Confronting the refugee crisis
Third in an occasional series on Harvard’s wide-ranging programs and research in Europe. BERLIN — One minute, Donia Mehu was standing in her kitchen, cooking and puttering. The next she was lying in rubble, horribly wounded and bleeding. It was 2012, the year that the Syrian civil war came to Aleppo, that troubled nation’s largest city and Mehu’s home. When her husband found her unconscious after the bombing, it was too late to save her leg. Mehu paused briefly in her story to control her emotions, then continued. Life was good in Aleppo, one of the world’s oldest cities, before the war. She and her husband had no children, but they did well enough that she was able to stay home and take care of the household. But that world was now blown apart. She said that these days her wish was to learn German, to better navigate the country in which...