A Palestinian refugee in Germany finds comfort with Holocaust survivors

People who have themselves fled a war zone cannot fully support a war. For them, it’s not just news or a headline, they know what war means for those affected.

This is the story of a young man’s life, a life I cannot even begin to imagine and I have been through some little hardships myself -or so I thought- until I started to realize that my life, even though it includes loss, grief, and pain, is still one millions of people dream of.

Amin Al Magrebi (born in 1998) was born and raised in Yarmouk, the Palestinian district of Damascus. Since 2015, he has been living in Berlin, where he studied history and economics at Humboldt University.

This is his story:

In December 2012, I spent my last night at my grandparents’ house in the south of Damascus. At noon, the warplanes of the Syrian Assad regime had attacked a mosque where people from the surrounding area had found refuge. For as long as I can remember, I went there almost every Friday to pray. It was now the scene of a massacre.

After the airstrike, armed rebels and jihadists entered the neighborhood and ousted the Assad soldiers. The regime lost control of Yarmouk, this small Palestine in the south of Damascus, and bombed it all night.

A mortar bomb hit the neighboring house across the street. The splinters smashed into the wall in front of me. I was fourteen.

My first night in the hail of bombs, my last night in my childhood home, left no mark on my body. A privilege that the bombardment of residential neighborhoods does not grant to everyone. Nevertheless, my memory of that one night remains very clear – even after almost twelve years.

Yarmouk

I was born and raised in Yarmouk, the “camp for Palestinian refugees” in the south of Damascus. Most of the up to 150,000 people who lived in Yarmouk during peacetime were descendants of Palestinians who became stateless refugees after the war between Israel and the Arabs in 1948. For generations, these Palestinians have passed on their stateless status to their children and their grandchildren.

In Yarmouk, I visited schools named after the towns and villages of a Palestine that no longer exists. The “Palestinian cause” of a return to Palestine, which found a macabre expression in all the people around me through inherited statelessness, is dealt with intensively in the Syrian curricula, in history lessons as well as in “national education”.

Syria is staunchly anti-imperialist, they say. It is in solidarity with the Palestinians and in the resistance struggle against the Jewish state, which cannot be called a state. It is instead called a “Zionist entity”. The fact that Palestinians remain war refugees for generations instead of being naturalized with all rights is not only explained by Syria by the fact that they want to preserve their “right to return to Palestine”.

When I asked my history teacher in eighth grade what the Holocaust was, he told me, “A lie of the Jews. In reality, they brought Hitler himself to power in Germany. A pretext to have a claim on our land, on Palestine.”

It wasn’t until years later that I learned the word indoctrination.

Two weeks after October 7, I saw an interview with Hamas political leader Khaled Mashaal on the Saudi television channel Al Arabiya. I remember a forgotten scene from my childhood. After a prayer, it was announced in the mosque that Mashaal, who was in Damascus at the time, like large parts of the Hamas leadership, wanted to give a short speech. I was much too young to remember the contents. After Maschal’s speech, I was allowed to shake his hand. Like the other children who didn’t know who Mashal was, I was happy about the handshake.

Germany

In September 2015 I came to Germany via the Balkan route. In Berlin, I learned a new language, while in Syria, militias and armies of all stripes committed atrocities. After all, Assad’s warplanes razed the home of my childhood to the ground. Yarmouk, home to hundreds of thousands of stateless Palestinians who knew no other homeland.

Because hardly anyone in Germany understands what “third-generation refugees” who have fled again means, I make it easier for myself and my interviewers when I am asked about my origins: “I was born and raised in Syria.”

Many “of my kind” do not share my attitude. But most Germans don’t know what to do with the term “stateless”. I don’t hold it against anyone. I also know little about conflicts that take place thousands of miles away.

I went to school in Berlin and took part in an excursion to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial. My school friends broke down when they saw baby shoes. How people were capable of doing such a thing to other people, they could not comprehend.

They were born in peace, I think to myself. For me, however, one horror reminded me of another and in the sleeping barracks of Auschwitz, I thought of the 200 people who starved to death during the siege of Yarmouk. War refugees cannot agree to any war without reservation. The experience of war gives us a different perspective.

