I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  In our family, my parents wanted us to integrate as much as possible into German society while not forgetting our own culture. Two afternoons a week, we attended Arabic school with a Moroccan teacher, a school organized and financed by the Moroccan consulate, but most days we played with the kids in our class after school. Unlike some Muslim girls in Europe today, who don’t take part in swim lessons or other athletic activities, we played sports. I played field hockey for six or seven years, which my parents encouraged. One of my sisters even joined a church youth group for a while.

  Still, some of the families in our neighborhood would not allow their children to play with us. This was partly because my parents were blue-collar workers, and there were also those who made fun of my oldest sister, who was disabled; others said that we came from a backward culture.

  More than once, neighborhood parents spoke to my sister Hannan’s primary-school teacher and asked that she be removed from the class because she didn’t “fit in.” Often the children of immigrants were asked to repeat classes, in some cases because they had problems writing German but also because of racism. Sometimes, after the first four years of primary school, they would be sent to Förderstufe or Hauptschule, vocational schools for children who weren’t planning to go to university. Even though my sisters and I were all fluent in German, Hannan’s teacher and some of the parents decided that she should go to the Förderstufe. Luckily she performed so well that after a year her teachers sent her back to the regular secondary school, which we call gymnasium. I was lucky with my teacher Mrs. Schumann. She supported my hopes to go straight to gymnasium when I was eleven.

  Our neighbors the Ehrts are one of the reasons I speak German as well as I do. Antje would keep an eye on what I was doing in school, and she was always very particular, especially about my writing. She wanted me to learn the best form of German. When I was a small child, she would read with me and often gave my sisters and me books of fairy tales and cassette tapes of Mickey Mouse stories that her children had outgrown. We were thrilled. My parents couldn’t afford to buy us many books or tapes.

  Around the time I started gymnasium in 1989, I began to see changes among the Yugoslavs who worked with my mother in the church community, including Aunt Zora and Aunt Dschuka. Their children had been in the after-school day care, like me. We had all been close friends, especially because our mothers were unskilled workers, which set us apart from German children, many of whose parents had been to university. Their children had names like Leika, Zoran, Ivica, and Ivan. They would always say proudly that they came from Yugoslavia. Suddenly, they refused to play with each other. Instead of sharing Yugoslavian heritage, they began to say, “I am Croatian,” “I am Serbian.” Others called themselves “Bosnians” or “Muslims.” Their mothers stopped joking with each other and drinking coffee and eating borek together in the break room.

  While we could clearly see a divide between Yugoslavs at my mother’s workplace, my parents asked us not to generalize. Aunt Zora and Aunt Dschuka were Serbs. They and their families came to visit and eat with us. Like us, they were horrified by what they heard and saw in the news but would always say that the country’s schism hadn’t come from within. “We used to be one people,” Aunt Zora told us. “We never asked if someone was Serb, Slovene, Croatian, or Muslim.” She believed that the war was a Western plot to weaken socialist Yugoslavia.

  We heard about massacres on the news or heard in school about someone’s uncle having been killed fighting in the former Yugoslavia. But this was all far away from my family and me. We had often felt like outsiders in Germany, but we didn’t feel directly threatened until September 1991. Almost two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, xenophobic riots broke out in Hoyerswerda, a town in the northeast of Saxony. Right-wing groups attacked workers from Vietnam and Mozambique and threw stones and gasoline bombs at an apartment block that housed asylum seekers.

  My parents and I watched on TV as Germans applauded when a building burst into flames. Some even raised their hands in a Hitlergruss, the infamous straight-armed Nazi salute, and screamed, “Germany for the Germans! Foreigners out!”

  My parents said not to worry, that this was in the former East Germany and that people in the West would never do something like this. “The people here know that without people like us, their economy would not be where it is today,” my father said.

