BBCIt belonged to his grandmother. solidity. Something he holds in his hands, runs his fingers across, and traces the path of memory. A little thing of beauty, inlaid with delicate mosaics.
Rene opens the music box, and ringing music begins to play, the same song he heard long ago in his living room in Damascus.
“This is all I have left of my home,” he says.
Everything about this young man suggests gentleness. René Chevan is short, thin, and speaks softly.
All week his emotions had been going back and forth. Joy in The fall of Bashar al-Assad. Heartbreak over the memories it aroused during the months he spent in Syrian prisons.
“There was a woman. Her image is still here in my mind. She was standing in the corner, and she was begging… and they obviously raped her.
“There was a boy who was 15 or 16 years old. They were raping him, and he was calling his mother. He was saying: Mama… Mama… Mama.”
There was rape and sexual assault.
When I first met Rene, he had just fled Syria. That was 12 years ago. He sat in front of me, trembling and in tears, terrified to show his face to the camera.
The secret police arrested him because he went to a pro-democracy demonstration. They also knew he was gay.
Three of them gang-raped Renee. He asked for mercy but they laughed.
“No one heard me,” he recalled in 2012. “I was alone.”
They told him that this was what he got in exchange for his demand for freedom. Another officer assaulted him every day. For six months he suffered this abuse.
When images appeared on television this week of prisoners being freed in Damascus, Rene returned to his own images.
“I'm not in prison now, I'm here. But I saw myself in the pictures and the pictures of the people in Syria. I was so happy for them, but I saw myself there… I saw the old version. I saw me there when they raped me, when they tortured me. I saw everything in flashback.” .
He cries and we stop the interview. A few minutes, he says.
Look at his living room wall.
There is a photo of his destroyed home in Syria, and a photo of Rene running a marathon in Utrecht. Then a photo of the Jesuit priest Father Frans van der Lugt, 75 years old, a psychotherapist and ecumenical activist in Syria, until his assassination in 2014.
It was Father van der Lugt who told Rene – who was struggling in an ultra-conservative environment – that he was a normal human being, and that Jesus loved him whatever his sexual orientation.
Rene takes a glass of water, then asks to continue our conversation.
I wondered why he agreed to show his face in front of the camera now?
He answers: “Because the Republic of Fear has ended. And because I am no longer afraid of them. Because Assad is a refugee in Moscow. Because all the criminals in Syria have fled. Because Syria has returned to all the Syrian people.”
“I hope we can live as a people in freedom and equality. I am very proud of myself as a Syrian, a Dutchman and a gay man.”
That doesn't mean he feels confident about living in Syria as a gay person just yet.
Under the Assad regime, homosexual acts were criminalized.
The country's new rulers have fundamentalist religious roots and have been involved in anti-LGBT violence and persecution.
“There are many Syrians from the LGBT community who fought,” Rene says.
“They were part of the revolution, and they lost their lives. (The Syrian regime) killed them just because they were from the LGBT community, and because they were part of the revolution.”
Rene told me he's “realistic” about the possibility of change. He is also concerned that all religious and ethnic groups – including Kurds – will receive protection.
Getty ImagesRene is among about six million Syrians who have fled the country and found safety either in neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey – the majority – or further afield in Europe.
Many European countries have already suspended asylum requests from Syrians, after the overthrow of the Assad regime. International human rights groups criticized the move, describing it as premature.
The number of Syrians in Germany is estimated at one million people. Among them is a wonderful disabled Kurdish girl whom I met for the first time in August 2015, when she joined a huge queue of people arriving on the Greek island of Lesbos.
She traveled through Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria on her way north.
To reach Europe from northern Syria, Nujeen crossed mountains, rivers and sea, with her sister Nisreen pushing a wheelchair.
“I want to be an astronaut, and maybe meet an alien. And I want to meet the queen,” she said.
I sat next to her on a dusty road, where thousands of asylum seekers lay exhausted in the midday heat. Her good humor and hope were contagious.
This was a girl who taught herself fluent English by watching American TV shows. Nujeen grew up in Aleppo, and as the war escalated, she went to her family’s hometown of Kobani, a Kurdish stronghold that later came under attack from the Islamic State.
I meet her now in Cologne's bustling Neumarkt Square, surrounded by Christmas market stalls where locals eat sausages and drink mulled wine, and the Syrian drama seems far away.
But not Nujin.
She would stay up all week watching TV, long after the rest of the family had gone to bed. No matter that it has an exam for business management course. You will manage.
Nujeen knows that there will never be a moment like the fall of the lion, a moment filled with this unique hope.
“Nothing lasts forever,” she says. “Darkness is followed by dawn.”
“I knew that I would never go back to a Syria with Assad as president, that we would never have the opportunity to be a better country with this man in power. We knew that we would never find peace unless he was gone. And now that this chapter is over, I think That's when the real challenge begins.”
Like Renee, she wants a country that is tolerant of diversity and cares for people with disabilities.
“I don't want to go back to a place where there is no elevator and only stairs leading to a fourth-floor apartment.”
As a Kurd, she is well aware of the experience of her people's suffering in the region.
Now, with Kurdish forces forced to withdraw from cities in the oil-producing north, Nujeen sees the danger posed by the new Turkish-backed regime.
“We know these people who are in power now. We know the countries and the powers that support them, and they are not fans of the Kurds. They don't like us at all. That is our biggest concern at the moment.”
There are also concerns that ISIS could regroup if Syria's new leaders are unable to stabilize the country.
There are constant calls to families still living in the Kurdish areas.
“They feel anxious and worried about the future like the rest of us,” Nujeen says.
“We never stop calling, and we always worry if they don't answer after the first ring. There's a lot of uncertainty about what will happen next.”
The uncertainty is exacerbated by the change in asylum policy in Europe.
However, this is a young woman whose life experience – experiencing serious disability from birth, witnessing the horrors of war, and traveling across the Middle East and Europe to safety – has created the capacity for hope.
In the nearly decade I've known her, it hasn't gone away. The fall of Assad only deepened its faith in Syria and its people.
“There are a lot of people waiting to see Syria fall into some kind of abyss,” she says.
“We are not people who hate or envy or want to eliminate each other. We are people who were raised to fear each other. But our default setting is that we love and accept who we are.”
“We can be a better nation, and we will be a nation of love, acceptance and peace, not a nation of chaos, fear and destruction.”
There are many hearts in Syria and outside that hope that you are right.
