PROMISED LAND
IN THE SUMMER OF 2015, A CURIOUS piece of world news brought a flicker of hope to the wretched Syrian city of Palmyra. Islamic State fighters had taken over the ancient town, toppling its monuments and executing anyone who resisted their draconian rules. And yet at one of the city’s darkest moments, rumors of a sanctuary far away began to filter in, generating dreams among a populace that had already lost everything. On Aug. 31 of that year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that her country was prepared to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war in the Middle East. “We can do this,” she said in a speech in Berlin, calling it a “national duty” to support those in danger. Across Syria, preoccupations with the civil war gave way to fantasies of an unlikely new promised land: the Germany of Mama Merkel.
The Chancellor suddenly became a positive punch line to dark jokes about Syrians’ futures, says Yehiya Mohammad, a driver from Palmyra who at the time had just been released from one of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s notorious prisons. “People would be talking to each other . . . One would suggest, ‘Just go.’ ‘Go where?’ ‘Go to Mama Merkel—she’s accepting everyone.’”
As the war eviscerated what was left of Syria’s schools and hospitals, many Syrians like Mohammad realized that they had no choice but to leave if they wanted their children to have
