The city of Daraya, Syria was bombed endlessly in the years around 2011. Feared to be a rebel stronghold, residents lived under a government controlled siege until 2014 when anyone who remained in the city was rounded up, forced unto green buses and moved into refugee camps in the northern part of the country. During those years of destruction and hunger, a group of young people searched the bombed and abandoned buildings for books. In a secret underground room they created a library. The "head librarian" was fourteen.
Why? In various ways, those young people who risked both the gathering and the reading of books were saying, "You can destroy my home. You can starve my body. But you cannot own my mind. You cannot limit my thoughts. You cannot keep me from being the most of me I can be." The war in Syria has been a travesty against humanity. The evil that makes war happen always is. But just as certain are the heroic few who push back against that evil - sometimes with powerful protests and sometime with hidden libraries.
Thomson is a journalist for the BBC who covered the war in Syria and personally knew the individuals and the war in this story. It deserved telling.
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