"I want to ask people out there to stand up for us and put themselves in our position. No one would like to see their children suffer like ours have."

"If you are asking for freedom and someone comes and arrests you, or kills your brothers, or your sons, or your father, no one gives you your rights, what are you going to do? How long will you stay silent?"

"We ran away. We didn't take anything, not even our shoes."

"What is there left in Syria now to be remembered other than the killing and the bombing and the shelling? Nothing good to be remembered."

"I will only remember the destroyed buildings that I saw before I left Homs. I didn't lose any family members, except my dad, who died in Jordan because he was sick. But all my friends don't exist anymore."

"I stayed in the Old City of Homs under siege about two years. It is such a hard and difficult situation. Everything is death. Everyday, more death, more death: death by shelling, death by snipers."

"I seriously reached this point where I felt I couldn't breathe anymore, I just wanted to leave."

"For Syrians, life is a nightmare after what happened. Syrians don't have any good place left or any good way to live anymore. The place where they lived can never be the same. We cannot go back. Our whole past lives were gone in a blink.."

"I got three bullets in my leg. I needed surgery right away, but in the field hospital they only had basic treatments. I only remember they wrapped my leg with gauze. It was not enough. "

"The security services attacked my house twice—one time with weapons—and they scared my daughter. She was so scared. They also had me fired. They went to the school and told the director that I was so dangerous for the kids and he fired me on the spot."

"And then I had to come here and learn German. It was very difficult. I was depressed. Then 6 months later I decided that if I was just sitting down and doing nothing, I would not be helping my country, and I would not be helping myself either."

"One day they brought an old man who got sniped trying to cross, he had a bullet in his forehead. The blood was covering the bag of bread he was carrying to bring his family. The only thing I remember is that pieces of his brain and skull were sticking to the bag of bread. And I couldn't do anything to help him."

"It was only in 2012 that we started to get direct instructions to kill people."

"Torture was escalatory. The first type was beating with a whip or car tire. I didn't give them information and they did not know anything, so they increased the pressure, they started basically doing waterboarding."

"You think you're reaching paradise, but that's not reality. You're arriving in a completely different world, a totally different country, a totally different language. "