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Like many Syrians, Marsel arrived in France in 2016 five years after the start of the war. Not on foot or on makeshift boats, but by plane, direct from Lebanon, thanks to his Ukrainian passport. “My family comes from three countries and yet today I cannot live in any of them”. A few weeks ago, his mother, Ludmila, was able to leave Ukraine to join him in Paris.
With his huge smile and sparkling eyes, Marsel is nothing like an exile in distress. He himself assures that he had a wonderful childhood and today has a fulfilling life as a young thirty-year-old. However, its history is a compendium of conflicts that have lasted for almost a century.
From Palestine to Syria
UNRIC/Fabienne Pompey
Marsel and his mother Ludmila in Brussels, Belgium.
In 1948, when the State of Israel was created, Mohamed Zaki Abdo, the grandfather of Marsel, a prosperous merchant from Yafa, left Palestine to take refuge in Damascus in Syria. The family, although uprooted, is well off: a large apartment in the center of Damascus, “the equivalent of the Champs Elysées”, says Marsel. Mohammed Zaki is raising his children in Damascus, with the idea that they will soon return to their country, Palestine. In the meantime, he invests in the education of his children. His son Nabil, father of Marsel, leaves young for Ukraine in Luhansk, in the Donbass for a doctorate in mechanical engineering. There he met Ludmila Leonova, also a mechanical engineering student.
After their studies, Nabil, the Palestinian/Syrian and Ludmila, the Ukrainian, joined Damascus in 1988. The family took a dim view of the arrival of this “Russian”, the foreigner, and the two lovers had to settle in Yarmouk, the neighborhood of Palestinian refugees, much less “chic”. Marsel is the second son of Nabil and Ludmila. He was born in 1992. “I only have happy memories of my childhood. My older brother and I were spoiled children. We moved very often but my father taught at the university, he had an enviable status at the time, my mother had decided to devote herself to us and gave piano lessons”.
In United Nations schools
“I spent my entire childhood in United Nations schools, schools UNRWAthe Agency for Palestinian Refugees. I made several. At the time, they were the best schools in Damascus. We had space, labs for chemistry, drawing workshops and above all Palestinian teachers who were totally dedicated to their work. The most educated Syrians envied our schools and would have liked to put their children there,” says Marsel.
As a child, Marsel learned the piano and the guitar, he played in a troupe and often went to the theater with his parents to see “plays for adults”. He practices classical dance for 9 years, becomes a child of the show itself. Between the ages of 8 and 16, he appeared in 25 commercials for Syrian television and starred in an educational television series broadcast throughout the Middle East. After his baccalaureate, he began studying architecture. Seven years on the benches of the university and left in the first 10 of the country.
To read the rest of this report, go to the website of the United Nations Information Center for Western Europe, based in Brussels
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