Marcel Gascón Barberá

I was in eighth grade when I finished school for the day and walked with my friends about 200 meters toward the city center. Right in the middle of a crosswalk, a female suicide bomber blew herself up about two meters away from me. The blast threw me to the ground. I had no idea what was happening. When I lifted my head, all I could see was a burned, headless body lying not far from me. I was covered in blood, and that's when I realized I had been caught in a terrorist attack. I survived by a miracle, while people who had been standing farther away from her were blown to pieces. A few years later, when I was about 17, I was sitting with friends in a beautiful forest. There was a couple sitting in a car not far from us. After about an hour, something frightened us, so we drove away. Later, we learned that terrorists had murdered that couple with axes, right where we had been sitting. When I was 18, my older brother was severely wounded in a bus bombing. When we took the bus to school in the mornings, we would split up and ride separately so that if a bus exploded, we wouldn't all die together. Sometimes we would get off the bus halfway through the journey, terrified by someone suspicious sitting next to us. They murdered my neighbors, the parents of my friends, and children from my neighborhood whom I knew. And that was **just** my childhood.