It reads like a film—too incredible to be true, yet it is. Nujeen is a sixteen-year-old Kurdish girl in a wheelchair. She lived in Aleppo, Syria, until civil war made the country uninhabitable, forcing her and her sisters to flee to Germany. Greece, Macedonia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria—she crossed each one, always in her wheelchair, her sister pushing, until she reached German soil.
With journalist Christina Lamb's help, Nujeen retraces the years before Syria's collapse, clarifying what turned her country into a war zone. The second half chronicles her odyssey as a migrant: sealed borders, deadly crossings in rubber boats across the Mediterranean. The narrative is intense and often harrowing. Multiplied across the millions fleeing as she did, it becomes almost unbearable. Yet Nujeen never slips into victimhood. Hope runs through every page, deeply rooted and genuine.
This is essential reading—both as an extraordinary journey and as a reckoning with those responsible for such suffering.
Matteo Cinti, 2017