what was done to the library, but the state of Daraya itself. ‘There were basically no homes left untouched. Some were just shells. When we got there, it was about three weeks after the fighting had ended and quite a few houses were still on fire, or at least smouldering. There was just utter destruction, you could barely move through the streets because of the debris everywhere.’ He told me that he felt really sad, seeing people’s possessions being picked over. Small groups of men, presumably with the permission of the army, were sorting through the debris and carting away whatever they liked. It was, he told me, the kind of chilling mayhem you often see when an occupying army moves into a conquered zone.

  ‘It was definitely an odd feeling,’ he continued. ‘It was eerie too. It brought the fighting that much closer. I mean, when we were in Damascus before, we obviously heard a lot of the artillery fire coming down on Daraya. But you really can’t envision what people there went through until you actually go through this place and see the destruction.’

  Frederik then talked of the other nightmare that leaves no evidence behind. The years of terrible hunger that had stalked the streets day and night and left children unable to sleep and adults struggling to carry on. The silent, invisible, relentless pain of siege. But the debris from the bombs and bullets was almost everywhere. The only places Frederik and Claudia found that seemed to have escaped the devastation, were the myriad tunnels and basements beneath the streets. The most cherished of all these subterranean hideouts was the basement that housed the secret library, though by the time they got there it was far from the calm and peaceful refuge it once had been. With no lights of any kind they had entered a desolate world of darkness and potential danger. ‘When we walked in,’ Claudia told me, ‘we had to think about the possibility that booby traps might have been left in the library, perhaps as revenge on the soldiers who had taken over their town. It really was quite worrying. So we entered the building very cautiously. But once we were inside, it felt so quiet, so peaceful.’

  Listening to Claudia I could well understand her fear of booby traps. They are the first hazard anyone working in a war zone is warned to watch out for, especially in situations where territory has just changed hands. Yet I couldn’t image those who had loved their library so much planting bombs in it. Their biggest wish was that it would still be there for them when they got the chance to come home. Taking revenge on soldiers in that way would surely have made little sense, nor compensated for the loss of their fondest treasure, the place that brought comfort to their past and hope for their future.

  As I was reflecting on that, Frederik’s attention had moved on to the dimensions of the secret library. Given its huge importance to the long-besieged community, he had imagined it would be so much bigger.

  ‘It looked and felt a lot smaller than the photos,’ Frederik told me. ‘It was basically just one room and it looked quite dilapidated. There were headings saying religious books, science books, physics books, things like that, but it was hard to see much of it. There was no light in the place. It was very dark, quite spooky.’

  Claudia told me that despite all the looting and dilapidated state of the library, there seemed to be no structural damage inside. The basement looked quite intact. There were still cushions in the reading corner where people had sat with their books, she said, and much else looked pretty much like it must have done before the evacuation. This helped Claudia picture the warm and peaceful atmosphere she had heard people talk about in my documentary. Now, she herself was standing in their treasured secret library: ‘It was very exciting to actually find this place. We were both really excited. I kept thinking about how all those people had been there in this secret location. I mean, it was still so very quiet inside. It must have been a place where you couldn’t hear all the bombs and the shelling that was going on outside. That was the first thing we felt. It was such a peaceful place.’

  They had both wondered at the time what had happened to all those people. ‘We were delighted that we managed to find Amjad,’ she told me. ‘He is alive and well. Before we went to the library we were told that some people from Daraya were taken to a refugee camp near Damascus. We found Amjad living there with his parents. It was quite magical really.’

  This was wonderful. Until now nobody I had spoken to had had any idea what had happened to that delightful young boy, who had perhaps loved the secret library more than anyone. Seeing how overjoyed I was at this news, Claudia and Frederik said they would dig out his new phone number for me, so that I could get back in touch with him. I was greatly looking forward to hearing how he was and how he had coped with the dramatic run of events. But while I was pondering on that coming encounter, Claudia told me that I was not the only person interested in Amjad. She and Frederik had mentioned their meeting with him to the Syrian government�
��s Information Minister, though without giving his name and where exactly they met him. When she told the minister how much the former Chief Librarian missed the secret library and its books, he came up with a rather unbelievable pledge: ‘We told the minister that after finding the library we had met Amjad, and what an interesting, intelligent kid he was. We then mentioned how very sad he was when he saw the pictures we had taken of the military looting all the books. So we asked the minister to let us take those books to Amjad ourselves. But he said, no, I can do this all myself, I will bring them for them and take care of everything.’

