Quotes from Wendy Pearlman

This is when we lost our humanity. I'd open my phone and look at my contacts and only one or two were still alive.

That next day, the regime launched chemical weapons. They hit very close to our house. My uncle and cousin were killed. It was like poison that burned their bodies from the inside.

Hopelessness is seeing someone else who has been there for eight months and hasn't been asked a single question and is just begging to be convicted and executed already.

I lived through rockets that would explode children into a million pieces. Sometimes we'd clean up body parts with our own hands. There wouldn't be a whole body to pick up. Just a hand or a leg or a head.

The second patient had been shot in the frontal lobe. He was there with his son, who was maybe eleven years old. The boy would leave at night, knock on doors asking for help, and then go back to his dad. On the third day, the army entered the hospital and killed them both. We saw them take the corpses away.

That August was the chemical weapons attack.

In the streets you saw people frozen in their cars, suffocated to death.

Imagine that you find your own neighborhood looking like Hiroshima. Destruction. Buildings knocked to the ground. A strange calm . . . as if you're in a theater. Silence. Only the tweet of sparrows.

Sometimes I joke to Munir that someone should gather all of us Syrians in one place and kill us so we can be done with this whole thing already. Then we'll all go to heaven and leave Bashar al-Assad to rule over an empty country.

At the interrogation center, they made us take off all our clothes. They mocked us and spat on us, but it was actually more dignifying than humiliating. You didn't do anything but say, "Freedom," and that was enough to rattle the entire regime and make them panic. For me, that was victory.

If someone wants citizenship quickly, he goes to Sweden. For young people who like to have fun, the Netherlands is the choice. Germany is for people who want to study and work.

no country in the world is paying attention to me. Not a single one is doing anything to protect any fraction of the rights that I should have as a human being living on earth. I'm not saying that the conscience of the international community is asleep. I'm saying that conscience doesn't exist at all.

We went from Greece to Macedonia, and then to Serbia, Hungary, and Austria before reaching Germany.

Because I'm a doctor, I tried to help whenever someone was injured. People were choking on tear gas and we'd pour cola on their faces, which counters the effect of gas. Their faces were sticky and glistening.

Everything in Jordan bothered me. My family, the government, the bad way the Jordanians treated us.

In Italy we were placed in a refugee camp, but then managed to escape. We found a Syrian guy who agreed to drive us to Denmark for 500 euros per person.

In Sicily they asked us if we were educated: engineers, teachers, doctors . . . if you said yes, they took your fingerprints so you stay in Italy. If you said no, they told you to keep moving to northern Europe.

I'm a woman. And I'm Christian. And I believe that this regime should go.

I was thrown in jail in Hungary, but it was like a five-star hotel compared to my time in our jails in Syria.

If I'd known this was life here I would have stayed in Syria and handed myself over to ISIS. It's better to die once than die slowly every day.

We were thirty-five people in one house. The women would sleep in one room and the men in another. When there was shelling, we'd be about three hundred people in the underground shelter.

So we left and came to Lebanon and my husband and daughter stayed in Syria.

It was humiliating. Syrians were treated like a burden. By the time I finished university in 2013, I was scared shitless to stay in the Arab world.

The more people tried to address the issue of sectarianism, the more violent the regime became.