We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria

by Wendy Pearlman

Because no country in the world is paying attention to me. Not a single one is doing anything to protect any fraction of the rights that I should have as a human being living on earth. I’m not saying that the conscience of the international community is asleep. I’m saying that conscience doesn’t exist at all.

This is when we lost our humanity. I’d open my phone and look at my contacts and only one or two were still alive. They told us, “If someone dies, don’t delete his number. Just change his name to ‘Martyr.’” That way, if you got a text from that number, you knew that someone else had gotten hold of the phone and might be using it to entrap you. So I’d open my contact list and it was all Martyr, Martyr, Martyr . . .

The regime has turned us into monsters so it can justify killing us by saying that it’s fighting monsters. Syrian society has been shattered, because families have been shattered. Bring any family together today and you’ll find four or five empty chairs.

I once photographed a barrel bomb that killed three kids. I was photographing the father as he sobbed. He kept saying, “I left them for one hour to look for a safer place to take them. I came back and they were gone.”

But even a monster has hope. He hopes that someday he’ll go back to being a normal human being.

We were alive, but not really living.

We don’t have a problem with death. Our problem is life without dignity. If we’d known what was in store for us, we never would have come. But we did come, and now we can’t just return. There’s no way back.

We respect all people and are against all terrorism. But why does this world have such little sympathy for people dying in Syria?

If I’d known this was life here I would have stayed in Syria and handed myself over to ISIS. It’s better to die once than die slowly every day.

Here in Sweden, I fulfill my duties and get rights in return. This is what homeland means.

People are thinking, “If they kick us out, where will we go?”

What do they expect us to do? Isn’t it enough our government destroyed us and we lost everything? We would prefer to stay in our country. If you don’t want refugees, help us make peace in Syria.

They want to scare their own people from demanding change.

We’ve accepted the fact that we need to make our dreams smaller if that’s what it takes to keep dreaming.