An innocent man murdered for refusing to rape a girl. People knocking down walls between houses in order to go from one part of the street to the other and avoid the sniper who has recently shot a twelve-year-old child. This brave woman has risked her life to tell me this, so I must listen without shying away. And, practically on every page, you do feel the urge to hide, not to read about any more hallucinating cruelty and pain – but you tell yourself: I must keep on reading. Samar Yazbek conveys everything as though it’s happening in real time, right before you, and there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. It comes as a surprise to register that the book is written in the past tense. You can’t smell the blood, the fear, you can’t hear the deafening explosions of barrel bombs, you can’t possibly imagine the grief, the sense of utter loss, of overpowering anger and the courage that animates all these individuals. Samar Yazbek writes comparatively little about her projects with women and children, and, instead, becomes a mouthpiece for all the suffering, horrors, despair and individual human experiences that we don’t get to see in the brief, flashing images we watch nightly on the news. I was trembling uncontrollably.”) you are pulled into the narrative with a force you just can’t withstand, and, once you’ve finished reading, you suddenly realise that you have been holding your breath for nearly 300 pages. The Crossing is not a book you “enjoy”– it is far too profoundly horrifying, and yet from the very opening sentences (“The barbed wire lacerated my back.

She also encountered men who had come from other countries, who were fighting for different, less clear causes, in a country where various powers and interests have turned neighbour against neighbour. They looked after her, protected her, told her about themselves, their neighbours, and the price they had paid and were still paying for what had begun as a peaceful protest against the president. During her three crossings from Turkey into Syria, she met men, women and children who gave her warm hospitality even when it meant giving her the little they possessed. Her aim was to set up small schemes to train women to become financially independent and provide education to children. A year later, with what comes across as a feeling of unfinished business, she re-entered Syria illegally three times, determined to do whatever she could to help her homeland and its people, doing what she believed was right.

I swore quietly, and as her palm came down on my head it felt like a rock might have shattered from the force.’įalling foul of Assad’s regime and pursued by the Syrian intelligence services, journalist and writer Samar Yazbek fled to France in 2011. “Swear by the thing you hold most dearly deep in your heart.” “Do you swear by God that you’ll tell the world what I have to say?” she asked.

The Crossing by Samar Yazbek