Daliah is a Palestinian-Iranian woman born and raised in Germany, far from her roots. Her childhood was shaped by the traditional songs whispered by her mother and stories of empires and freedom fighters told by her father before she fell asleep.

“‘Filthy foreigner’ — those two words belong to my earliest memory,” she says. “I was in kindergarten when children told me they couldn’t play with me because I was filthy and foreign.”

From her first encounters with the world around her, Daliah was made to feel like an outsider.

At six years old, she visited her mother’s homeland for the first time — “the holy land,” as her mother called it with a bittersweet smile. She had grown up hearing stories about olive trees, ancient landscapes, and freedom stretching from the river to the sea. But what she encountered was something entirely different: checkpoints, occupation, armed soldiers, fear, and the constant proximity of death. During that visit, she witnessed the killing of an ice cream vendor while walking past his shop — a moment that would remain with her forever.

Today, Daliah lives in Berlin. She graduated from SOAS University of London with a focus on conflict, violence, and development — subjects inseparable from the realities that shaped her life.

This portrait is part of a larger exploration of memory, displacement, identity, and inherited trauma — of what it means to belong to a homeland while growing up far away from it.