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The Documentary: Die Klassen: Die Klassen: Die Trennung

Mohammad with Son

05/09/2017 GMT

Die Klassen: Die Trennung

Die Klassen

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Die Klassen, Die Klassen: Die Trennung

A Syrian father and daughter in Berlin and their struggle to reunite with family

The fortunes of a Syrian father and daughter in Berlin and their struggle to reunite with their family left in Damascus.

In the summer of 2015 tens of thousands of Syrians left their war torn homeland and put their lives in the hands of the smugglers who would help them navigate the hazardous route to Europe. Many of these bedraggled travellers ended up in Germany, where Angela Merkel famously told the German people “We will cope”.

Among the new arrivals were Mohammed Dallal, a man in his late 40s and his 16-year-old daughter Noor. They found themselves in Berlin, exhausted by their journey, bewildered by their new surroundings and overwhelmed by the tasks ahead of them: finding a place to live, working out how to support themselves and seeking out a place to learn a new and difficult language. 

Mohamed and Noor had other concerns. They’d left half the family behind in Damascus. Mohamed had been reluctant to leave at all but after a bomb attack earlier that year had left his ten-year-old son with only one leg he thought he had no option. Germany, he was told, was the place that made the best prosthetic limbs, so Germany was where he would go. Mohamed and his wife, Abeer, agreed that leaving her with three children would be too much of a burden. So he agreed to take Noor with him, leaving 10-year-old Saif and three-year-old Lilas with his wife in Damascus.

Amy Zayed and Laura Graen have accompanied Mohamed and Noor for nearly two years through the emotional and bureaucratic vagaries of the refugee life. In this programme, we hear whether the family is, at last, together again.

(Photo: Mohamed holds up a picture of his son. Credit: Laura Green)

The Documentary: Die Klassen

Amy Zayed speaks to Syrians attending German language classes in order to integrate into their new home.

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