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Boat refugees in the Mediterranean 2017
Photo: Chris McGrath / Getty Images
The horror rests in the basement in 23 crimson files.
Torture and knife wounds, forced prostitution and sexual violence, burns, electric shocks and blows, explosions, severed heads and a lot of blood: hardly anything that one person can do to another is left out in the case descriptions that Martin Begemann neatly filed in the archive of his psychiatric outpatient department kept in Göttingen.
Cannibalism is also mentioned.
Begemann is a psychiatrist, over the course of two years he has compiled the life and suffering stories of 133 young refugees who came to Germany from Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Nigeria.
Begemann meticulously mapped their routes.
He measured the scars on their bodies.
He asked her about her fears.
And he recorded her story on video, presented in halting English or broken German.
Begemann did not sleep well in these two years.
Begemann conducts research at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen.
His goal was to find out how traumatic experiences affect life.
And with hardly any clientele this can be better studied than with young people who have been through the horrors of fleeing to Europe.
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