28 November 2017
Photographic memories
Stories of our life — the Raslan family
“We made every place special, by taking photographs,” says Amira Raslan, a 26-year-old Syrian, today living with her family in Berlin. “Like when we passed over a border, we’d say ‘Oh great! We made it into Serbia! Picture! Picture!’ We didn’t want it to be like a refugee journey, but like a family trip.”
Our two boys are afraid of policemen and soldiers,” she said quietly, careful not to upset her nearby children, twins Amr and Jannat, 8, and Karam, 5. “So, when we would see them on the trip, we told the kids they were there to protect us, and we’d take photos of the kids in front of them.”
“I had more than 2000 photos,” her husband, Khaled, 34, says. He’s the designated photographer of the family. “I had photos of my children when we lived in Syria, in the camp in Lebanon, the boat going to Greece, and photos all the way to Germany.”
In the chaos of the 2015 refugee crisis, Khaled’s phone was stolen soon after he arrived.
“Before that, I didn’t have Instagram,” Khaled says, “Now I upload all of my photographs, so if my phone breaks or gets stolen again, I still have my photos. It’s like a photo album — those are our memories that we want to keep.”
“Karam was not like other kids,” he says, “he was born with an impairment — he couldn’t walk. He had two surgeries. I learned the techniques and did them for 3.5 years, all the massages and the physiotherapy until he was able to walk.”
Khaled scrolls through his phone to the first photograph on his feed.
“In this photo, he was so happy, it was a life-changing moment: when he was finally able to walk and then run.” Khaled adds, “the hand and water droplets are there to show we are cleaning away the past and that he has a new life.”
“This photo symbolizes a time before the war started, that’s how I knew the kids before the fighting started,” Khaled says. “It is from the old shelter. We went out for a walk into this park,” Khaled says. “That was the first time in Germany that they had played without fear, it took them three months to get to that point.”
As Amira and Khaled look through their photo album, a Whatsapp message notification appears on the screen. It’s a video from his brother in Syria–he’s at their family apartment in Homs. The video shows the condition, there’s nothing there.
Some photos have come in now showing the exterior, and the street outside. Khaled is barely able to talk. Amira is motionless.
“To go back, we would need thirty thousand Euros to fix our home,” Khaled says, “I see my apartment, my neighbourhood, the street I used to live on in the past, and now it’s all been destroyed.”
He’s trying to be rational about it, but the tears gathering in Khaled’s eyes give him away. His worry is that their protection status might be revoked, and deported back to Syria. Even as the family make sure-footed steps integrating into German society, the ground never feels stable.
These new photos from Homs will not make it into the Instagram family photo album. That’s reserved for the memories they want to keep — the kids playing in the snow in Germany for the first time, the first day of school, kids birthday celebrations and more.
Text and photos by Ashley Gilbertson / VII Photo for UNICEF and by the Raslan family. Read more about the Raslan family’s experiences as they settle in Germany after fleeing the Syrian conflict:
