Many moons ago, 18-year-old Mahmoud Taffash landed in Lesbos. The year was 2015. For the fresh-faced Syrian, as for the thousands of other refugees who arrived on the eastern Aegean island at the height of Syria’s civil war, the crunch of the pebbles on a beach, reached on a dinghy from Turkey, marked the start of his journey west.
“It was move forward and rest, move forward and rest,” the 27-year-old recalled of the odyssey that would eventually take him from the uncertainty of a conflict zone to the tranquillity of Hamburg. “And all about looking ahead.”