  I was angry with my parents during that period, especially with my father. While my grandmother in Morocco was very strong-willed and never let anybody boss her around, I felt that my father did whatever his bosses or other Germans told him. As a chef, he worked long hours, and we barely saw him. But very often when he had a day off, his supervisors would call and ask him to come to work, and my father would immediately go. It didn’t help that he lived upstairs from the restaurant owner, Mr. Berger, who always knew when my father was home. When we went to the German authorities to renew our residency documents, I noticed that my father never asked questions or talked back, even when the people on the other side of the table treated him shabbily.

  In our apartment building, Mrs. Weiss, who had survived the Holocaust with her husband, invited me into her apartment for a cocoa the same week that the news was full of the riots. She and her husband had told me about the concentration camps and their dead family members. The old lady seemed in distress; her face was pale. She told me that she hadn’t slept in days. The images from Hoyerswerda haunted her. “Please, child, take care of yourself and your family. I worry for you,” she said. “These people, these thoughts, they are ugly and dangerous.”

  I told her not to worry, and that this all was happening in East Germany and would never reach us in Frankfurt, but Mrs. Weiss shook her head. “No, no, you don’t understand,” she said. “If the Germans had learned, what has happened in Hoyerswerda could not have happened.”

  A year later, in November 1992, my parents’ argument lay in tatters, as members of a right-wing gang set fire to two houses occupied by Turkish families in the city of Mölln, in the western part of Germany. A Turkish grandmother and two girls were killed and seven others were injured. The attackers called the fire department themselves to report the attacks, ending their calls with the words “Heil Hitler!”

  It was the Jews who spoke most forcefully against this terrifying attack. While most German politicians chose to stay away, the head of the German Jewish community, Ignatz Bubis, and his deputy Michel Friedman went to pay their respects to the victims and their families. On May 29, 1993, the house of another Turkish guest worker, Durmus Genc, was burned in Solingen, also in the former West Germany. Genc’s two daughters and two granddaughters, aged four to twenty-seven, were killed, along with a twelve-year-old visitor from Turkey. Again, members of Jewish organizations spoke up the loudest.

  That summer, my parents took us to Morocco on vacation. By now there were four of us children, my brother Hicham having been born in 1986. We flew to Casablanca, drove to Meknes, and spent three or four weeks at my grandmother’s house visiting and receiving family and friends.

  My father’s half sister Zahra also lived in Meknes, about ten minutes from my grandmother. She was married and had seven children, and one day my sister Hannan and I went to visit. One of Zahra’s sons, who was about nineteen at the time, had some friends over from the neighborhood. They were all watching TV.

  I saw a mountainous region and cars with bearded men carrying guns. They said, “Allah hu-Akbar,” meaning “God is great.” The screen showed women crying and screaming. A voice said that these women had been raped and their families killed by Serbs. My cousin and his friends began to look angry. The next scene showed men with long beards standing behind two kneeling men. One of the bearded men said something in a language I couldn’t understand. A different voice, apparently of the cameraman, said “Allah hu-Akbar.” Next, I saw one of the bearded men holding the heads of the kneeling men in his hands. My cousin and his friends applauded.

  “What movie are you watching?” my sis
ter asked.

  My cousin and his friends stared at us. It wasn’t a movie, they said.

  “This is the truth about what is happening in Bosnia,” one of my cousin’s friends said. “It shows how the mujahideen fight in Bosnia against the Serbs who massacre Muslims.” He continued: “All Serbs should be killed. They rape our sisters and kill our brothers.”

  Hannan and I told them that not all Serbs were bad and that in fact my mother had two Serbian coworkers who were very kind.

  “You can’t be friends with these people,” my cousin’s friend said. “You will see. Soon they will try to kill all the Muslims in Europe. Without the mujahideen, you will all be slaughtered.”

  My sister told me in German not to listen to him and that we should leave soon.

  “How come you don’t know about this?” my cousin asked. “These videos come from Germany. The man who films them is a German of Egyptian descent.”

