Anaïs Clerc, Yazan Melhem

Three completely different personalities and yet one thing that connects them: The flight from their homeland to a foreign country. Torn from their everyday lives in the former Yugoslavia, Ukraine and Syria by war and the destruction of their homeland. Imagine suddenly having to flee unexpectedly from your own country into uncertainty and the unknown. A mother and brother who had to be left behind, a father who was left unsecured in the cellar, and the hasty escape of a girl with a little sister and a terminally ill mother. Accompanied by horrific images, they escape the horror via the sea and overnight stays in tents, via uncertain train journeys and numerous unwanted stops to Germany. Once they arrive in safe areas, loneliness, anxiety and fear for those left behind and their future overshadow the safety from war. On the way to building a new life and a new home for themselves, the shadows remain. Imagine being safe, but still not feeling safe, constantly worried. Trying to bring the family over, trying to find a job with a foreign surname and the fact that no matter how long they have lived in the new country, they are always looked at with a sideways glance, a constant reminder that they are different, that they don't really belong in their new home. However, the reality is that there is only one thing that makes everyone different and that is luck. The luck not to grow up in a country ravaged by war and horror and the luck not to have to flee.
With the three stories of flight, which were compiled into a collective memory on the basis of interviews, author Anais Clerc, who won the Dramatist* Prize for this work together with Yazan Melhem, portrays how painfully tangible and present the topic is even today and that there is much more to people than just their experiences of flight. Through the detailed depiction of the very personal and painful memories with sentences that are presented in the original language, you feel what is described as if you had experienced it yourself, even if it is still so foreign.