We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria

by Wendy Pearlman

It’ll take him like six months, up to one year, to become a normal human being, to say what he thinks, what he feels. Then they might start . . . whispering. They won’t speak loudly. That is too scary. After all that time, even outside Syria you feel that someone is listening, someone is recording.

We were all just groups of strangers. A country of closed communities, held together by force.

There was just a cloud of scariness around us, like they wanted you to feel uncomfortable with what you were doing.

I’m not saying that the conscience of the international community is asleep. I’m saying that conscience doesn’t exist at all.

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

My son spent the first years of his life in Homs stuck inside because of the curfew and the bombing. He had no contact with anyone but his parents and grandparents. He was two years old when he saw another child for the first time. He went up to him and touched his eyes, because he thought that he was a doll.

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.

That’s one of a dictator’s strategies: to keep the population in ignorance. A library means people will read, which means they’ll think, which means they’ll know their rights.

But once, after the war started, he called me and managed to say: “Thank you for being so stubborn. You saved yourself, and you saved your sister, too.”

I don’t want to be only a political thing. I want to be able to laugh, tell jokes, enjoy music. To be a person with dreams, hopes, love. I have a lot of anger at the world and I want space to heal. I want to find the space to be me.

For me, freedom is living in a society that respects me. Freedom is being able to express myself. Freedom is the chance to do something for which people will remember me.