Syria’s Lost Generation
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For six months earlier this year, the photographer Elena Dorfman covered the Syrian refugee crisis for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, one of the organizations that mobilized to build the Za’atari refugee camp, in Jordan, which David Remnick wrote about in August.
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Of the millions of Syrians displaced by the civil war, Dorfman was drawn most strongly to the teen-agers. “They seemed particularly shell-shocked and bereft,” she said. “They spoke to me of powerful longing and frustration.”
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In these portraits, Dorfman documents a small fraction of a population disproportionately affected by the war. As Remnick writes of Za’atari, “The dispossession is absolute. Everyone has lost his country, his home, his equilibrium. Most have lost a family member or a close friend to the war.” The same is true for the teen-agers Dorfman photographed in camps in Lebanon and Iraqi Kurdistan. “They all talked about missing out on lives,” she said, “on futures that now seem lost.”