Because I see myself in them, I am also moved by the stories of escape from the Second World War. I watch my Syrian and Palestinian friends recommend Hannah Arendt’s essay “We Refugees”  to each other. We find solace in the literature of Holocaust survivors. We think these people know what it feels like. They know what statelessness means and what uprooting is. Through her writing, I understand myself a bit more. Through their – and my – escape, I understand my own grandma and grandpa a little better. Born out of Jewish statelessness, Zionism becomes less alien to me – and even more sympathetic. Just like the Palestinian cause, which I am reinventing.

My attempt to learn Hebrew fails because the language course takes place digitally. I lack the discipline for the new language but have not lost interest in it. I discovered the Arab Jews who had to flee the Arab world after 1948. We meet at the same crossroads, only in the opposite direction. They, too, left their own childhood home “in tears”. I discover my own “never again”.

Not born in peace, Germany’s coming to terms with its past is its reconciliation with its European neighbors and Israel amazes me. “We,” I think to myself, Israelis and Palestinians, have not even reached this extreme, this industrial destruction of life. Even “we” would not necessarily have to kill ourselves for all eternity. If “they” could do it, shouldn’t “we” be able to do it too?

In my room in Berlin, I read about the theater actress Hanna Maron, who had to flee from the Nazis in the same city as a small child. She became the queen of theatre in Tel Aviv near Jaffa, where I might have been born if my grandparents had not fled the city as children in 1948.

In 1970, Maron lost a foot in an attack by Palestinian terrorists at the airport in Munich. Until her death in 2014, she fought for peace and an end to the occupation. Like the little displaced child that we all are, I have to cry in my room.

My growing interest in Jewish history makes me suspicious in the eyes of some old friends. The accusation: I do not commit myself clearly enough to the Palestinian side. Between a confession that denies the other and a constructive understanding of the multigenerational misery into which I was born, I prefer the latter. Because I always get tired of the indifferent shrugging of the shoulders of some and the resentment-laden sayings of others, I remain silent. When the 7th of October happened, I collapsed in myself.

October 7

Since 7 October, there has been a brutality that is no stranger to me, only repugnant. All around me are confessions of unrestricted solidarity, coupled with selective indifference, or worse, selective glorification of violence as a form of justice.

It is clear that Germany has a problem – not only with Islamist demonstrations or the rise in anti-Semitic violence but also in its failure to have a position that does not approve of war against civilians. A position that does not stop at hesitant lip service.

Much has been written about the protest on the German streets against Israel’s military action in Gaza, with an emphasis on imported anti-Semitism and failed integration. Both are real problems. However, the war experience of many people, which is also “imported”, is the cause of their protest.

On social media, I see a rediscovery of Syria; as a clever argument against Gaza. Why? The accusation asks, did the people in Germany who are demonstrating against Israeli military operations in Gaza today not also demonstrate when people were being killed in Syria, Iraq, or Yemen?

In fact, these people were fleeing their bombed neighborhoods. Today they are demonstrating against what they see as their own fate, which is now taking place in another country.

If the question of whether to bomb a hospital when a terrorist is entrenched there is not overly theoretical, but has references to a fundamental event in one’s own biography, the indifferent acceptance of human collateral damage becomes impossible. No integration course will teach war refugees the indifference born of peace, which at best pays lip service to the death and flight of the people in Gaza – or worse: a comparison with Dresden in 1945.

Recently, Israel’s Minister of Intelligence, Gila Gamliel, proposed a “voluntary resettlement” for Palestinians from Gaza. It should go without saying that many war refugees in Germany cannot show unconditional solidarity in the face of such proposals on the part of an Israeli minister or shrug their shoulders indifferently, but would take a stand against them.

In a few weeks, it will be the eleventh anniversary of my night in the hail of bombs in Yarmouk. In Gaza, they now count over 50 nights, far beyond what I experienced that night. I was fourteen and didn’t realize that I was losing my home forever.

I was sitting on the bus departing from Yarmouk and looked out of the window. The passers-by on the street looked indifferent, going about their daily lives. I will never forget both, the shelling of the night and the indifference the day after.