What We Remember Will Be Saved: A Story of Refugees and the Things They Carry

PROLOGUE

There are always hidden historians among the survivors of war. These are the people who carry the stories of what happened with them when they escape, so that the past can be remembered. More often than not, they carry these stories not in books but through little things. A sapling, a spoon, a scarf, a recipe for eggplants stuffed with walnuts, a prayer in a dying language. I have come to believe that a lost neighborhood can be salvaged in a song and that an entire city can be carried in a dress. I have met those who save the past simply by speaking it aloud, who write the dead into living by planting a tree. This book is about these historians and the stories they rescue. It is also a chronicle of war and migration told to me by those who managed to stay alive.

In 2016, I set out on a series of journeys across the Middle East and Europe to try to understand what Syrian and Iraqi refugees were carrying with them as they escaped war, to listen to the stories these ordinary objects might have to tell us. I had lived in Syria as a student years before the war broke out, and I knew Syrians to be artisans: a people who love beauty, cooks who care about the way food is displayed on a plate, musicians and poets, makers of soap. By the time I began my journey, so many thousands of people had died in the war in Syria that the United Nations had stopped counting. More than half of Syria’s population had been displaced, just as millions of Iraqis were also being uprooted as ISIS occupied their cities and towns. We were witnessing the largest refugee crisis in modern history. So much was being lost. The war introduced me to the terrible goneness of things.

Yet I trusted that those escaping were also finding ways of saving the stories of the cities they left behind. Where were the famous pastry chefs of Homs, still carrying their recipes? The traditional storytellers of Sinjar, carrying their epic poems? Who would remember the stories of the friendships that vanished in Mosul? Where were the oud musicians? The last speakers of Aramaic?

In time, I began to hear stories: of a young musician from Homs, Syria, who crossed the sea with his violin wrapped in cellophane. Of Syrian mothers teaching their children recipes for eggplant jam in the refugee camps of Lebanon. Of an entire orchestra created from Syrian classical musicians in exile in Germany. By their very being, these individuals were articulating a version of history in which they were not victims but agents, the small things they salvaged not mere fragments but windows into the histories they were now entrusted with remembering and transmitting to future generations. I felt that if I spent more time listening to stories like these, I might begin to understand not only what was being lost in war but also what was being rescued.

I knew I would need to meet these historians where they now were. I would travel to Jordan, Iraq, the Netherlands, Turkey, Switzerland, England, France, Greece, and Germany, speaking to Syrian and Iraqi chefs and gardeners in exile, painters and curators, a political cartoonist, photographers. I decided to narrow the focus of my writing on stories told to me by those who had escaped the swath of geography between Qaraqosh in Iraq and Aleppo in Syria, a borderlands region of extraordinary diversity that had been devastated by war, with entire populations now displaced. The people whose stories I tell in this book naturally reflect just some of the many voices of that region: religious and secular; Muslim, Christian, and Yazidi; Arabic-, Kurdish-, and Aramaic-speaking neighbors now scattered all over the world, many of whose very identities are bound up in living in conversation with one another.

I would meet a woman who saved her city in a dress. A musician who saved his city through his songs. A couple who saved not one pharmacy but two. A young man who saved stories of Muslim-Christian friendships as his city fell apart. A son who saved his family on a mountain and then saved the story of what happened so that it could be remembered.

In time, these individuals became my teachers. It is because of their stories I now know that, even in front of immense violence, there is always something small to be carried, some act to be done, and that these little things transform history in ways we only later understand.

Awal al-shajara bithra, goes the saying in Arabic. A tree begins with a seed.

PART I

HANA’S DRESS

Qaraqosh, Iraq → Erbil, Iraq → Amman, Jordan → Australia

The town was like this—joyful and full of brides.

—Talal Acam

1|A TOWN NAMED BLACKBIRD

The first time I saw Hana, she was standing at the back of a room, holding a dress in her hands. The dress resembled a quilt she could wrap around her body, and into that dress she had sewn a city. Inside that city she had sewn a world: with its own language, with fruit-bearing trees, and with friends interlocking their arms and dancing. I had no way of knowing how immense that world had been or even that it was now both gone and saved. I had no idea that I would follow that dress as it would follow me.

