The Pianist from Syria

by Aeham Ahmad

  Every time I see how healthy our two sons are, how joyful, every time I hear them babbling in German as they come out of their preschool, my heart leaps. I remember how pale Ahmad was when we were starving in Yarmouk and could feed him only rice and clover. Whenever little Kinan wants to show me something, he gently takes my finger and places it on the object in question. He does this because he’s lived with my blind father for so long. I can only hope that the horrors of the war and their escape from Syria didn’t scar the souls of our sons. I can only hope.

  And then I’m drinking coffee with my wife, it’s spring, the flowers are blooming, the sky is clear, we’re safe. Tahani has to go to her German class, and I ride my bike to the train station and take a shiny white train to my next concert. Wonderful people greet me—they’re happy that I’ve come. We do a sound check, maybe an interview, and in the evening, I’m on a big stage playing my songs from Yarmouk, full of sadness and hope. People are listening. I’m sharing my pain with them, and yet I’m happy, for I feel our hearts beating in unison. That’s when I’m truly alive—when my audience has tears in their eyes, when I can express what’s in my heart: the certainty that we can accomplish anything . . . together. All borders are erased, if only briefly, and each of us is greater than before, free and full of courage.

  * * *

  This, then, is my story. The story behind the photo that went around the world, of a man in a green shirt playing the piano amid the rubble. And, as anyone who sees it will know, the photo can never tell you what happened before or what came after.

  — AFTERWORD —

  November 2018

  A lot has happened in the three years since I completed the writing of this book. My family and I are now settled in Wiesbaden, Germany, although I still find myself struggling when I’m not keeping busy. It sometimes seems that it’s easier for me to travel across Europe for concerts and to keep talking about my experiences, raising both awareness of our situation and money to help other refugees, than it is to sit alone with my thoughts.

  The war continues in Syria, and will soon enter its eighth year. How many more will it be? And nobody is winning. More than 5.6 million Syrians have fled the country as refugees, and 6.1 million are displaced within Syria. Half of those affected are children. It is thought that this war has created the largest refugee crisis of our time.

  We know we are the lucky ones, to have been reunited as a family and allowed the chance to start a new life in a country where we will be safe. It is a very small proportion of refugees who are reunited with their families after fleeing Syria. A lot of people who had fled to Europe have returned to Syria because they weren’t able to bring their families over to join them. If it hadn’t been possible to bring Tahani and my sons to Germany, there is no doubt I would have returned to Syria as well—even with the strong possibility that when I returned I either would have been imprisoned, forced into the army, or killed. Families have been torn apart by being separated; it was very hard for Tahani during the year I was in Germany on my own, as she often thought I’d found a better life and didn’t need her anymore. This happened with a lot of families who were separated around the same time as us. Many refugees returned to Syria not because it is now safe, but because they had to be with their families. This situation is still going on; many people are still returning. It felt like the most important thing in the world for me to keep my promise to Tahani that we would all be together again within a year, and I asked everyone I could to help me.

  There is no question that I had to make the journey ahead of Tahani and our sons. When they followed, less than a year later, they had a safe journey by plane. It is also almost impossible to raise the funds for a whole family to leave the country at the same time. Once we had found the money for me to leave, I was then able to try to help them from Germany.

  The best thing to have happened to us recently was receiving the news that my parents would also join us in Germany. They arrived in October 2018, and I am so happy to have them here. It was a very long process to enable this to happen, but it is a huge relief to me. They made the same journey as Tahani, on a flight via Beirut. It had been hard since I left Syria to know that my parents were still there.

  It is incredible to think that in a journey of one day, the rest of my family had been able to leave Syria and be in Germany. It couldn’t be more different from the journey I had to make! But this is why I made that journey—for my family.

  There is nothing I can do for Zeinab, or for everybody else I left behind, but I have done what I can for my family.

  Ahmad is six years old now, and Kinan is four. They attend school and have settled well into life in Germany. They don’t really have any memories of their time in Syria, but Ahmad knows when we talk about it that it means war and hunger, so he must have some awareness of it. He knows that to be in Syria is a scary thing. I think that as he gets older, any memories he does have will grow more concrete.

  Kinan is a bit more curious than Ahmad. He is a bit quieter, more considered and thoughtful. Sometimes when I am watching the news, he will sit down to watch it with me. He doesn’t talk very much about the past, but his language isn’t great—he isn’t fluent in Arabic or German at the moment, but perhaps things will start to come out as his speech develops. I think his memories will come to him as he gets older. It is the youngest children I worry for the most; older generations are experiencing all of this now and will process it and be okay, but for the younger victims of the war, I worry that the trauma of it won’t come out until much later.

  Yarmouk was once home to a hundred and sixty thousand Palestinians but is now a shell of bombed-out buildings and rubble. When I left Yarmouk, there were seventeen thousand people still living there. In the years after I left it became an even more dangerous place, which is almost unimaginable. My parents were forced to move to Yalda, and in April 2018, the Yarmouk camp was completely destroyed.

