Apocalyptic Log / Real Life

• Older Than Print: Here's a 1349 report of the Black Death:
  I, Brother Clyn of the Friars Minor of Kilkenny have written in this book the notable events which befell in my time ... so that notable deeds shall not be lost from the memory of future generations I, seeing many ills, waiting for death till it come, have committed to writing what I have truly heard; and lest the writing perish with the writer, I leave parchment for continuing the work, if haply any man of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and continue the work which I have begun.
  
  [in another hand] Here it seems the author died.
• The message that William Coulthard scratched on his empty canteen as he lay dying of thirst in the Australian desert in 1858. "My tongue is sticking to my mouth ... My eyes dazzle, my tongue burns, I can't get up."
• "June 3rd 1864, Cold Harbor Virginia, I was killed." The final entry of a Massachusetts volunteer in the Army of The Potomac in The American Civil War.
• Charles Gordon kept a detailed diary of the Siege of Khartoum, ending prophetically: "If the expeditionary force... does not come within ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best of the honor of our country."
• Ulysses S. Grant completed his autobiography five days before succumbing to throat cancer in 1885. His notes concerning the progress of his cancer were reportedly required reading in medical schools for many years.
• For 33 years, the fate of S. A. Andrée's Swedish Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 to the north pole remained a mystery. In 1930, the remains of the three expedition members, their camp and a large number of photos and diary entries were found at Kvitøya island. In these, the men had recorded in extraordinary detail how their balloon crashed after just three days on July 14, their increasingly desperate attempts to get back to Svalbard the following three months and their ultimately doomed battle against cold, hunger, disease and exhaustion. Andrée ended the last coherent diary entry, from early October, with the words: "With such comrades as these, one ought to be able to manage under practically any circumstances whatsoever." All the members of the expedition are believed to have perished just a few days later.
• Scott's diary from the 1912 Terra Nova Expedition. Quite depressing reading.
  I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.
  It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more.
  R. Scott.
  [Scrawled]
  Last entry. For God's sake look after our people
• The RMS Titanic's radio operators kept putting out emergency messages in Morse code as long as they could. The quality and range of the messages declined as the ship lost more and more power. One of the last intelligible radio messages: "We are sinking fast passengers being put into boats". The final message was sent at 2:17 A.M, around three minutes before the ship went under. Of the two Wireless operators, only one lived to tell the tale.
• Vince Coleman, train dispatcher who died in the 1917 Halifax Explosion (the largest man-made explosion ever prior to the atomic bomb): "Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbour making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys."
• On the night of the 25th of November 1936, a Nebraska proctologist named Edwin Katskee injected himself with a large dose of then-legal cocaine. He was found dead in his office the following morning, having written out his symptoms as he experienced them. As the night went on, the handwriting of his entries became increasingly erratic, with the final entry simply detailing "paralysis", then a swirling scrawl that ends heading to the floor where his corpse was discovered. Nobody is quite sure what the purpose of this was, as his family stated it was an experiment gone wrong, citing an antidote nearby that Katskee had either decided not to use or was unable to do so. Others contend that it was a suicide, and that he decided to detail his symptoms as a means of leaving behind something for his fellow physicians to utilize. If the later theory proved true, it was sadly for naught. The physicians who later examined his "death diary" found the entries too erratic and illegible to be of any scientific use.
• The entirety of The Hindenburg disaster was caught on film and narrated by radio presenter Herbert Morrison, who was audibly overcome with grief and horror until he could no longer bear to continue. On seeing the gigantic airship burning, and people falling from the passenger decks, he coined the famous aghast phrase: "Oh, the Humanity!" Despite the shocking power of the explosion, amazingly, about two-thirds of the passengers escaped alive. The other one-third died mainly because they panicked and jumped out of the cabin before they hit the ground. (Even some of the jumpers survived and were interviewed by Morrison.)
• H. P. Lovecraft kept a record as he was dying of intestinal cancer. The last entry was written four days before his death in 1937. The New York Times ran an article about it, "Writer Charts Fatal Malady" a couple of days later.
• A number of soldiers of the Soviet garrison of Brest Fortress held out in the basements of the old fortress for over a month after it was overrun in the early days of Operation Barbarossa, where the Nazis had some success, though things quickly turned sour when the winter came rolling in. One carved into a wall: "I'm dying but I won't surrender. Farewell, Motherland. 20.VII.41"
• The heartbreaking nine-page diary of twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva, in which she systematically recorded the deaths of her entire family, one death per page, during the Siege of Leningrad. The final entry reads, in a childish scrawl: "The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left." Tanya was eventually rescued, only to die of tuberculosis 2 years later.
