“Between Two Worlds”

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As we know from history, dictators’ power does not only come from the barrels of guns if they have put the right system and people in the right position. This is also the subject of the life story of the Iraqi Zainab Salbi in her book “Between Two Worlds — The Years with Saddam and My Escape from Tyranny.”

The book was published in 2005, and it fell into my hands at a thrift store twenty years later, and I am so glad it did. This is how it seems to work in my life; I find answers to questions that I have not even asked at the right time -somehow. Hard to explain.

Between Two Worlds

It is poignantly written, and the story will stay with you. The story of Zainab Salbi, who grew up on the lap of Saddam Hussein. She called him Amo, uncle. Zainab’s parents were friends with Saddam Hussein when he was still vice president – a farmer from Tikrit who desired contact with Baghdad’s high society. Zainab Salbi’s parents belonged to it. In her mother’s diary, she reads:

“We were not thrilled about this friendship. Many times, we did not accept his invitations. We managed to avoid him for two years. In the meantime, he made friends with other families from our circle of acquaintances. But we couldn’t avoid him forever. It was not uncommon for him to call in the middle of the night to tell you that he would be coming by in a few minutes. You had no choice but to invite him in and entertain him somehow, even if he had just woken you up from sleep. “

From this diary, Zainab Salbi also learns how afraid her parents were of the dictator.

“In the course of the evening, he spoke about friendship and that death is the punishment for anyone who betrays a friend. Silently, we concentrated on his words. Because what he said was both a threat to us and an allusion to his murder of one of his best friends, the former Minister of Education Mahmoud Al-Hamdani. As he told us, he had sat with him the night before he killed him. “

Apart from the fear that Zainab Salbi’s parents had, which prevented them from refusing Saddam Hussein’s ‘friendship’, they were also in his ‘debt’.

After Saddam Hussein instigated the war against Iran in 1980, he had all of Iraq’s Shiites of Iranian origin deported. Many of them had been living in Iraq for decades and felt like Iraqis. Nevertheless, Saddam Hussein did not trust them. He had them carted on trucks to the Iranian-Iraqi border, where they were ordered: “Run, back there is your home, you traitors.” Since Zainab Salbi’s mother also came from Iran, the father used his relationship with Saddam Hussein to prevent his wife’s deportation. Zainab’s mother cannot bear the situation and attempts suicide. “I feel like a caged bird,” she explains to her daughter after her rescue. Their fear of Saddam Hussein dictated their lives. She forces her husband to volunteer for the war to prove his loyalty to Saddam Hussein. Other women try to help their husbands not to be drafted, Zainab’s father complains and then goes to war to protect the family. He survives, but he never gets over the fact that his wife demanded that he risk his life.

Zainab also begins to feel like a caged bird. Because of her parents’ closeness to Saddam Hussein – her father became his private pilot – she was not allowed to make friends with anyone or give anyone her phone number. But for her, the dictator remains the dear uncle, Amo. Unlike her parents, she has no idea what a brutal tyrant Saddam Hussein is.

“My Brudder and I were planted in Amos’ life as Baba grafted new branches onto his citrus trees. We grew and prospered, but there was always a scar at the wound site. We had big dreams because we overestimated our freedom. Then something happened, and we only had to look down at ourselves to realize that it had all been just an illusion. We were not free at all, not for a single minute. Our parents had known this from the beginning, and it was precisely for this reason that Baba had never wanted to be Saddam’s pilot. “

What Zainab Salbi describes in her book is so impressive because it shows the dictator up close for the first time. Never before have we learned so much about Saddam Hussein as a person. Zainab Salbi says that today, after learning of all his misdeeds, she sees the monster in Saddam Hussein but when she thinks of the person she met, she also remembers her dear uncle. She asked herself when she had become aware that the man she had greeted with kisses on the cheeks was a murderer.

“I have never witnessed what he did to other people. I never had to put the dismembered corpse of a relative back together like a puzzle, nor did I have to move from one prison to the next for years in the hope of finding a son still alive whom the Mukhabarat had arrested from the dinner table. I was lucky because I was one of his loved ones. “

The book also shows the fears of the people who were in a supposedly privileged position compared to Saddam Hussein. Since he could turn such relationships into their opposite at any time, Saddam Hussein managed to break these people, to take away their personality. In addition, women from privileged society could also experience what could happen to any peasant girl in Iraq, that they fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein or his son Udai, who ran entire rape factories. Zainab Salbi describes the fears her father endures when he learns that Udai has shown up at a party where his daughter is also present. When the mother sees that Saddam Hussein has his eye on Zainab, she forces her daughter to marry a stranger from the USA. Zainab only learns years later that the fear of rape drove her mother to her decision. In the years in between, she hates her mother, because this complete stranger rapes her just as Saddam Hussein would have done. However, she was able to escape her husband afterwards – and founded Women for Women International, an organization that works for victims of rape all over the world.

The book deeply moved me.