Deutsche Welle (English edition)
Sahraa Karimi to direct a film on her flight from Afghanistan
"Filmmakers do not realize their power. If they raise their voices in solidarity for the people of Afghanistan... it will work," Afghan director Sahraa Karimi told DW. She plans to turn her flight from Kabul into a film.
In Venice, far from Kabul and the Taliban, Afghan directors are calling on the international film community to show solidarity with those under threat in their native country.
Sahraa Karimi, the first female president of the Afghan Film Organization, spoke with DW at the Venice International Film Festival, where she has come to raise the alarm and to make sure the world does not forget her country and her people.
Before the Taliban conquered the Afghan capital of Kabul on August 15, effectively seizing control of the entire country, Karimi was busy on her second feature film, a followup to her social drama Hava, Maryam, Ayesha, which premiered in Venice in 2019. She was also overseeing the entire Afghan Film Organization, which had features, documentaries and several short films in production as it tried to rebuild a movie industry in the country.
Under the Taliban's rule from 1996-2001, all cinema, like all forms of art, were banned.
"Just imagine, I was in the middle of production on my second film," Karimi told DW about her experiences on August 15 when the Taliban entered Kabul. "It was a normal, ordinary day. Everything was normal. And then, within a few hours, everything collapsed."
A difficult journey
Karimi made a harrowing escape, running through the streets of Kabul to get home, gather her family and try to make it to the airport to fly out of the country. But their flight was canceled. With the help of the Slovak, Turkish, and Ukrainian governments — Karimi, who stu
died cinema in Bratislava, holds Slovak citizenship — she was able to get out on August 17, taking a Turkish Airlines flight from Kabul to Istanbul and then to Kyiv.
Karimi is now planning to turn her experience into a fiction film.
"I'm a filmmaker. The only way, at least for a while, to forget this trauma that I experienced is to write it and to make it into a film," she said, adding that she hopes her story will give a different perspective on the events than seen in the news media.
"People only saw the bigger story, of the crowds. But there were many individual stories in those crowds, stories I saw myself, that I experienced," Karimi said. "The response of the
American army, which was very bad, the desperation of people who grabbed the wheel of airplanes as they tried to lift off. I will tell their stories. My film will look at what happened from different sides."
The power of the international film community
But Karimi isn't in Venice just to tell her story. In a panel discussion on Afghanistan in Venice on September 5, she and Afghan documentary filmmaker Sahra Mani called for action from the international film community.
Karimi wants international film organizations, including the European Film Academy, to pressure national governments to create humanitarian corridors to help get artists and others who want to leave out of the country, as well as a guarantee that they will be granted the status of political refugees.
"The international film community doesn't realize the power they have," she told DW. "People love actors and actresses and filmmakers. People love cinema. They can be very strong voices for solidarity with Afghan filmmakers and Afghanistan. If they decide to be the voice for Afghanistan and to protect Afghanistan — Afghan women, Afghan
filmmakers — it will work."
Karimi praised countries like Ukraine, which have stepped up to grant escaping Afghans visas and travel documents. She called out other European countries, including Germany, which have been more hesitant.
"What happened in Afghanistan happened. There are a lot of refugees, not just filmmakers and artists but other refugees. I think countries like Germany should show solidarity with these people, especially with artists and filmmakers. They should not just ignore them [but] accept them," she said.
"They do not need to be afraid. Artists and filmmakers integrate easily into a society and they bring with them their creativity, their stories, which can enrich the culture of their new country."
four of those plaques dedicated to the Black victims of the National Socialist regime.
That small number of Black people commemorated with a Stolperstein actually just recently doubled: Two cobblestone-sized memorials were added at the end of August in Berlin, in remembrance of Martha Ndumbe and Ferdinand James Allen.
The c e remo n i a l ev e n t brought together people from different Black initiatives and decolonization movements.
Gunter Demnig, the artist who came up with the idea of those commemorative stones, also took part in the ceremony, and he carefully inserted the stones in front of the last houses where the victims lived before they were arrested by the Nazis.
Martha Ndumbe died at the Ravensbrück concentration camp
The ceremonial event first started at Max-Beer Strasse 24, in front of the house where Martha Ndumbe lived before being imprisoned.
Martha Ndumbe was born in 1902 in Berlin. Her father, Jacob Ndumbe, came from Cameroon, whereas her mother, Dorothea
Grunwaldt, was a German from Hamburg.
Martha's father came to Germany as a participant in the First German Colonial Exhibition in Berlin. After the end of the exhibition, he stayed in Berlin, where Martha was born.
When Martha was growing up in Berlin, discrimination made the social and economic situation for most Black people in Germany precarious, and it was impossible for her to find a decent job. "She turned to prostitution and petty crimes for her survival," says Robbie Aitken, who also documented the case of these two individuals.
The Nazis imprisoned her for being an "asocial professional criminal." On June 9, 1944, she was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she died on February 5, 1945.
Ferdinand James Allen was euthanized
The second stone inserted on that day was at Torstrasse 176-178, the final address of Ferdinand James Allen, who was born in 1898.
His father, James Cornelius Allen, was a Black British musician from the Caribbean and lived in Berlin. His German mother, Lina Panzer, also came from Berlin.
Ferdinand was also struggling for survival as a Black person; he additionally suffered from epilepsy.
He was sterilized under the Nazis' 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. According to Aitken, it was also due to his health and biological condition that he was killed at the Bernburg psychiatric hospital on May 14, 1941, as part of the Nazis' campaign of mass murder through involuntary euthanasia, known as Aktion T4.
Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed died at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp
With these two new Stolpersteine installed on August 29, Berlin now has three such memorials for Black victims of Nazi Germany.
The first one was installed in 2007, for Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed.
Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed was born in 1904 in Dar es Salaam, the current financial capital of Tanzania. At the time, the city was part of German East Africa, which included presentday Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. He worked there as a child soldier for the German colonial army and later on moved to Berlin in 1929, shortly before the
Nazis took power in 1933.
Struggling economically as he faced discrimination, Mahjub had to take on several jobs, including working as a Swahili teacher, a waiter in hotels and an actor in various colonial films.
The Nazis accused him of "transgression of racial barriers" for having affairs with German women and sent him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1941. He died there on November 24, 1944.
His commemorative stumbling stone can be found in front of his last home, Brunnenstrasse 193 in Berlin, where he was arrested.
Commemorative stones for Black victims
These three commemorative stones are not far away from each other, in Berlin's district of Mitte, where most Black Berliners were living in the time, according to Robbie Aitken.
"It was mainly poor Black communities, and even when they had money, they were not invited to live in other places," points out Berlin-based Tanzanian activist Mnyaka Sururu Mboro.
In addition to Berlin's three stumbling stones for Black victims of Nazi persecution, there is a fourth one in Frankfurt at
Marburgerstrasse 9.
It commemorates a South African, Hagar Martin Brown, who was born in 1889 and brought to Germany to be a servant in an aristocratic family. During the Third Reich, doctors used him to test medical chemicals, which led to his death in 1940.
An ongoing research process
Professor Robbie Aitken, who is the co-author of a book on the topic, titled Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, is pursuing his research on the Black experience in Nazi Germany for a future work.
The historian still manages to uncover some forgotten cases by investigating reparations claims made by Black victims in the postwar period.
"I hope there are more Stolpersteine to come at some point," he says. "There were clearly more Black victims, but the difficulty is in finding concrete, document evidence to prove victimhood. This is difficult because of the Nazis' destruction of records." And, he adds, the rare remaining documents are also hard to locate.