That late October seemed unusually cold, and I had not packed well. Even after more than a decade of living in the Middle East, I still forgot until it was much too late how frigid the autumn air becomes, especially in the barren areas along the desert. From my home in Jerusalem, I had traveled north and crossed the Sheikh Hussein bridge into Jordan. Now, as my taxi headed south toward Amman, I watched out the window as green fields slowly gave way to the sprawl of the city. I studied the name scribbled in my notebook: Abouna Eliyan. I had seen his name written in three different places in my notebook in three different ways—Eliyan, Elian, and Alyan—together with three different phone numbers. On a subsequent page, I had written the name of a city, Qaraqosh, which comes from the word blackbird in Turkish.

I was traveling in search of a man I had never met and a city I had never seen. In some ways, I felt as though I was also trying to locate myself in a moment in history. The city of Qaraqosh itself is located in northern Iraq, some twenty miles southeast of Mosul, and I had decided that my journey would begin with those who had escaped from there. If I knew of Qaraqosh, it was because the town had now become synonymous with a tragedy. On August 6, 2014, ISIS had invaded Qaraqosh, and essentially the entire population, some forty-four thousand Christians, fled for their lives. Overnight, tens of thousands crossed the border to Iraqi Kurdistan to seek what they thought would be temporary shelter.

But ISIS remained in Qaraqosh. Months passed. Then a year. Much of Qaraqosh’s population—either out of the exhaustion of waiting or because they could not ever imagine feeling safe in Iraq again—began to scatter across the world, crossing international borders and becoming refugees. Thousands traveled by plane to Amman, where the government welcomed them while they applied for visas at the embassies there in hopes of being resettled, largely in Australia. Almost all of them belonged to the Syriac Catholic Church, which was also the church to which I belonged in Jerusalem, where I lived with my husband and three children. The sudden emptying out of Qaraqosh had shaken the rest of the global Syriac community, especially those still living in the Middle East.

And so it had been the bishop of my own community in Jerusalem who had first scrawled that name into my notebook as he flipped through his address book—Abouna Elian, or Alyan, or Eliyan—referring to the priest in Amman responsible for pastoring the refugees of Qaraqosh. He asked that when I met him, I send his greetings.

It was with that small sliver of information and a note that said Syriac Catholic Church—past the Tche Tche café, Sweifieh that I arrived in Father Elian’s office in Amman that October morning. I found him sitting behind a desk littered with papers, wearing a light-blue clerical shirt with the pocket weighed down by a cell phone, his white hair visibly thinning and blue eyes shot red from lack of sleep. He offered me espresso, which he had learned to make as a seminarian in Milan, and as we sipped, we took a moment to accustom ourselves to our different dialects of Arabic.

Are you from here? I asked.

No, I’m from Qaraqosh in Iraq, he answered. I was born there, lived there for twenty-seven years, became a priest, and then left to complete my studies in Italy. When I returned, I went to work in the seminary. And I was working there still when ISIS came. I lived at the seminary with another priest, and on the sixth of August 2014, on the Feast of the Transfiguration, we heard explosions. They landed near two children, who died. The rest of the town became frightened, and that is when they began to flee.

He was speaking in a rush, and I struggled to follow, for he was describing how he escaped a town that I was just beginning to understand had ever existed.

Qaraqosh had around fifty thousand people, he continued. "Everyone left that first day, except for thirty or forty of us who stayed. By the next morning, at around two o’clock, we looked around and said, ‘Forget it. ISIS is coming, and no one else is coming to save us.’ At three thirty in the morning, someone called and said, ‘What? Where are you? Get out now because ISIS is entering the city.’ At four in the morning, we left. And ISIS really was coming. ISIS was coming from the area of the south, and we were leaving from the north.

We left with nothing, he continued. I didn’t even bring my liturgical clothes with me. I knew I’d be able to find them again. I only brought my passport and my computer. You don’t think about what you can bring when you escape your city at four in the morning.

He tried to explain to me how an entire world left on those two days: mothers and fathers and grandparents and children, priests and nuns, painters and musicians, farmers and students. He described the single road out of the town, crammed with cars; the houses emptying of their inhabitants; the bells of the main church ringing to urge everyone to leave.

It wasn’t just Qaraqosh that emptied out that day, he said. It was the towns of Bartella and Bashiqa and Karamles, the entire area of the Nineveh Plains around Mosul. We fled to Ankawa in Erbil in Kurdistan, but others from our city escaped to Sulaymaniyah and Dohuk. In Ankawa, we stayed together, sleeping in the streets, in buildings, and in churches, waiting. Then, last year, I was sent to Amman to work with the refugees who were arriving here.

I tried to imagine that waiting—one that had extended from days to weeks to years, a waiting that was happening still. More than two years had passed since that August day in 2014, and still no one had been able to return. Would you mind telling me a little bit about what Qaraqosh was like? I asked. I had never even seen a photograph.