  This man’s name was Reda Seyam, and his videos from Bosnia were some of the earliest examples of jihadist propaganda that has since ballooned into today’s use of violence as a recruiting tool. Many jihadists of my generation would later describe Bosnia and especially the massacre at Srebrenica as their “wake-up call.” The Dutch UN soldiers who stood by and watched as Muslim men and boys were seized and killed in Srebrenica convinced some Muslims that the West would do nothing as Muslims got slaughtered.

  Back in Germany, things got worse. Later that summer, Hicham and I went out for ice cream one afternoon not far from the Holzhausenpark near our house in Frankfurt.

  As we walked home, a car packed with four German men pulled up next to us. “Gypsies! We will kill you, Gypsies!” they yelled. With their shaved heads and tattoos, the men stood out as skinheads. It was rare to see people like this in our neighborhood. I looked around to see if they were talking to somebody else, but the street was empty. “We mean you two Gypsies!” one of them shouted. “We will kill you. We will take you to the gas chambers!”

  My brother started crying. I threw our ice cream away, grabbed Hicham’s hand, and screamed for him to run. The car was following us. I knew I couldn’t run fast enough—my brother was too slow, so I lifted him and turned onto a one-way street. The car was about to follow when other cars showed up and honked. One of the other drivers screamed that he would call the police, and the car full of skinheads drove away. My brother and I ran home sobbing.

  I told my parents we had to leave Germany. I begged them, “First they burned the Jews, and now they’ll burn us.” I thought back about what my cousin’s friend had said in Meknes, about people going after Muslims in the middle of Europe. Was he right?

  I started having nightmares about the car with the shouting skinheads, from which I’d wake up crying and screaming. I began to read extensively about the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and how it all began. I was filled with fear as strong as anything I’d ever felt, not just for me but also for my whole family. Reading about what the Nazis did to handicapped people, I couldn’t help thinking about my sister Fatma. I felt we were no longer safe or accepted in Germany. For days, I begged my parents to pack and leave. “These people don’t want us here,” I told them.

  That week, I heard a radio interview with Michel Friedman, one of the Jewish leaders who had been so responsive to the attacks on Muslim immigrants. He spoke about the Holocaust, how it felt to be the child of survivors and to live in Germany. Yet Friedman didn’t want to abandon the country he’d grown up in. “Leaving Germany and settling somewhere else would have been the easiest option,” he told the host. “We—and I am talking about whoever has a sense of humanity, no matter if Jewish, Muslim, or Christian—cannot let these right-wing groups win by allowing them to shut us up or by packing our bags.”

  That was the moment I stopped asking my parents to leave. Instead of giving in to my fear and alienation, I took them as a challenge, one that continues to this day. I decided to work as hard as I could and do my best to prevail over the forces that so frightened me. That was what I meant all those years later, when I told the ISIS leader on the Turkish-Syrian border that he’d taken the easiest way out. I believed my way was harder.

  My parents are partly responsible for saving me. I wasn’t able to say that all Germans were bad because I lived among some good ones who supported and cared for me. It all sounds obvious now, but back then I was a teenager, and I was very angry.

  I sometimes wonder what would have happened if an Islamic State recruiter had found me in those dark moments. I’m not sure how I would have responded, or whether I would have been strong enough to resist.

  2

  The Hamburg Cell

  Germany, 1994–2003

  When I was a teenager, politics and current events captured my imagination. I asked my German godparents to keep their magazines and copies of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s big daily newspapers, so I could read them. One day, I saw an article about an old movie focusing on two journalists whose reporting led to the resignation of the American president Richard Nixon. “Based on a true story,” the article said. There was a large black-and-white photograph of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the newsroom.