  It is thought that the figure of those imprisoned or missing in Syria now stands at more than eighty thousand, although it’s impossible to get an accurate figure because many families are too afraid to report their missing relatives, or don’t have the means to do so. Families are going years with no news at all about their loved ones. My father continues to struggle a lot, as we still have no news about my brother Alaa’s disappearance. We don’t know if we will ever learn what happened to him. Many of those missing or imprisoned are children; some with their mothers, some without. For many children, war is all they have known of life. Many of those missing are being tortured or ill-treated in prisons, which is what my friend Raed experienced.

  When I left Raed in the prison to continue my journey out of Syria, I never imagined he might still be there three months later. His story has a happy ending, though—he and his wife now live in Hamburg. The torture he experienced in the prison led to him requiring two operations on his spine when he reached Germany. He is still unable to use his hand some of the time, and he struggles to walk. But we are all safe, and grateful to have access to food, running water, sanitation, and medical care.

  This is my politics—what is right for the people, for the civilians. I don’t side with politicians, I just want what is right for the human population.

  Tahani is involved in the art scene in Wiesbaden and has had her first exhibition. She received some really positive newspaper reviews for it, and has been asked to show her work with another refugee at a prominent art exhibition. She finds the same comfort in art that I find in music: it is an outlet for her to express all her feelings of the past few years.

  We’ve also opened a small music and art school, where we teach both children and adults. We wanted to create a cultural center where we can help integrate Syrian refugees into German society. Tahani looks after this mostly, but when I am there I will play a concert with the students. Her German is much better than mine, so she is able to translate for the children. I also run some workshops to teach about the war in Syria, and we sometimes hold concerts whe
re I will read from this book and then invite attendees to ask questions afterward. It is important to me to help educate children about refugees. We teach both Germans and refugees in the school, although most of those we teach are refugees, as they don’t have the money to attend the prestigious music schools in Germany.

  I continue to keep busy with my music. That is my revolution. I enjoy using my music to work with various aid agencies. We recently played a benefit concert where we raised twelve thousand euros (almost fourteen thousand dollars), which was used to build a new hospital in Syria. While I play I am always thinking about where this all began: of playing with the children in those streets of Yarmouk and wondering where they are now; of Zeinab standing beside the piano; of my father’s determination for me to have an instrument I could play well, and how suddenly Syria changed from the country where I was receiving that education to the place it was when I left. Although I have my family here with me now, I still feel helpless when I think of the people I left behind. And this is where I continue to use my music: to build connections, to raise money to help, to bridge gaps in people’s understandings, to create common ground.

  This is what is important to me now. This, and family.

  My father after his arrival in Germany, with my son Kinan.

  (Photo courtesy of the author.)

  — ACKNOWLEDGMENTS —

  I would like to thank—from the bottom of my heart—all those who stood by my side, who supported and helped me, who encouraged me, and who occasionally endured me.

  I’d like to thank the following people: Carmen Elena Belaschk, Suraya Hoffmann, Rein Wolfs, Monika Fabricius, Rita Akkawi Hazboun, Michael Stein, Luisa Imorde, Stephan Zind, Marianne Hoffmann, Katharina Deserno, Hendrick Denker, Kai Schumacher, Fadi Jebaily, Ayham Nabuti, Athil Hamdan, Samir Nashat Sido, Verena Rajab, Montserrat Cabero Pueyo, Don Horenhof, Lukas Narojek, Sakher Al-Mohamad, Roswitha Kacmaczyk, Sonja Arnold, Lelya Lavandula, Steve Schofield, Lothar Pohl, Hans Joachim Hecek, Remon Azar, Jürgen Ney, Sabee Ottima, Ahmad Almasri, Bernhard Felix von Gruenberg, Birgit Apfelbaum, Moira Wachendorff, Susanne Gundelach, Birgit Kiel, Britta Fischer, Elke Gruhn, Hiltrud Fuchs, Torsten Schreiber, Thilo von Debschitz, Mechthild, Hans Karl Henne, Teresita Cannella, Edgar Knecht, Vanessa Ess, Vanessa Schmitt, Nail Odeh, Walter Schumacher, Karim Hamed, and Ernesto Briceño.

  If there’s anyone I might have forgotten, I apologize! Thank you all! Without you, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

  — ABOUT THE AUTHOR —

  AEHAM AHMAD was born in Yarmouk, a suburb of Damascus. His father encouraged his musical talent, and at age seven, he began piano lessons at the State School of Music in Damascus. He later studied music education in Homs and worked as a music teacher. In 2015, he fled to Germany because of the war in Syria. Today, he lives with his family in Wiesbaden and gives concerts all over Europe. In December 2015, Ahmad was awarded the International Beethoven Prize for Human Rights.

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  Copyright © 2017 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH

  English language translation copyright © 2019 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Translation by Emanuel Bergmann

  Originally published in Germany in 2017 by S. Fischer Verlag as Und die Vögel werden singen

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  Author photograph © Gaby Gerster

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  ISBN 978-1-5011-7349-3

  ISBN 978-1-5011-7351-6 (ebook)