I was angry with my parents during that period, especially with my father. While my grandmother in Morocco was very strong-willed and never let anybody boss her around, I felt that my father did whatever his bosses or other Germans told him. As a chef, he worked long hours, and we barely saw him. But very often when he had a day off, his supervisors would call and ask him to come to work, and my father would immediately go. It didn’t help that he lived upstairs from the restaurant owner, Mr. Berger, who always knew when my father was home. When we went to the German authorities to renew our residency documents, I noticed that my father never asked questions or talked back, even when the people on the other side of the table treated him shabbily.
In our apartment building, Mrs. Weiss, who had survived the Holocaust with her husband, invited me into her apartment for a cocoa the same week that the news was full of the riots. She and her husband had told me about the concentration camps and their dead family members. The old lady seemed in distress; her face was pale. She told me that she hadn’t slept in days. The images from Hoyerswerda haunted her. “Please, child, take care of yourself and your family. I worry for you,” she said. “These people, these thoughts, they are ugly and dangerous.”
I told her not to worry, and that this all was happening in East Germany and would never reach us in Frankfurt, but Mrs. Weiss shook her head. “No, no, you don’t understand,” she said. “If the Germans had learned, what has happened in Hoyerswerda could not have happened.”
A year later, in November 1992, my parents’ argument lay in tatters, as members of a right-wing gang set fire to two houses occupied by Turkish families in the city of M?lln, in the western part of Germany. A Turkish grandmother and two girls were killed and seven others were injured. The attackers called the fire department themselves to report the attacks, ending their calls with the words “Heil Hitler!”
It was the Jews who spoke most forcefully against this terrifying attack. While most German politicians chose to stay away, the head of the German Jewish community, Ignatz Bubis, and his deputy Michel Friedman went to pay their respects to the victims and their families. On May 29, 1993, the house of another Turkish guest worker, Durmus Genc, was burned in Solingen, also in the former West Germany. Genc’s two daughters and two granddaughters, aged four to twenty-seven, were killed, along with a twelve-year-old visitor from Turkey. Again, members of Jewish organizations spoke up the loudest.
That summer, my parents took us to Morocco on vacation. By now there were four of us children, my brother Hicham having been born in 1986. We flew to Casablanca, drove to Meknes, and spent three or four weeks at my grandmother’s house visiting and receiving family and friends.
My father’s half sister Zahra also lived in Meknes, about ten minutes from my grandmother. She was married and had seven children, and one day my sister Hannan and I went to visit. One of Zahra’s sons, who was about nineteen at the time, had some friends over from the neighborhood. They were all watching TV.
I saw a mountainous region and cars with bearded men carrying guns. They said, “Allah hu-Akbar,” meaning “God is great.” The screen showed women crying and screaming. A voice said that these women had been raped and their families killed by Serbs. My cousin and his friends began to look angry. The next scene showed men with long beards standing behind two kneeling men. One of the bearded men said something in a language I couldn’t understand. A different voice, apparently of the cameraman, said “Allah hu-Akbar.” Next, I saw one of the bearded men holding the heads of the kneeling men in his hands. My cousin and his friends applauded.
“What movie are you watching?” my sister asked.
My cousin and his friends stared at us. It wasn’t a movie, they said.
“This is the truth about what is happening in Bosnia,” one of my cousin’s friends said. “It shows how the mujahideen fight in Bosnia against the Serbs who massacre Muslims.” He continued: “All Serbs should be killed. They rape our sisters and kill our brothers.”
Hannan and I told them that not all Serbs were bad and that in fact my mother had two Serbian coworkers who were very kind.
“You can’t be friends with these people,” my cousin’s friend said. “You will see. Soon they will try to kill all the Muslims in Europe. Without the mujahideen, you will all be slaughtered.”
My sister told me in German not to listen to him and that we should leave soon.
“How come you don’t know about this?” my cousin asked. “These videos come from Germany. The man who films them is a German of Egyptian descent.”
This man’s name was Reda Seyam, and his videos from Bosnia were some of the earliest examples of jihadist propaganda that has since ballooned into today’s use of violence as a recruiting tool. Many jihadists of my generation would later describe Bosnia and especially the massacre at Srebrenica as their “wake-up call.” The Dutch UN soldiers who stood by and watched as Muslim men and boys were seized and killed in Srebrenica convinced some Muslims that the West would do nothing as Muslims got slaughtered.
Back in Germany, things got worse. Later that summer, Hicham and I went out for ice cream one afternoon not far from the Holzhausenpark near our house in Frankfurt.
As we walked home, a car packed with four German men pulled up next to us. “Gypsies! We will kill you, Gypsies!” they yelled. With their shaved heads and tattoos, the men stood out as skinheads. It was rare to see people like this in our neighborhood. I looked around to see if they were talking to somebody else, but the street was empty. “We mean you two Gypsies!” one of them shouted. “We will kill you. We will take you to the gas chambers!”
My brother started crying. I threw our ice cream away, grabbed Hicham’s hand, and screamed for him to run. The car was following us. I knew I couldn’t run fast enough—my brother was too slow, so I lifted him and turned onto a one-way street. The car was about to follow when other cars showed up and honked. One of the other drivers screamed that he would call the police, and the car full of skinheads drove away. My brother and I ran home sobbing.
I told my parents we had to leave Germany. I begged them, “First they burned the Jews, and now they’ll burn us.” I thought back about what my cousin’s friend had said in Meknes, about people going after Muslims in the middle of Europe. Was he right?
I started having nightmares about the car with the shouting skinheads, from which I’d wake up crying and screaming. I began to read extensively about the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and how it all began. I was filled with fear as strong as anything I’d ever felt, not just for me but also for my whole family. Reading about what the Nazis did to handicapped people, I couldn’t help thinking about my sister Fatma. I felt we were no longer safe or accepted in Germany. For days, I begged my parents to pack and leave. “These people don’t want us here,” I told them.