Stories of Flight
Honour coursed through everyone and the village wanted her gone
“They’re going to do it on Thursday,” Sabreen’s brother-in-law quietly told her once the other men of the family had…
City residents must leave their homes
Sorpong Peou was the oldest of seven children, and for them, he desperately wanted an end to the civil war…
Homosexuality is illegal in Namibia
By the time he was 21, Elvis knew that he saw men differently. If he glanced sideways in the locker…
Indignity became no different than survival in Dachau
Hidden from view, Erwin Schild watched a fire burning outside his Würzburg seminary as the sky grew light. It was…
“Year Zero” changed everything
Rain dripped down the face of the nearly-new father, bent in front of his wife’s swollen belly, also veined with…
Once a mighty tree falls ... the earth around it shakes
Avtar Sandhu watched the shapes of strangers slip onto the deck of a cargo ship, a far smaller one than…
All over the empire crisscrossed convoys of men, women and children
Posters appeared in the spring of 1915 across the Ottoman Empire with an order for Armenians to leave immediately. They…
He wasn’t certain that he really wasn’t sick
The coastline of Guyana’s capital, Georgetown, namesake of the British King and colonizer George III, aligns with a long, concrete…
They followed their mothers in near pitch darkness towards the Mekong River
Back when Chai Bouphaphanh went by Chairuth, the name his friends could still pronounce, Laos was recovering from a long…
What saved her sanity in Herat was her children
Like many middle class teenagers in 1970s Kabul, Shabnam grew up assuming she would go to university. Her father was…
Your skin is dirty
In the early Budapest daylight, Robi Botos walked his stepdaughter to school, and as he walked, he listened. He had…
This deliberate brutality was new, and so were the strange effects of adrenaline
On a Sunday in May, 1997, Joseph awoke to his uncle gently shaking him. There had been a coup, his…
Loly was a long-gone revolutionary
Loly Rico was born into a wealthy San Salvador family. She attended private school, and was rarely left wanting for…
Government troops singled out young Tamils, obsessively suspicious
Tarun was born in 1983, the year civil war began in Sri Lanka. Across the northern part of the island…
People who spoke about freedom and democracy were punished
Rebels took Mie Tha Lah’s father during the night in November 1989, the turbulent year when the military dictatorship declared…
The Taliban ended all expressions of free women
Election season arrived in the north, as it did across Afghanistan, with the Taliban retreat to the eastern border. It…
Yodit learned how to live as an illegal migrant
Yodit Negusse opened her front door to a young boy sent by a family friend. He told her the kebele,…
Killing began within hours
Their neighbour, whose name Christine does not remember, gave his word that he would hide her family of four. She…
He had pretended not to be Roma since childhood
National identity was erratic for a long time, for people living in Eastern Europe. Tibor Lukács was born in the…
By January 1991, the state dissolved
“See you in a month!” Hodan Ali called to her parents and siblings from the departures gate at Mogadishu International…
When the signal came to shut up, they stood like statues
When he was discharged in 1980, Zafar Iravan had served the Iranian Navy for 15 years, was the commander of…
It took 1,000 miracles to survive the Holocaust – 999 were not enough
The first years of war passed in relative calm for the 1,800 residents of Botchki, a village south of Bialystok…
Majed was tortured for seven days
Abu Zaabel is a prison that sits in Cairo and, in 1998, was a torture chamber and convenient hold for…
Being Rohingya Muslims meant statelessness
Heavy rains helped families in Buthidaung grow vegetables year-round next to their bamboo-frame homes. There was one annual crop of…
Familiar living stopped and survival began
When Sarajevo was pockmarked and seized in collapse, people began to believe in destiny. It happened to Marko when a…
Baha’is became an outright public enemy
Iren Hessami was old enough to know it was a game, but young enough to be comforted anyway, when her…
Asians had 90 days to leave the country
Before the hijacking, Karim Teja’s father, Sultan, said violence in Uganda ebbs and flows. When Idi Amin deposed the president…
On the eleventh day, the ocean ended
A girl had collapsed. No one could help, they could barely move from sea sickness. There was no space and…
Santiago had been on edge for months
On the evening of September 10, 1973, as he often did, Claudio Durán met with three colleagues to discuss El…
He marched with thousands of students
Andrew Hidi and his fiancé Suzanne had decided to leave Hungary, but not before getting married and honeymooning for one…
She was born into slavery
Adeline Oliver had an infant daughter when she and 14 others from the Coombs estate trekked through a forest that…