What struck me in the first chapters of The Beekeeper was how small details carry the weight of entire lives. When Mikhail pauses over the letter N, it is the symbol ISIS painted on Christian homes, a single red mark that forced families out after fifteen hundred years. She doesn’t tell her students this, but as a reader, the contrast hits hard: something as innocent as a letter suddenly becomes a marker of death and exile. That tension between the ordinary and the horrific runs throughout Nadia’s story, where picking tomatoes for her thirsty children leads straight into capture by ISIS.
What stayed with me most was Nadia’s survival after being sold, raped, and forced to make rockets with her children. The details of Nadia’s story are unbearable (a five-year-old daughter tasked with tying detonation lines!) but they also reveal how war seeps into every corner of life. Even escape was fragile, depending on the kindness of a shopkeeper who let her use the phone and a smuggler who knew the right back roads. Reading this, I kept thinking about how survival isn’t an ending. Nadia herself admits she still wakes up at night from nightmares. Survival is ongoing, messy, and never fully secure.
This sense of uncertainty echoed in the article about Syrians in Germany. Anas Modamani, who once symbolized Merkel’s “We will manage it,” now has a German passport, but politicians still talk about sending people like him back the moment Assad falls. In his words, “Berlin has become my second home, I will definitely stay here.” Just like Nadia, he wants stability, not the constant threat that safety can be taken away. Even those who have “made it” still live with the possibility that the ground will shift beneath them.
The New Yorker piece on Khaled al-Halabi was also interesting in relation to this. His story is messy: a Syrian intelligence officer who both carried out regime orders and sometimes tried to soften them. He survived by maneuvering between sides, and his escape was brokered through back channels and political deals. Reading about him alongside Nadia and Modamani complicates the picture: it’s not just victims and villains. War creates these murky spaces where survival means compromise, and no one comes out clean.
Together, these readings made me think about exile less as a fixed condition and more as something unstable and shifting. For Nadia, it meant an unlocked door that could either imprison or free her. For Modamani, it’s a passport that doesn’t fully guarantee belonging. For Halabi, it was a uniform that first made him powerful and later made him hunted. What ties them all is that survival doesn’t end with escape, but evolves into a lifelong negotiation with memory, fear, and the constant question of where one truly belongs.
