We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria

by Wendy Pearlman

I was too scared to protest. I went only once, because my girlfriend wanted to go. In the taxi and then at the demonstration, I thought that everyone else was a security agent about to arrest me. A guy I know got arrested that way. They brought him in for interrogation, but he wouldn’t confess that he’d gone to a protest. Then they showed him a video and asked, “If you didn’t go, who is this?” He turned yellow. In the video he was in the middle of a demonstration, sitting on someone’s shoulders—and that someone turned out to be the interrogator.