Father Elian nodded, and I could see him focusing, fixing his vision on a place far off. The most important thing to know about us is that we were the largest Christian town in all of Iraq and one of the most ancient Christian towns in the world, he said. We had nine churches: seven from the Syrian Catholic tradition and two from the Syrian Orthodox tradition. The language of our liturgy, of our traditions, and even our spoken language was Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language.

He opened up his computer and clicked on a video. Together we watched thousands of young men and women and children wearing bright traditional outfits processing through streets, waving olive branches in the air and singing Hosanna. That was our last Palm Sunday in Qaraqosh, he said quietly.

I looked at the people’s faces, singing, radiant. In his poem A Song on the End of the World, written in Warsaw in 1944, the poet Czeslaw Milosz describes the scene at the end of the world, where a man mends a fishing net, and women walk with umbrellas, and vegetable sellers shout in the streets, and a man binds up his tomato plants. I thought of that poem as I stared at the video of girls singing in the streets four months before ISIS arrived and emptied their town entirely. There will be no other end of the world, writes Milosz. Qaraqosh was something like that—a world entirely there and then vanished.

Father Elian pointed to a stack of papers on his desk. They contained names scribbled in Arabic and square identity photos paperclipped to corners. He explained that these were the files for all the refugees in his charge—men, women, and children who had escaped Qaraqosh, Bartella and Bashiqa, Mosul and Baghdad in Iraq—along with cities like Aleppo, Homs, and Damascus in Syria. Here was the uprooting of entire populations of ancient Christian communities in the Middle East, an exodus distilled into a pile of bureaucratic papers.

Look at how many of us we are. He held up the pile of papers in his hands to measure its weight. We have 1,250 Syriac Catholic families here. Each one of those sheets of papers isn’t for one person—it’s for a family of four or five people. And the minute one family is resettled, another one arrives and takes its place.

I tried to envision the numbers in my head. Thousands of people from Qaraqosh were waiting for visas while living in Jordan. Thousands of others had already traveled to Europe, Canada, Australia, and other countries to find resettlement. Tens of thousands were still waiting in Kurdistan in Iraq, in camps and temporary housing, unable to return home. An entire city had been uprooted and exiled.

What do you think will happen to the community? I asked.

We’re scattering all over the world, Father Elian told me. Just look at my own family. I have one sister in Canada, one in Slovakia, one in the United States, one in Germany, one moving to Australia, one in Jordan, and one who remained in Iraq. It’s difficult to think of a future when there isn’t a strong government that can ensure peace. Even if I returned to Qaraqosh, how could I know that the same thing won’t happen again?

I finished taking notes in my notebook and slipped it away in my bag. As I prepared my things to leave, he looked at me and said, with a firmness and a clarity I wasn’t expecting, Now that Qaraqosh has been taken, our language will likely disappear. When the people of Qaraqosh leave for Australia or Canada, who will keep speaking it five years from now? And it’s not just the language. Everything will disappear—our heritage, even our ancient liturgy.

We sat for a few moments in silence. I stood up, and he shook my hand.

Come to the Mass on Saturday at five at the Deir Latin Church in Hashmi al-Shamali, he finished. If you want to meet the people of Qaraqosh, you will find them there.

2|HYMNALS

Four days later, I took a taxi to the Deir Latin Church in Hashmi al-Shamali in East Amman. A man sitting on a chair on the sidewalk pointed me to a side entrance, and when I finally found it, I slipped inside. What I found in the lobby of the church felt like another country entirely. In front of me, a middle-aged woman was helping her elderly mother to stand. Children darted through the lobby and paused to light candles. Many of the oldest women seemed to be reaching for support—from arms, church pews, canes, as if the earth itself were unsteady. Nearly everyone was speaking a dialect of neo-Aramaic, a Semitic language that had centuries ago been the spoken language of the entire Middle East but had now all but disappeared.

I found a seat near the front of the church, watching as the pews filled up and the faithful extended into the back lobby until there was no place left to stand. Father Elian approached the altar, dressed in long white liturgical garments and wearing a green stole around his neck, followed by an assembly of deacons and altar boys and girls. All of them had become refugees. He began the liturgy in Arabic instead of Aramaic, in deference to the country and the borrowed church in which they now found themselves, as well as to the scattered refugees from Mosul, Baghdad, and Damascus among them who would not have been able to follow his native dialect of Aramaic.