• The 1942 siege of Corregidor, Philippines, and the final radio message sent by Sergeant Irving Strobing. "They are piling dead and wounded in our tunnel. Arm's weak from pounding key, long hours, no rest, short rations, tired. I know how a mouse feels. Caught in a trap waiting for guys to come along and finish it up."
• Herpetologist Karl P. Schmidt did one of these in 1957, after being bitten by a small boomslang (a venomous snake); he believed it wasn't large enough to be dangerous, so he did not take antivenin, but did type a running log of his symptoms through the night and into the next morning; he was found dead later that day.^note Not helping the case was that it was discovered later that boomslang bites caused delayed symptoms.
• The transcript of the recording from Apollo 1, the crew of which died when a fire started in the cockpit during a test in 1967.
  Ed White: Fire!
  Gus Grissom: I've got a fire in the cockpit!
  Roger Chaffee: I'm burning up!
  [screams]
  [silence]
• Donald Campbell's final transmissions from his Bluebird boat as he tried to break his world water speed record and died when his craft somersaulted over and crashed in 1967.
  "A hell of a bloody row in here. I can't see anything... I've got the bows up. I've gone. Oh..."
• The increasingly irrational log entries of amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst, whose mental state gradually deteriorated to the point of suicide during a solo round the world sailing race in 1969.
• The Balibo Five, a group of TV reporters from Australia and New Zealand who travelled to East Timor in 1975, shortly before the Indonesian military seized control of the territory. Three days before he was killed—suspected to be the work of Indonesian militants—one of the reporters, Greg Shackleton, recorded a film newsreel about the local villagers and their impending plight in the face of military aggression.
• The disappearance of Frederick Valentich in 1978. While flying his light aircraft from Melbourne to King Island he reported to ATC that he was being harassed by an unidentified "aircraft" that he presumed was an Air Force jet of some kind, but none were operating in his area, nor were any civil planes in the vicinity. In his final transmission he comes to a frightening realisation:
  "That strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again." (open microphone for two seconds) "It is hovering and..." (open microphone for one second) "...it's not an aircraft." ^* One of the less supernatural, yet no less disturbing theories is that, due to Valentich's lack of experience flying at night and becoming disoriented in a cloud bank, he was flying inverted without realizing it. (You'd think you would know if you were upside down, but thanks to the concept of the Graveyard Spiral and the various sensory illusions that can occur while flying, it is actually harder than it seems to determine orientation when flying in the dark...) The "lights" he saw would have been his own, reflecting in the water above him as he descended closer and closer. While considerably more mundane than alien abduction or a prelude to War of the Worlds, it's still disturbing when you consider that if it was like this, the poor guy was rapidly advancing upon his own violent death and likely never even realized what killed him.
• The Jonestown massacre in 1978 had so many victim's testimony and evidence from several sources remained:
  • The last speech that Jim Jones gave to the residents of Jonestown was recorded for posterity. In it, you can hear him direct the older members of the community to help the younger children, and for them to "not worry about the children's crying; [the punch] is just a little bitter. It's not painful." Makes for some chilling night time listening. The effect of listening to it is enhanced by eerie "ghost" music heard throughout (an inadvertent effect of Jones taking an old audiotape of pop music recorded at high speed and taping over it at low speed).
  • The Edith Roller journals. A former college professor, she kept a detailed log of her daily life in Jonestown. She never came home.
  • The footage of Congressman Leo Ryan's visit to Jonestown collected by NBC News cameraman Bob Brown, which abruptly ends just as gunmen from Jonestown open fire on Ryan's delegation on a Guyanese airstrip; both Ryan and Brown were killed.
• Tammy Mathre did this in 1978, keeping a diary in her checkbook. She was a nursing student who'd become depressed and increasingly focused on God and what the Bible says about death and dying. She went camping alone in the Big Horn Mountains. A year later a few fragments of her bones were found. The diary proved she hadn't killed herself; she'd been injured and couldn't leave.
• The eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state in 1980 was something that was both seen coming due to the increase in volcanic activity, drawing scientists and journalists, and happened suddenly and explosively, which caught several victims with essentially no chance to escape:
  • David A. Johnston's last message: "Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!"
  • An amateur radio operator named Gerry Martin also radioed to Vancouver to report the eruption. His last recorded words were "Gentlemen, the uh, camper and the car sitting over to the south of me (this was Johnston's camp) is covered. It's gonna get me, too. I can't get out of here..."
  • A subversion occurred with photographer Reid Blackburn, another victim— his camera was recovered after the eruption, but the heat had ruined the film inside.
• The final transmission from RNLB Solomon Browne, the lifeboat involved in the Penlee lifeboat disaster, as it attempted to rescue the crew of the MV Union Star in hurricane force winds. Both vessels were lost with all hands.
