German books. In spite of the blockade, in spite of food shortages, in spite of almost annual Israeli invasions and other ‘mowing the lawn’ tactics, Yasmin has been obsessed with German literature. She is writing her master thesis about how German society processes the collective guilt of the Holocaust in their stories. She contrasts that with how French fiction writers depict the Holocaust. She’s fluent in the language of Rimbaud and the language of Rilke. Yasmin has always been particularly disgusted by evil. It all started when she read about Anne Frank. While reading Anne Frank’s diary at 13 Yasmin felt like the two of them could have been best friends if they had ever met. Apart from The Little Prince no book has had such a profound effect on Yasmin.
On the morning of October 7th she wasn’t celebrating in the streets, unlike what some American Twitter crusaders like to claim. She was reading Der Vorleser, by Bernhard Schlink. She had sinned, because before reading the book she had already watched the movie. Yasmin has watched almost every German movie that’s been released in the last 30 years. Her favorites are the comedy Goodbye Lenin and the thriller Das Experiment. Goodbye Lenin tells the story of a guy who wants to prevent his mum from finding out communism has fallen. He’s scared she’d get a heart attack if she did. Das Experiment is loosely based on the (in)famous Stanford prison experiment. Other favorites include Der Untergang, Gegen die Wand and Die Welle. Die Welle also deals with with an experiment gone wrong. Kinda like the oppression of her people. How far can it be taken, before something goes wrong?
Yasmin is the oldest of five. She has three sisters and one brother. Rashid. Rashid is the Benjamin of the family, meaning that he’s the youngest. He’s the youngest and he is everyone’s favorite. He was a little unexpected. Yasmin’s youngest sister is 12. Rashid is 5.
Yasmin’s father is very introverted. Obsessed with politics, but he only shares his views with his wife, his children and two friends he grew up with.
Already on October 8th her father decided the family should throw their most vital possessions into the car and start driving south. Perhaps they would be able to get into Egypt and maybe they could return later.
He told everyone to take a good look at their apartment, because he doubted Israel and its puppets – he never called them allies – would leave even one stone on top of another.
And so they did.
Yasmin had to leave her German books behind, because they were not considered vital for survival. She and her sisters searched the whole apartment for every morsel of food and rushed to the markets to buy up anything they could find. Her father gave them all the cash he could find and said: ‘Buy whatever food there is available. Pay triple the price if you must.’
They drove at night. Many people were already on the move. In the distance they could hear explosion. From time to time they could hear jets pass. All seven of them cringed every time that happened.
They reached Rafah. Life seemed to be going at the same pace as before there. Yasmin had never been to Rafah before. She tried to convince herself they were on a trip. On holiday. When she was 19 she had a boyfriend whose family was from Rafah. A car mechanic. He had spotted her walking past the car repair shop many times and had somehow figured out where she lived. He knew one of Yasmin’s classmates and he had given that one a letter for Yasmin.
It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for her. At first she had been delighted. She liked the way he looked at her. It made every cell in her body buzz. There were some obstacles though. He wanted to get married right away and didn’t understand why reading German books was sometimes more important than hanging out with him on the beach. Her mother had met him once and had said later: ‘He’s a nice boy, very polite, quite handsome too, but I can’t picture you with someone who thinks it’s a cute little defect that you want to read Die Blechtrommel by Günter Grass on a Sunday morning when you could be watching a Formula 1 race on your laptop.’
She still missed the way he used to look at her and she felt hot needles all over her body when she remembered his face after she had told him that she didn’t have time for a relationship right now. He hadn’t set a word. He had only nodded and had walked away. She thought that with his nod he had meant to say: I know I can’t nourish your soul. Go be nourished, I won’t stand in your way. It’s then she realized he had probably loved her dearly, but it was too late now. They hadn’t spoken since. She started taking a different route to school.
Rashid had fallen asleep right after getting into the car. In his arms he was tightly clenching his precious Spiderman action figure. The trip had taken longer than expected. The distance was short, but with so many people on the move the roads were jammed.
Everyone got out of the car, but Rashid was still asleep. Very soon people offered to take them in. Their father didn’t want to be a burden to anyone and refused. He started asking around how one could get into Egypt. He didn’t get any optimistic answers.
Eventually they used the last money they had to buy a tent. If crossing into Egypt was not an option their father considered it to be a very bad idea to stay in an urban area.
