Years later, it emerged that Black September was an offshoot of Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization. But in the immediate aftermath of the Munich attack, Muslims and Arabs faced new scrutiny. My parents felt the change, especially my father. Police would stop him often and ask for his papers. The homes of Arab students were searched because police suspected them of supporting militant groups or sheltering their members. “Some people would even say, ‘Arabs should leave,’” my father told me. It didn’t bother him because something bad had happened, and the Germans were trying to figure out who was behind it. He understood why they were suspicious.
The pressure continued throughout the 1970s, as terrorism became a daily reality in West Germany. Groups such as Black September and the Baader-Meinhof Gang, which called itself the Red Army Faction, were motivated by hostility toward Israel and what they dubbed Western imperialism, but ideologically they were left-wing and secular. The Red Army Faction included the children of German intellectuals; they saw West German leaders as fascists and compared them to Nazis. This wasn’t entirely wrong; at the time some influential posts in West Germany were held by people with connections to the Nazis. The Red Army Faction undertook bank robberies, bombings, hijackings, kidnappings, and assassinations. The group had connections to the Middle East. In the late 1960s, Baader-Meinhof members traveled to a Palestinian training camp in Lebanon for instruction in bomb making and other guerrilla skills, and some members took part in joint operations with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and other groups. The Red Army Faction kidnapped West German politicians and industry leaders, including Hanns-Martin Schleyer, an influential businessman and former SS member, whom they also killed.
In 1973 my mother gave birth to my oldest sister, Fatma. A year later, my sister Hannan arrived. Then, in 1977, my mother learned that she was pregnant for the third time. The doctors advised her to have an abortion. They thought I would be born with a congenital defect that could leave me without arms or hands. My mother was distraught.
“It’s all in the hands of God,” my father told her. “Let’s have the child and whatever happens, happens. We’ll deal with it.”
In those days, some Turkish migrants were known to cause scenes at German hospitals when women gave birth to girls. They wanted sons.
When I was born, the doctor looked apologetic. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a girl.”
“Is she okay?” my mother asked. “Does she have arms and legs?”
“Not only is she okay,” the doctor said, “she just peed on me!”
Because I was born healthy, against all the doctors’ predictions, my parents named me “Souad,” which means “the happy fortunate one” in Arabic. And in many ways I was a very lucky child. Klettenbergstrasse, where we lived then, is one of the nicest streets in Frankfurt. My father’s boss, who owned the restaurant where he worked, rented an apartment at number 8, and he found us an apartment in the same building, at the very top, in a sort of attic. The building was old and had six flats. Most of the other residents in the building and the neighborhood were bankers, managers, or business owners. A stewardess for Lufthansa lived in the other top-floor apartment, across from ours. We were the only guest worker family.
While the area was beautiful, our apartment was not. The roof leaked so badly that sometimes my mother had to set up buckets to catch the rain. Both of my parents had to work, and not only to support us. They also felt responsible for their families back in Morocco and Turkey and sent their parents money every month. A German woman cared for my two older sisters during the day in her apartment. When my mother’s younger sister came to visit her and their brothers in Germany, she took care of me during the day.
When I was eight weeks old, my parents learned that my mother’s father was very ill. They couldn’t afford to buy airline tickets on such short notice; the bus was more affordable, but it meant at least four days of travel. My parents worried that the trip would be too much for me.
Antje Ehrt and her husband, Robert, who lived in our building, offered to take care of me for the four weeks that my parents would be gone. My parents accepted but insisted on paying for my expenses. But my parents’ return was delayed because my grandfather’s health worsened, so they stayed longer. There were no telephones. The Ehrts started to worry about how they would explain to the authorities where this baby had come from.
After my parents came back, the Ehrts became like godparents to me. The couple had two children of their own and were more open-minded and inviting than some others in the neighborhood. Robert Ehrt was a manager at a big German company. I was told later that when I was a baby, he would come home from work and play with me and give me a bottle.
The family used to eat in their kitchen, and when I stayed with them as a baby they would leave me in the bedroom. But I didn’t like that. I wanted to be where the action was. I would scream until they came and got “madam” in her bassinet. They would put the bassinet on the kitchen counter so I could be close to them as they ate.
On the ground floor lived another couple who would influence me. Ruth and Alfred Weiss were Holocaust survivors. My father would sometimes buy them bread from the bakery, and my mother would send them cookies or food she had cooked.
“Many of my teachers were Jewish,” my father always told us. “I am very grateful for what they have taught me.”
When I was just a few months old, my mother’s sister, the one who had come to Germany to visit and had been babysitting for me, decided to return to Turkey to help care for my grandfather. My parents discussed sending me to Morocco, to stay with my father’s mother. There, I would be with someone who would really take care of me; I would also learn Arabic and get my early Islamic education.
It seemed the right choice. I was still breast-feeding, and since my mother wouldn’t be with me, my Moroccan grandmother found a Berber woman in her neighborhood to nurse me. Back in Germany, my mother mourned. She knew that I would make my first memories far away from her.
My Moroccan grandmother, Ruqqaya, had been named after one of the Prophet’s daughters. She and her relatives bore the surname Sadiqqi; they were known to be descendants of Moulay Ali Al-Cherif, a Moroccan nobleman whose family came from what is today Saudi Arabia and helped unite Morocco in the seventeenth century, establishing the dynasty of the Alaouites, who are still in power today. They were a dynasty of sharifs, a title that only the descendants of Muhammad’s grandson Hasan are allowed to carry.