  ...We've got four off at the moment, male and female. There's two left on board... *loud noise, followed by dead air*
• In 1988, Ivan Lester McGuire went skydiving and recorded his dive. Partway through the video, he appears to be looking for his ripcord, which he can't find, since he'd forgotten his parachute. At this point the camera goes spinning until the video glitches out, as footage of the final stage of his descent was destroyed on impact.
• Any detailed, candid diary writing by a person in the grips of depression or similar can read like one of these. Things are going great, then one starts going downhill. For example, the last words Kenneth Williams wrote in his diary before his apparent suicide in 1988 were, "What's the bloody point?"
• Christopher McCandless kept a diary of his time in the Alaskan wilderness, which documented his eventual death by starvation in an abandoned bus on the 112th day of his Alaska excursion, August 1992. Notably, this also appears in literature and film as Into the Wild.
• Björk once had a stalker by the name of Ricardo Lopez. He had planned to kill her with a letter bomb which would launch a discharge of corrosive acid upon opening, and he kept a video diary detailing the process of his plans. During the course of the diary we can clearly see Lopez' mental health erode, culminating in the final entry in September 1996 with him shaving his head, painting his face, and blowing his brains out with a revolver, on camera.
• In the days before committing mass suicide in 1997 several members of the Heaven's Gate cult recorded final exit statements. The morning after the suicide the tapes with the recorded statements were delivered to a surviving member.
• The Columbine High School shooting produced two of these.
  • The killers themselves recorded a large number of home movies in which they planned and discussed their future killing spree. Many of the "basement tapes", as these videos are sometimes known to True Crime followers, are still held under lock and key by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, who claims to have had them destroyed in 2011 (though this has been disputed), and have only been shown to a select few people, including the families of some of the victims and survivors. That said, partial transcripts have been released. The final tape, recorded thirty minutes before the shooting began, had the both of them apologizing to their parents for what they were about to do and saying that their friends Chris Morris and Nathan Vanderau could have their stuff if they survived.
  • During the shooting itself, a library phone line was left open by a teacher who called 911 before the shooters' entrance forced her to leave the phone to go hide. The open line caught and recorded the sounds of students being killed and injured, the dialogue of the shooters to their victims and each other, and after the shooters leave, the surviving students being told to quickly flee out a nearby door, then dead air. The first five minutes of the call were released, in which by listening carefully under the conversation of the teacher and 911 operator, several things can be heard. Including a bomb going off, the shooters cheering and after entering the library shouting at the students to get up, and three shots being fired (two of the shots were fatal).
• There are a number of appropriately awful accounts from the submarine world, notably the brief log kept by the survivors of "Kursk "after her sinking. And, even worse, the audio recording from "USS Thresher's" underwater telephone. The captain kept up a narrative as the submarine sank, totally out of control, and passed crush depth. Utterly horrifying.
• The September 11th attacks provide several examples:
  • Kevin Cosgrove's last phone call from an upper floor in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. As he describes the situation, he suddenly shouts, "Oh, God!" and screams as the building collapses around him.
  • Aboard United Flight 93 was Todd Beamer, who used an on-plane telephone to recount what had happened on board and a plan to take back control of the plane: "Are you guys ready? Let's roll." The "rolling" was for a snack cart that was used as a battering ram on the door to the cockpit; UA 93 was eventually crashed into a field in western Pennsylvania, well away from any major US landmarks.
  • And on AA Flight 11, attendant Betty Ong desperately tried to inform ground operations. Between difficulty breathing (the hijackers had sprayed mace) and repeated requests for her name and seat number, and then operations specialist Nydia Gonzales getting the same requests when she tried to relay the information, precious seconds were wasted, but it was Ms. Ong's call that led to the grounding of every plane flying through American airspace.
• The onboard video camera was recovered from the wreckage of Space Shuttle Columbia after its 2003 disaster and the last few minutes were played, although it stopped before the actual disintegration.
• Christa McAuliffe was recording her experiences of takeoff in Space Shuttle Challenger during its 1986 launch, no doubt for classroom material. When her tape recorder was later recovered, it confirmed that the seven on board had survived the initial explosion.
• Amateur documentary filmmaker and bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell accidentally left a camera recording (audio only) on the 2003 night he and his girlfriend were fatally attacked by a starving grizzly bear. While the tape has never been released (for obvious reasons), according to those who have heard it, it's completely terrifying. The documentary Grizzly Man showed Werner Herzog listening to it and becoming increasingly freaked out in lieu of playing it.
• After the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004, a tourist victim's camera was recovered with the memory card still readable. Photos of the wave were published, one of them shot just a few seconds before the guy was pulled under.