Yasmin’s family was one of the first families to set up camp to the west of Rafah, kind of in the middle of nowhere. Soon more tents started popping up. Something like a camp emerged with a rhythm of its own. The family started making friends with other refugees. The later the people arrived the more horrible their stories became. Things were rapidly worsening all over the Gaza strip. Yasmin felt proud that her father had known how to act immediately.
In the tent camp all daytime hours were spent trying to survive. Looking for water, looking for food. People reverted to barter. Money became a little important. Yasmin heard stories about people trading a car for a bag of flour or twenty pills containing 1 gram of paracetamol. The tent camp revealed how the value of an item can be very situational.
Refugees from Gaza kept confirming to the family that it had been the right decision to leave. Her father said: ‘The international community will let Israel rage until it’s all raged out and then they will help us rebuild. First they let Israel destroy everything and then they send money to rebuild and then Israel does it again. You can’t get much more absurd than that.’
Yasmin and her sisters adapted fairly well to life in the tent camp. Her younger sisters sometimes fought over the one hair brush they all had to share. Yasmin thought it was funny that even in a war zone her sisters cared more about their hair than about anything else. She took it as a healthy sign.
Rashid had it harder. He wanted to play, he missed his toys, he missed his friends. He didn’t mind playing with his older sisters, but this was merely ersatz. He preferred to play with kids his age.
Two weeks ago Yasmin found a family with two young boys about Rashid’s age. They had a heavy rubber bowling ball and six bowling pins.
They had been bowling when the drone struck. Nobody in the camp knows why the drone targeted three kids, ages five, six and eight.
They had been playing in an empty field a few hundred yards from the nearest tent.
Yasmin is fairly certain she put only parts of Rashid in the plastic bag her mum had given her. She had carefully looked around for chunks of human bodily mass covered in blue and red. Rashid had been wearing his Barcelona shirt and blue shorts. His two friends had worn nothing but beige shorts. Locating the pieces of her brother wasn’t hard.
Calculating if the pieces she had collected were numerous enough to represent Rashid’s body hadn’t been hard. She felt like she had scraped enough of Rashid together for a proper burial. What was hard was not remembering the last thing she had said to him. What was hard was remembering how many times she had been annoyed with him and how many times she had felt bored playing simple games with him when her school work or her social media accounts had been calling for her attention.
Already now she was scared she would never be able to recall his voice and already now she had trouble fixing his face in her mind. She desperately wanted to look at pictures of him, but she realized she didn’t have any in her phone. Her mum had plenty. She wanted to get back to her mum and she wanted to see Rashid’s picture. Smiling. Proudly kicking a ball. Before he had been turned into mush.
That’s what she did. She carried the plastic bag with Rashid to her mum. She asked to see his pictures. She stared at his smile until she felt it was burned into her forever.
The next day she convinced a stranger to drive her back to Rafah. She didn’t have much, but she had a phone and an internet connection. She started interviewing people on the street. On TikTok she started talking about what was happening around her in English, in Arabic, in German and occasionally in French. She got about 40,000 followers. She posted between 10 and 20 times a day. Three days ago an IDF sniper hit her in the chest. Four men carried her to an improvised field hospital. She couldn’t speak, but she could hear what the men were saying. They were carrying her on a door. They were using a door as a stretcher. She could hear one of the men say there was a hole the size of an orange in her chest. She felt no pain, but she felt like she could easily drink four liters of water in one go. She also felt like gravity had a bigger pull on her than on other days.
Yasmin never reached the field hospital. Her last thoughts were a mixture of imagining herself teaching at some German university, walks with her ex-boyfriend and regret for hurting him and extreme guilt for the times she had told Rashid to play by himself and leave her alone.
Her last thought was: if we meet in heaven the first thing I will do is play with him for however long he wants. Even if he wants to spend hours building a bus station using my books as building blocks.
The sniper who shot her was also 21 years old. He hadn’t read any German books, but as a teenager in school back Philadelphia he had watched the movie The Reader with Kate Winslet, based on the last book Yasmin had been reading. He had gotten a good look of her face before he shot her, the Arabic word djemile had been floating around in his head, but he forgot all about her face when his fellow soldiers had patted him on the back.
‘That’s one bitch who won’t poop out any terrorists’, his best friend had said. He hadn’t felt right about it, but he decided to think about it later, much later, when the war against the evil enemy had been won.
Help me publish a book
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The Confessor 