  It was not hard to detect the sceptical tone in Claudia’s voice when she relayed this unlikely sounding pledge, especially given that, for Amjad’s safety, they hadn’t told the minister where to find him and his family. ‘I think both of us feel utterly the same way about that little kid,’ Frederik continued. ‘Amjad is such an interesting boy. I have no doubt that being in the library so much, and reading so many books there, did an incredible amount for him. I think that really transformed him from being just a small kid in Daraya, into a very critical and analytical thinker. This is particularly amazing given the impression we got that both his parents, who are living in the refugee camp with him, are illiterate.’

  Amjad’s parents had both seemed concerned about Claudia and Frederik’s visit because the heads of the refugee camp came with them, and the occasion had drawn a large crowd. Their worry was that word of Amjad’s role in what the security services would see as the ‘rebel library’, might get back to the authorities. Not, Claudia added, that Amjad himself appeared bothered about that at the time. On the contrary, Frederik told me, he seemed uninhibited and voiced some very strong opinions. He kept telling them how much he loved the secret library and what a big difference it had made to his life. ‘The library had clearly changed his life in many ways,’ Frederik said. ‘It seemed to have reformed and strengthened his personality. You could see that within his family setting. He has now taken on a leadership role. All this sprung from the fact that he had managed to educate himself by reading all these books and taking on the responsibility of running the library.’

  While all this was enormously heart-warming and impressive, I was concerned that Amjad had been so quick to speak his mind. Might the combination of his new-found authority and youthful exuberance bring him unwise attention in such a dangerous country? Frederik seemed to share my fears: ‘Amjad is now a public figure and that’s not something that will make life easy for him. That has been emphasised by both your work and ours. These articles and broadcasts are watched and read by very powerful people, and these are the ones who can get him into trouble.’

  I could only hope that Amjad, who always wore his heart on his sleeve, would learn to be more careful what he told people sometimes.

  Over the following days, as news of the looting of the secret library spread, I received a stream of messages, many expressing anger as well as distress. Some came from people who had heard my radio documentary a couple of months before; others were from those I had come to know in Daraya. Anas, Sara, Rateb and Ayham all told me how shocked and heartbroken they were and Abdul Basit, who was one of the first to be told the news by Malik, wrote: ‘This is what I always dreaded, our beloved library being desecrated in this way. I am so sad to hear this news that I can’t take it in, I can’t find the words to express my deep sadness.’ I pictured his description of how he had lain across the books in the secret library and cried before being evacuated, how this cherished literary sanctuary had inspired him to carry on during the darkest days of the siege and how he dreamed that one day he would return to it. Yet now it was gone. I just didn’t know what to write back to him. It took me ages to compose a short, rather inadequate text, saying how I felt that even though the regime’s soldiers had looted the library, they couldn’t destroy the spirit of those who built it.

  One of the most poignant dedications to the library came from the former pharmacy student and FSA fighter Homam al-Toun, who had written so movingly of his lifelong friend Omar Abu Anas. He posted his thoughts on Facebook:

  Thoughts about the Library (9 October 2016)

  I knew I was gonna cry on a day like this and I remember telling my brother Omar Abu Anas that if Daraya falls, the destruction of the library will go down as our most painful loss. I always thought of this possibility. But I used to avoid imagining what it would be like to see it demolished. Barrel bombs were sometimes dropped near the library and I used to pray asking God to protect it.

  After seeing this Facebook post I managed to make contact with Homam, who was also now living in Idlib. When our conversation turned to the looting of the secret library, I could hear the pain in his voice: ‘It was a really awful thing to read about as there was nothing we could do to stop it. The revolution inspired the building of the secret library, because before then we were prevented from reading many books. Some of the ones we had there were banned by the government. Yet now all who came to the library could read them. Our secret library was not just a nice place to read books, it was a crucial part of our revolution.’

