Artists After the Escape: Aeham Ahmad — When music saves a life

Snow covers the streets of Wiesbaden, softening the sounds of the busy metropolis. Only the crunching noise from steps in the snow rings loud and clear. A young man is walking down Wilhelmstraße. He pulls his thin jacket tighter around his slim shoulders and raises his face.

“Could we do this once more?” asks the cameraman filming for the DW multimedia special “After the Escape.” He waves to the young man, who runs lower back to his starting role to do it for the digicam. He’s affected the person despite January’s bitter cold and runny nose. Born in Damascus, Ahmad now makes his domestic in Germany; nevertheless, he thinks of his home city.

Here — and yet no longer right here.

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“Whenever I walk down this road, I constantly must consider Damascus,” Aeham Ahmad stated throughout our interview. “I don’t forget how my spouse and I would stroll through the antique part of the city. We concept we had all the time inside the global.”

Ahmad’s Damascus does not exist anymore. Innumerable bombs have rained down on it. Fighters have moved through the twisting streets, plundering and killing human beings. But Ahmad did not permit himself to be deterred from using that destruction for long. Nearly every day, he and his buddies might pull his piano into the ruins, wherein he could play to boost humans’ spirits, especially children’s ones. Friends could film him making tracks within the rubble.

The internet videos made him famous around the sector. He performed and performed to oppose hate, battle, and starvation. Then, sooner or later, a grenade exploded nearby, injuring one in every one of his palms and his face. Ahmad just slightly survived. To now not depart, the scar above his eyebrow and runny nose attest to that.

Much worse than these physical memories, however, are a number of his recollections. “Zeinab became a touching female who could always come and sing,” recalled Ahmad. One day, a random bullet hit her, killing her right away. Ahmad did not need to play the piano after that, but his buddies insisted he continue. So he did — until that fateful day in April 2015.

Ahmad’s 27th birthday, and a pal and Ahmad’s father have been helping him smuggle his piano through a checkpoint manned by the “Islamic State” (IS). The guards carrying Kalashnikov rifles stopped them and set the piano on the fireplace because they recollected tracking sacrilegious. Ahmad’s blind father stepped in front of his son and his friend, claiming that the piano belonged to him and that he did not know the two young guys. That prevented what might have been a far worse state of affairs.

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The fear Ahmad should have felt that day radiates from his darkish eyes. It will probably in no way completely disappear. But he’s nevertheless open and boyish when he speaks. Once he begins speaking, it’s hard to stop him, and he laughs plenty. And yet, all of a sudden, despair can take preserves of him once more — like while he talks about his dad and mom, who remain in Yarmouk, an area of Damascus, or his brother Alaa, who has been lacking since 2013.

Seaham Ahmad was born and grew up in the Yarmouk Camp for refugees. He is a member of the Palestinian minority in Syria. His father, a blind song tool builder, fostered his musical expertise from an early age. Ahmad commenced piano lessons when he was five and later studied tune in Damascus and Homs. But turning into a pianist was in no way his dream; it changed into greater than his father’s.

Fleeing Syria, leaving a circle of relatives

After his piano was destroyed, Ahmad was overcome with fear. His wife Tahani and their two younger sons, Ahmad and Kinan, fled, but they did not get far away. Soldiers captured them and locked them up in prison simply outside of Damascus. It becomes a miracle that the circle of relatives becomes launched some days later. Then they made a callous decision: Tahani and the children would pass lower back to Damascus. However, Ahmad could flee to the West.

He did so through Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Croatia, and Austria. He reached Munich, Germany, in September 2015. He was then assigned to Olpe, Kirschheim, Münster, and Gießen before being allowed to settle in Wiesbaden, the capital of the federal nation Hesse. Had the conflict in Syria never happened, the world would possibly by no means have heard of Aeham Ahmad. Had he never shared his heartfelt song with the sector, he wouldn’t have been able to gain a foothold in Germany so fast.

Music opened doorways

From the beginning, Aeham Ahmad had “pals” in Germany because of his videos. Famous German artists, including musician and actor Herbert Grönemeyer and musician Judith Holofernes, invited him to play with them in visitor performances. Ahmad became increasingly more capable of earning money with his track and constructed a life for himself in Germany. In August 2016, his best want became granted: after a year of separation, he once again changed into being able to wrap his hands around his spouse and two youngsters. They now live all collectively in a small apartment in Wiesbaden.

But notwithstanding his musical fulfillment, Ahmad worries that his hobby ought to hamper someplace down the road and that he could not succeed as a pianist. “I’ll emerge as promoting falafel or something once more,” he said. “I am Aeham Ahmad from Syria. No one will need to return to my concert events without my story!” In addition, he still has his damaged hand from the grenade to care for, so he should never end up a concert pianist. He can be restricted in technical talent, but his virtuoso, emotional pieces touch people where they subject maximum: their hearts. The “pianist in the rubble” may become truly the pianist Aeham Ahmad sooner or later.