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PAULA SLIER

PAULA SLIER

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The Stories that Stayed With Me

Nothing prepares you for the moment history stops being something you read about and becomes something you stand inside 

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" In war zones, I learnt that what we see is rarely the full picture - and often not even the true one."

- paula slier

The Boy Who Still Surfed
the World

Over the years, photographs arrived from beaches, oceans and coastlines across the globe - the journey Assaf never got to make.

Assaf Tzur was just 16-years-old when he was killed in a terrorist attack while travelling home in the school bus. His greatest dream was to surf the world’s oceans. 
 
At his funeral, his father buried him beneath a headstone shaped like a surfboard and asked travellers from across the globe to photograph themselves with Assaf’s picture wherever their journeys took them. Over the years, photographs arrived from beaches, oceans and coastlines across the globe – the journey Assaf never got to make. 
 
As is customary with Jewish tradition, people also sent stones to be placed aside his grave.
 
Assaf never got to see the world. But in a way, the world came to see him. 

What Kind of Sister Prays for Her Sister to Die?

In a refugee camp in northern Iraq, I sat holding the hands of Amira, a Yazidi woman whose 27-year-old sister had been taken hostage by Islamic State terrorists. The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority, were specifically targeted by ISIS because of their faith. Thousands of women and girls were abducted, sold in slave markets, raped and subjected to systematic sexual violence, with the youngest girls often fetching the highest prices. 

Amira told me her sister had managed to call briefly to say the girls were being sold, enslaved and raped. Through tears, Amira confessed that she had begged her sister to kill herself. “What kind of sister tells her sister to kill herself?” she asked me. She wasn’t speaking out of cruelty, but out of unimaginable love and desperation, terrified that death might be kinder than what awaited her sister at the hands of Islamic State.

Some questions never leave you. 

The Girl Who Wanted to Become a Journalist

One of the most unexpected moments of my career came when I met two teenager girls receiving treatment in the same Israeli hospital – one Palestinian and one Israeli. The Israeli teenager had survived a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. The Palestinian teenager had been caught in a crossfire while travelling with her family in Bethlehem. Their lives, backgrounds and experiences could not have been more different, yet they shared teh same hospital ward and the same determination to rebuild their lives. 
 
Years later, the Palestinian teenager told me that meeting a woman journalist had inspired her to become one herself. Sometimes you never know which conversation will change someone’s life – including your own.

The Pen, the Kalashnikov and the Cross

In Homs, Syria, I met a former schoolteacher whose life had been turned upside down by war. He told me that the day a mortar exploded in the school yard and he had to hand over the body of a six-year-old to her father, was the day he swapped his pen for a Kalashnikov. He took my hand as we ran across “Sniper Valley” where snipers were shooting anything that moved from the rooftops. As we said goodbye, he pressed a small cross into my hand. It wasn’t a political gesture or even a religious one. It was a symbol of hope. “Pray for me and my men,” he asked me, “because most of us won’t make it out here alive!”  
 
I’ve forgotten many dates, military operations and countless headlines. I have never forgotten the people. Whenever I look at that cross, I am reminded of the terrible choices war forces ordinary people to make. These are only four stories among thousands. They are why I believe every conflict must first be understood through the lives of the people living it.