  It was now clearer than ever just how important the library had been to the people of Daraya. Not just as a treasured secret reading room and place to escape the bombs and bullets, but as an icon of their uprising. A fact that explains why it was unlikely to be left in one piece when discovered by the Syrian army.

  There was also a financial aspect to this, too, that had helped determine its fate. Some of the books in the library were apparently quite valuable; even the more ordinary ones were worth a few Syrian pounds if traded on the streets of Damascus. I had seen no evidence of the books being sold since the CNN crew filmed them being taken away, but a few days after talking to Frederik and Claudia, Anas texted: ‘We have confirmation that books stolen from the library have been found on sale on the streets of Damascus. The reason I know this is that we referenced every book using our own coding system. Inside we always wrote who each one belonged to and where the owner lived. Since the looting of the library, books with these markings on have been found on sale.’

  Still visibly angry and upset, Anas told me that this illustrated how the regime put no value on knowledge. The books, he continued, had been sold for whatever they could get, which appeared to have been very little. He wished that the looters had left them behind and taken the furniture and everything else instead. But he had not lost hope despite what had happened: ‘I think books are like rain. Wherever rain falls things grow. So hopefully wherever our books land, the person who reads them will gain knowledge, and his or her mind will grow. This in turn will help humanity grow. We will always be proud of our secret library and I’m sure that good things will continue to flow from it.’

  The young voice that answered the phone did not sound like the one I remembered. It was nervous, suspicious and wary. When I checked that I was speaking to Amjad, the reply was simply, yes. There was fear in that word, not the warm, endearing enthusiasm of old. When I explained who I was and what I wanted to talk about, the bubbly boy I had known suddenly returned. He let out a raucous welcome. Where was I, he asked, had I come to Syria? I explained that I was in London but longing to find out how his life was going since leaving Daraya and its secret library. Suddenly, on my mention of the library, his tone cooled again. I got the feeling that young Amjad, who I had learned was now fifteen, had finally been told to watch what he said. This was probably just as well. I remembered thinking only a short while before how necessary such caution was, in a country as dangerous as Syria, especially for somebody as naturally open-hearted as Amjad, though it certainly didn’t help our conversation flow. When I asked if he had seen anybody from Daraya since arriving in his new home, he answered curtly: ‘I’m sorry, it is not possible to answer that.’

  Was somebody with him, I wondered, warning him not to say anything about the formerly rebel-held town or anyone from it? Or perhaps he was in a public place and worried that anything he said might be overheard by t
he wrong people. It seemed possible that his nervousness might be connected to the visit by Frederik and Claudia from CNN when Amjad and his family were living in a centre for displaced people near Damascus. I remembered Frederik telling me that crowds had gathered, and wondered whether that might have led to them all being questioned by the security forces. That would obviously cause problems. Unlike in parts of Idlib, there was no bombing or fighting there, which must have been a huge relief. But the downside was that, in government-controlled areas like that one, anyone from formerly rebel-held towns like Daraya, was never free of suspicion. I had been told that the population in such places was monitored closely by the security services. All of which might explain Amjad’s nervous behaviour.

  Determined to help ensure that nothing I said would get him or his family into any trouble, I ran through a list of questions I wanted to ask him and told him to check with his parents if it was all right to answer them. And when I called Amjad back the following morning, he seemed much happier, far more like the open, zesty and trusting boy I had found so endearing. He told me that his school work had come on quite a lot and that his family were eating proper meals again. When I reminded him how he had told me during the siege of his dreams of eating eggs, he giggled and told me that those dreams had now become reality. It was only when we started talking about the secret library that Amjad’s tone changed. ‘I am very, very sad about this because the library was my life. I read so many books there and spent so much of my time in that wonderful, quiet and friendly place. I always liked to think of it still being there, untouched, waiting for us to go back. The loss of the library is what saddens me most, more even than anything else that happened to our town.’

 

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