The Morning They Came for Us Quotes

“And this is the worse part of it — when you realize that what separates you, someone who can leave, from someone who is trapped in Aleppo, or Homs or Douma or Darayya, is that you can walk away and go back to your home with electricity and sliced bread; then you begin to feel ashamed to be human.”
― Janine Di Giovanni, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria

“The lowest depth that a human being can reach is to perform or to receive torture. The goal of the torturer is to inflict horrific pain and dehumanize another being. The act not only destroys both parties' souls — the victim's and the perpetrator's — but also the very fabric of a society. By subjecting men or women to enforced violence, sexual violation, or worse, you transform them into something subhuman. How does someone return to the human race after having been so brutalized?”
― Janine Di Giovanni, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria

“War means endless waiting, endless boredom. There is no electricity, so no television. You can't read. You can't see friends. You grow depressed but there is no treatment for it and it makes no sense to complain — everyone is as badly off as you. It's hard to fall in love, or rather, hard to stay in love. If you are a teenager, you seem halted in time.

If you are critically ill — with cancer, for instance — there is no chemotherapy for you. If you can't leave the country for treatment, you stay and die slowly, and in tremendous pain. Victorian diseases return — polio, typhoid and cholera. You see very sick people around you who seemed in perfectly good health when you last saw them during peacetime. You hear coughing all the time. Everyone hacks — from the dust of destroyed buildings, from disease, from cold.

As for your old world, it disappears, like the smoke from a cigarette you can no longer afford to buy. Where are your closest friends? Some have left, others are dead. The few who remain have nothing new to talk about. You can't get to their houses, because the road is blocked by checkpoints. Or snipers take a shot when you leave your door, so you scurry back inside, like a crab retreating inside its shell. Or you might go out on the wrong day and a barrel bomb, dropped by a government helicopter, lands near you.

Wartime looks like this.”
― Janine Di Giovanni, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria

“Nada had grown up with these stories – and stories of the subsequent imprisonment and persecution of religious Sunnis – but her reasons for joining the opposition were not religious in nature. She joined because she ‘wanted the chance to live in a democracy. As you do.”
― Janine Di Giovanni, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria

“While I was lying on the floor, they stood over me, kicking me in the teeth and punching me and using their hands and feet. One man put his military boot in my mouth. I lay there hiding my face as they kicked and thought: ‘They are using my body to practise their judo moves.’ And the entire time they were beating me, they kept saying: ‘You want freedom? Here’s your freedom!’ Every time they said freedom, they kicked or punched harder. Then suddenly the mood changed. It got darker. They started saying if I did not talk, they would rape me.”
― Janine Di Giovanni, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria