The sun burns down on a small village less than 20 miles north-east of Mosul, Iraq. Milisia, 14, and her sister Madlin, 13, greet me at the gate in flawless, almost accent-free German. They lead me into the yard of a grey, rectangular, one-story building where their family rents a single room.
We sit in the heat, joined by their mother and two younger brothers, aged nine and ten. Their eyes hold a mixture of hope and despair – as if I am both a bridge to the world they lost and a reminder of it. The girls hand me a carefully preserved plastic folder: their end-of-year school assessments from Germany.