  Like all kids, I’d thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had considered becoming an actress or a politician, but All the President’s Men tipped the balance in favor of journalism. I was thrilled by the notion that these two reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were taking on people in power, that they were so persistent in finding the truth, and that their articles had such impact. Look at this, I thought. Journalism can change things. It reminded me of what my grandfather in Morocco had said years earlier: the people with power are the ones who write history. I could see that journalists didn’t simply write what happened; what they wrote could change lives.

  My parents weren’t especially excited about my career plans. My mother said that the prisons in Turkey were filled with journalists. My father delivered the opinion of one of his coworkers, who told him that there were already many “German Germans” who wanted to become journalists and couldn’t get a job. “She said this profession is more for German Germans and that you are better off doing something else,” my dad relayed. “For example, you could become a nurse.”

  I understood my mother’s argument. She was worried about my safety. But when it came to my father, I was just disappointed. Why would he let other people decide what was right or wrong for me? And what did it mean that many “German Germans” wanted to become journalists? Hadn’t I been born in Germany?

  Redford and Hoffman were stronger than my parents’ concerns. After seeing the movie, I cut out the photo of the actors standing in the newsroom and hung it on my bedroom door. I was determined to become a journalist. I also knew that I’d have to pay for my education because my parents wouldn’t be able to.

  When I was fourteen, I took on two jobs, working Saturdays in a bakery and babysitting twice a week. At sixteen, I added two more: tutoring kids in math and German and working at a home for elderly people in the evenings. I cleaned floors, washed dishes, and fed the old ladies.

  In the meantime, I established a magazine at my high school called Phantom. The first contributors and editors were some of my closest friends. We interviewed politicians and personalities, including Michel Friedman, the Jewish leader who had so inspired me after the killings of Turkish migrants and who was also a politician in the Christian Democratic Union, and Gerhard Schröder, then prime minister of the state of Lower Saxony, whom I met at a political event in Frankfurt before he became the Social Democratic Party (SPD) candidate for the chancellery. Ignoring all the media and bodyguards surrounding him, I tapped on his shoulder, introduced myself, and asked for an interview for my school paper. I told him how important I thought it was that politicians talk to young people. He turned to his assistant. “Sigrid, can you give this young lady your business card?” he said.

  In return, I proudly presented my own homemade business card, which was
white with my name in blue. I’d decorated the cards with silver sparkles because I didn’t want people to forget me.

  Schröder smiled. “When we get questions from Phantom, just forward them to me,” he told his assistant. We chatted for a few minutes, and he asked what grade I was in.

  I didn’t realize that other reporters had gathered nearby, and some were taking pictures. The next day, my mom got a phone call from one of her friends: “Your daughter is in the newspaper with Gerhard Schröder!” I bought the paper and tore it open, but then I saw the caption: “Gerhard Schröder explains politics to a young Frankfurt party member.” I was outraged. I called the paper and asked for a correction. “You can’t just write that I’m a member of the SPD,” I told them. “I’m not.” But the people in the newsroom just laughed and told me it was a great picture.

  At about this time, I also began writing letters to the editor in response to news coverage or issues of the day; one of them, about Islam and women, was even published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. After it ran, somebody from the neighborhood called my mother. “Tell your daughter to stay out of politics,” she said. But I was adamant that as a young woman and the daughter of guest workers I had a voice, too.

  I didn’t identify primarily as a Muslim in those days. I felt that my siblings and I had more in common with our friends whose parents had come from Greece, Italy, or Spain than we did with other Muslim kids. What mattered was that we were the children of immigrants, that we weren’t “German Germans” but outsiders.

  In Germany, it is usual for high school students to do brief internships in fields that interest them. When I was sixteen, I began calling local newspapers and asking if I could do an internship, even unpaid. I got one at the Frankfurter Rundschau, a daily paper that was more liberal than the Allgemeine Zeitung. I worked on the local desk, writing about elementary school students growing flowers in their school gardens and about disputes between neighbors over garbage pickup or where their dogs had peed. I did whatever came along, on top of schoolwork and my other part-time jobs.