Icrossed three borders in fourteen days. The first was in the back of a truck that smelled of diesel and fear. The second was through a river that was colder than I could have imagined any water being. The third was on foot, at night, through a forest where I could hear nothing except my own breathing and the sound of my youngest daughter asking me if we were almost there. I told her yes. I didn’t know if I was telling the truth.
“They gave us numbers when we arrived. I remember thinking: I was a professor. I had a name.”
I am a doctor. Before the war, I worked at a teaching hospital in Aleppo. I had a house with a garden where my wife grew tomatoes. My children went to a school three streets from our front door. I had spent fourteen years building a life with the precision and care that I brought to my medical practice. And then, in the space of three years, the war took all of it.
What They Don’t Tell You About Survival
There is a word in Arabic — ghurba — that means the particular grief of being far from home. It is not just homesickness. It is the ache of existing in a place that was not made for you, of having no context, no roots, no history that the people around you can see or understand. In the camps, and then in the temporary housing, and then in the cramped apartment in Berlin where we spent our first two years, I lived inside ghurba like a second skin.
The German language was beautiful and impenetrable. The bureaucracy was exhausting in ways that are difficult to explain to someone who has never had to prove their own humanity to a government form. There were days when I felt that the process of becoming a refugee had made me less than human in the eyes of institutions — reduced to a file number, a status, a problem to be processed.
My Children, My Reason
My daughter Nour was seven when we left. She learned German faster than any of us, the way children do — unselfconsciously, joyfully, as though a new language is simply another game to play. Watching her navigate her new school, watching her make friends, watching her argue confidently with a classmate on the playground in a language she had not known two years before — this was what kept me going on the hardest days.
“She doesn’t carry ghurba the way I do. She carries both worlds, and she makes it look like a gift, not a burden.”
I want my story to be heard not so that people will pity me. I have no interest in pity. I want it to be heard because I know that right now, somewhere in the world, there is a family making the same journey we made. There is a father telling his daughter that they are almost there, not knowing if it is true. And I want him to know that on the other side of that journey, it is possible — slowly, imperfectly, painfully — to rebuild. Not the same life. A different one. Sometimes, unexpectedly, a good one.
On Being Seen
I found Unmuted through a community organization in Berlin that works with refugees. I was asked to write something for their newsletter, and the woman who ran the organization said: “Don’t write what you think we want to hear. Write what it actually felt like.” It was the first time in four years that anyone had asked me that question.
I am a doctor again now — I passed my German medical licensing exam last year. I work at a clinic in Wedding, where many of my patients are also refugees and migrants. When I sit across from someone who has just arrived, who is still in the early fog of ghurba, I can say to them honestly: I know where you are. I was there. And I see you.
Being seen is not a small thing. It is, I have come to believe, one of the most fundamental things one human being can offer another. This is what Unmuted gave me. And it is what I try to give, every day, to the people who sit in my examination room.
