In 1985, Ala Sarraj went to sleep in Damascus and dreamed of a big yellow door nearly 300 kilometers away, in Palmyra. He was 22 and one of the top-ranked students in Syria, studying medicine at the prestigious Damascus University. In the dream, the door’s outlines were vague, its color diluted by hints of gray. The grinding and screaming of torture could be heard behind it.
Ala would dream again of the door after his older brother, Abdul Rahman, fled Syria for Chicago that same year; again after Ala joined him in 1987 to complete his medical residency at Rush University; and again after the two were joined by their mother and sister in 1988. Their father, who’d died in Kuwait when Ala was five, had not lived through Hafez al-Assad’s regime as the other Sarrajes had — had not seen the beatings on buses, the home invasions, the decimations of whole cities.
[For more of this story, written by Rebekah Frumkin, go to https://psmag.com/two-syrian-t...646d8dd13#.w4b5db8qm]
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