WELCOME!

I wonder whether he thought of hallucinating when seeing me at 8:40 am at his desk in a velveteen blue nightgown with hiking boots, asking for the toilette key and only three minutes later for a refreshing cup of instant coffee.

Security men are stoics. He would smile, hand me the key, and when he saw me 10 minutes later with a pink washcloth he'd state "And now have a wash."

Then sun was shining on our "welcome day." The night sky was clear when I locked the construction trailer's door behind me at 3:00 am, wondering whether I might be able to sleep inside this room of reminiscence. It contained memorabilia made available by residents, such as pictures and objects, depicting life before bomb attacks, life before tough decisions had to be made. There were Latif's shoes, real shoes in a glass cabinet and - on the wall - a picture of shoes: Dakel's shoes- the ones that would protect the soles of his feet on his way from the Sinjar Mountains to Berlin. Then there was Abd Elrahman's poster portrait right above the bed. When looking to the left, I saw Hameed in Kabul. In front of me sat Vlato's teddy in a glass cabinet. The teddy had been left behind when the little boy was deported in the middle of the night. Two pictures in off-colors are glowing - one shows a disrupted living room interior, the other one is the deep hollowed asphalt of Bagdad Street in Damascus where the Mounem family used to live.

I slept well. I slept very well those few hours until I had to get up. That's when I encountered Sham, who would sneak around a corner of the house in her pajamas. We would greet each other silently. Zlatan's seemingly Mongolian eyes would keep it a secret whether the twitching in the corner of his mouth - when spotting me crossing the courtyard - was a smile or not.

It was way past midnight, when Khaled took pictures of the ladies Ruschka and Zineta, who would manufacture cakes and pastries in the kitchen on second floor.

Dakel and I run cables and layed carpets. Aymen would saw along, self-determined. At 5:00 pm we had one last rehearsal of the red carpet performance - Mohamed Firas' odyssey from Libya to Italy, to finally crawling the last meters into the HEIM.

At 2:55 pm everything looked really nice. The courtyard was raked the German way, the duvet covers would write "home" [daHEIM] at the front of the HEIM.

At 3:00 pm it started to rain.

"So what," is what 8-year-old Melisa says in situations like this.

And somehow it really did not seem to matter. "… It was warm in the cold", a visitor would write to me the next day.

And another one would state "… I am deeply impressed by everything all of you brought into being at KUNSTASYL. … Sheriff-Deen, who himself has been an unaccompanied minor when fleeing from Togo, has never seen an Asylum before. In comparison, his own situation seemed to be rather paradisiacal to him."

It's a long way from housing to a home.

Ruschka und Zineta

Erinnerungsraum