That week, I heard a radio interview with Michel Friedman, one of the Jewish leaders who had been so responsive to the attacks on Muslim immigrants. He spoke about the Holocaust, how it felt to be the child of survivors and to live in Germany. Yet Friedman didn’t want to abandon the country he’d grown up in. “Leaving Germany and settling somewhere else would have been the easiest option,” he told the host. “We—and I am talking about whoever has a sense of humanity, no matter if Jewish, Muslim, or Christian—cannot let these right-wing groups win by allowing them to shut us up or by packing our bags.”
That was the moment I stopped asking my parents to leave. Instead of giving in to my fear and alienation, I took them as a challenge, one that continues to this day. I decided to work as hard as I could and do my best to prevail over the forces that so frightened me. That was what I meant all those years later, when I told the ISIS leader on the Turkish-Syrian border that he’d taken the easiest way out. I believed my way was harder.
My parents are partly responsible for saving me. I wasn’t able to say that all Germans were bad because I lived among some good ones who supported and cared for me. It all sounds obvious now, but back then I was a teenager, and I was very angry.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if an Islamic State recruiter had found me in those dark moments. I’m not sure how I would have responded, or whether I would have been strong enough to resist.
2
The Hamburg Cell
Germany, 1994–2003
When I was a teenager, politics and current events captured my imagination. I asked my German godparents to keep their magazines and copies of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s big daily newspapers, so I could read them. One day, I saw an article about an old movie focusing on two journalists whose reporting led to the resignation of the American president Richard Nixon. “Based on a true story,” the article said. There was a large black-and-white photograph of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the newsroom.
Like all kids, I’d thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had considered becoming an actress or a politician, but All the President’s Men tipped the balance in favor of journalism. I was thrilled by the notion that these two reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were taking on people in power, that they were so persistent in finding the truth, and that their articles had such impact. Look at this, I thought. Journalism can change things. It reminded me of what my grandfather in Morocco had said years earlier: the people with power are the ones who write history. I could see that journalists didn’t simply write what happened; what they wrote could change lives.
My parents weren’t especially excited about my career plans. My mother said that the prisons in Turkey were filled with journalists. My father delivered the opinion of one of his coworkers, who told him that there were already many “German Germans” who wanted to become journalists and couldn’t get a job. “She said this profession is more for German Germans and that you are better off doing something else,” my dad relayed. “For example, you could become a nurse.”
I understood my mother’s argument. She was worried about my safety. But when it came to my father, I was just disappointed. Why would he let other people decide what was right or wrong for me? And what did it mean that many “German Germans” wanted to become journalists? Hadn’t I been born in Germany?
Redford and Hoffman were stronger than my parents’ concerns. After seeing the movie, I cut out the photo of the actors standing in the newsroom and hung it on my bedroom door. I was determined to become a journalist. I also knew that I’d have to pay for my education because my parents wouldn’t be able to.
When I was fourteen, I took on two jobs, working Saturdays in a bakery and babysitting twice a week. At sixteen, I added two more: tutoring kids in math and German and working at a home for elderly people in the evenings. I cleaned floors, washed dishes, and fed the old ladies.
In the meantime, I established a magazine at my high school called Phantom. The first contributors and editors were some of my closest friends. We interviewed politicians and personalities, including Michel Friedman, the Jewish leader who had so inspired me after the killings of Turkish migrants and who was also a politician in the Christian Democratic Union, and Gerhard Schr?der, then prime minister of the state of Lower Saxony, whom I met at a political event in Frankfurt before he became the Social Democratic Party (SPD) candidate for the chancellery. Ignoring all the media and bodyguards surrounding him, I tapped on his shoulder, introduced myself, and asked for an interview for my school paper. I told him how important I thought it was that politicians talk to young people. He turned to his assistant. “Sigrid, can you give this young lady your business card?” he said.
In return, I proudly presented my own homemade business card, which was white with my name in blue. I’d decorated the cards with silver sparkles because I didn’t want people to forget me.
Schr?der smiled. “When we get questions from Phantom, just forward them to me,” he told his assistant. We chatted for a few minutes, and he asked what grade I was in.
I didn’t realize that other reporters had gathered nearby, and some were taking pictures. The next day, my mom got a phone call from one of her friends: “Your daughter is in the newspaper with Gerhard Schr?der!” I bought the paper and tore it open, but then I saw the caption: “Gerhard Schr?der explains politics to a young Frankfurt party member.” I was outraged. I called the paper and asked for a correction. “You can’t just write that I’m a member of the SPD,” I told them. “I’m not.” But the people in the newsroom just laughed and told me it was a great picture.
At about this time, I also began writing letters to the editor in response to news coverage or issues of the day; one of them, about Islam and women, was even published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. After it ran, somebody from the neighborhood called my mother. “Tell your daughter to stay out of politics,” she said. But I was adamant that as a young woman and the daughter of guest workers I had a voice, too.
I didn’t identify primarily as a Muslim in those days. I felt that my siblings and I had more in common with our friends whose parents had come from Greece, Italy, or Spain than we did with other Muslim kids. What mattered was that we were the children of immigrants, that we weren’t “German Germans” but outsiders.