Today we begin a new liturgical year, Father Elian announced solemnly during the homily. We ask ourselves, ‘Who is Jesus to me?’ In the Gospel, all the disciples give the wrong answer. Only Simon Peter says, ‘You are the Messiah, the son of the living God!’

He paused. We must also ask God to make our relationship closer. This is the time to begin anew.

It was the final Sunday of October, and in the Syriac tradition, it was the beginning of the liturgical calendar and the sanctification of the church. Now the weeks of Advent leading up to Christmas would begin—a longer Advent than the Roman Catholic calendar I had grown up with and more aligned with the new year of the Jewish calendar, with which the ancient Syriac tradition remained so closely bound. It was a day of new beginnings, and they were carrying their calendar with them. I wondered how long that, too, would last. In any normal year in Qaraqosh, this would have been harvest season. But this was no normal year. It occurred to me that when the physical home is taken away, the liturgical calendar becomes a country in time, for time cannot be taken from us.

Father Elian sat down, and a heaviness settled over the assembly. A woman across from me was weeping, her forehead pressed to the wooden pew in front of her. The choir began to sing, and I listened as their voices filled the room with a song—not in Arabic but in Syriac this time, a liturgical form of Aramaic.

I cannot quite describe what happened next as those consonants and vowels fell from the choir loft and the song landed among us. It was as if the space began to slowly be lit from the inside. One person after another began to sing along in Aramaic, first softly and then with more confidence, until the church was alive with the song of a people who—for a very brief moment—were home again.

When the Mass was finished, I stood in the foyer surrounded by people introducing themselves. A twelve-year-old boy named Marvin told me he had come to Amman from Baghdad. I remembered that joint suicide bombers had targeted the Syriac Catholic Cathedral in Baghdad in 2010, killing an estimated fifty-eight people and setting off a wave of refugees, and I wondered if he had also been in the church that day. Another young woman told me she was from Mosul, where the Christian community had escaped ISIS. Other refugees had escaped Bartella and Bashiqa, villages in the Nineveh Plains emptied out by ISIS in 2014.

I recognized the soloist from the choir walking in my direction, her long black hair pulled back tightly. She wore a red blouse trimmed with lace and a large necklace of black and red beads. I introduced myself, and she shook my hand. My name is Meena, she said. I’m from Qaraqosh.

I asked her how long she had been living in Amman. For just a few months now, she answered. When I told her I was a writer, she pulled a phone from her pocket and scrolled to a photograph of a house. The roof and the second story had been charred black, like someone had set fire to it and then blown it out. That’s my home in Iraq, she said quietly.

By now, the rest of the choir had joined us, and Meena introduced them: Alaa’, Louis, and her sister Mirna. Wassim and Sonia, who were married. They were all refugees from Qaraqosh, and they spoke Arabic and English in addition to Aramaic, having been students at the university in Mosul.

We left everything in a single night: our studies, our homes, everything, Wassim said. I was an engineer. We waited to see if we could return, but ISIS destroyed everything.

His young wife, Sonia, who was pregnant, stood cradling her stomach with her hands. We had been planning to get married in Qaraqosh, she added. I lost all that I had, even my wedding gown.

Were you all in the choir together in Qaraqosh then?

Meena shook her head. There were seven different Catholic churches in our city, and we were all members of different choirs. But when we arrived here, we found one another. We thought that we had lost everything. But then we understood that we could at least still save a church choir.

Would you mind singing something for me? I asked.

They nodded, and we returned to the sanctuary, where they took their places in front of the altar. Meena stood at the center, and they pulled out their cell phones from bags and back pockets. With their liturgical books destroyed, these phones had become their hymnals, and they held the screens in front of them so they could follow the notes.

They sang. Meena’s voice rang out clearly, leading them. I listened to them singing a language that could be on the edge of vanishing but was still alive in them, a song they had carried out of war and across borders. The choir sang that song for the onset of a new year, punctuated by alleluias. For a moment, all of us were transported to that city whose song had been saved at the end of the world.

They finished. A silence held in the air. We walked out into the night streets together. It was cold; I had not dressed well. They shielded me from the onslaught of cars. Alaa’, one of the choir members who had been quiet until now, turned to me. If you’re not too busy, he said shyly, we’d like for you to meet our families.

3|THE MAP OF A WORLD

I followed the choir through the streets until we turned off into an alley and entered an apartment block. I thought of the number I had read: that 80 percent of the refugees in Jordan lived not in refugee camps, as is commonly thought, but in urban areas among the local population, often in poverty. Alaa’ opened a door on the ground floor, and we all passed through. Inside, a dozen people had crowded around