Janina Findeisen Bonn woman talks about her captivity in Syria

BONN · In an event hosted by the Protestant Church, Janina Findeisen from Bonn spoke to an audience about her nearly one-year captivity in Syria. She said she made the wrong decision when she entered the civil war area while well advanced in her pregnancy.

She who travels has a story to tell. This old folk wisdom was evident on Wednesday evening when Janina Findeisen made an appearance for a book reading at an administrative building of the Protestant Church in Bonn. More than 300 people came to see her and get an impression of the 34-year-old journalist firsthand. In 2015, while highly pregnant, she traveled to the Syrian civil war region.

There she found, as planned, her old school friend Laura, who had gone to the "Holy War" as a convert from Bonn Islamist circles. Shortly afterwards, Findeisen was kidnapped by terrorists and spent almost a year held hostage by the militia. During this time she gave birth to her son. She wrote down her experiences and recorded them in the widely acclaimed book „Mein Zimmer im Haus des Krieges“ ("My Room in the House of War"). The fact that questions remain unanswered despite the 336 pages was made clear by the conversation that took place on the podium between the author and GA chief reporter Wolfgang Kaes.

Janina Findeisen, like her friend Laura, attended the Clara Schumann Gymnasium and grew up just around the corner from where she found herself on this evening. She answered one of the most pressing questions frankly: a "mixture of a perceived sense of security and naivety" led her to make the wrong decision to enter Syria. She also felt a certain pressure to not to let down her partners with whom she had started a film project. What remained open was whether the environment she was exposed to at the time, played a role in her decision.

Her book is not only about Syria, but also about Bonn. It is about a city, which in its history, already “boasted” the highest density of lawyers, civil servants, spies and even jihadists relative to its population. Findeisen writes in the book that after the federal government's move (to Berlin), Bonn had "retired, so to speak". And further: "Bonn had become without meaning and we did too along with it". It was an attempt to explain the comparatively high number of young people in Bonn who became Islamists, which Wolfgang Kaes does not allow the author to get away with, responding that life in Bonn is not really so bleak, not a place where people lack any kind of perspective. Findeisen says she writes "from a very personal perspective". Answering a question about whether she had had a guardian angel, she said “absolutely.”

Organizer of the reading, Holger Schwab from Buchladen 46, said that all proceeds from the evening would go to the organization “Reporters Without Borders.”

(Orig. text: Rüdiger Franz; Translation: ck)

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