• On a lighter note: Xan Brooks of the Guardian liveblogged the Isner-Mahut match at Wimbledon in 2010, which went down in the record books as the single longest tennis match in history. The blog reached full-on Zombie Apocalypse proportions in a couple of places.
  7.30pm: Let it end, let it end, it's 46-all. It was funny when it was 16-all and it was creepy when it was 26-all. But this is pure purgatory and there is still no end in sight. John Isner has just struck his 90th ace. Nicolas Mahut, poor, enfeebled Nicolas Mahut, has only hit 72. Maybe we should just decide it on the number of aces struck? Give the game to Isner and then we can all crawl into our graves.^note The match finally ended in its third day, having twice been suspended due to darkness, with Isner winning the final set 70-68. Brooks did not return to live tweet the next day, presumably for mental health reasons.
• Jessica Gawhi posted a twitter post on her wall regarding a visit with her mom. It was taken just a few minutes prior to Jessica's death during the 2012 Aurora theater shooting.
  • #TheDarkKnightRises oh man one hour till the movie and its going to be the best BIRTHDAY ever - Last tweet of theater shooting victim Alex Sullivan.
  • And the reply from a friend of his:
    @pikachudiamonds: i hope you're okay :(
• While the streamer in question survived, getting caught by the 2014 Iquique earthquake in the middle of a stream has to count for something (link in Spanish, with English subs).
  "...and the floor is shaking quite a bit... we are live with a quake here, must be magnitude 6... 7... now it's up at 8...earthquake, earthquake, guys! It's moving quite- *sounds of rattling furniture* I'M GONNA DIE, I'M GONNA DIE!"
• The black box of the SS El Faro documents the activities of the bridge crew as she sails into Hurricane Joaquin. It starts out mundane enough, with idle conversations and shooting the bull, before it begins into more sober comments about the deteriorating weather and the ship's attempts to weather the storm. Soon enough, it becomes clear that the ship is foundering and the captain gives the order to abandon ship. The last words on the recording are that of the captain trying to assist a panicked crew member out of the bridge as the ship capsizes. Sadly, no one from the El Faro survived.
• During the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in Alberta, Canada, one resident witnessed the destruction of his home via the living room security camera feed streamed to his iPhone.
• The diary of Linda Bishop, the 'Homeless Angel' of Ground Zero after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, who had been diagnosed as bipolar, a judgment she rejected. After her release from a mental hospital she moved into an abandoned farmhouse and recorded her experience in a notebook. Intending to live independently to prove that she could, she planned to stay only a few days, but worried that her unkempt appearance would attract unwanted attention if she went into town. Figuring she'd wait for divine inspiration for her next move, she lived on nothing but apples scavenged from a nearby orchard and melted snow for over three months. It was one of the coldest winters on record. When her apples ran out, she documented the process of her slow starvation—"35th day w/out food"—until her death. All the while she was close to occupied homes, and had a plan to leave and get help; but her eyesight failed due to starvation and she knew she'd never make it. God Knows Where I Am is a documentary of her story, which was released in 2017.
• The mass shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs on Nov. 5, 2017 was captured on video almost in its entirety, as the church recorded its sermons every week in order to post them on YouTube. The cameramen were among the first to be shot when the gunman broke in, and no one was able to turn it off, so the camera kept rolling as the congregation was massacred.
• This video of the abandoned headquarters of the defunct Ames department store chain, accompanied by ghostly PA system voice-overs, concludes with the company's final voicemail to employees.
• During the early jet age, ejection seats would not operate until the cockpit canopy was jettisoned (today they can punch through the glass). A British pilot test-flying a Hawker-Siddeley Sea Hawk had his controls jam while in a moderate descent over open ocean. His canopy would not jettison, so he could not egress the doomed plane. He calmly narrated the last moments of his flight and his efforts to recover control so that later pilots might learn from what happened. The transmission was cut off at impact.
• This is sort of the whole reason they have black boxes on airplanes. The Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) records everything said in the cockpit and over the radio on an aircraft, and the device is made of highly durable material that's unlikely to be destroyed in a crash. (And as for the old Stock Joke about "why don't they just make the whole plane out of that material?"...well, such a plane would be too heavy to fly, and it wouldn't protect passengers from the impact anyway.)
  ALA 261 First Officer - I think if it's controllable, we oughta just try to land it —
  ALA 261 Captain - you think so? ok let's head for LA.
  ALA 261 - [thump]
  ALA 261 First Officer - you feel that?
  ALA 261 Captain - yeah.
  ALA 261 Captain - ok gimme sl— see, this is a bitch.
  ALA 261 First Officer - is it?
  ALA 261 Captain - yeah.
  ALA 261 - [2 clicks, then an extremely loud bang]
  ALA 261 Captain -Mayday!
  • The most common last word on black box recordings is "Shit!" (or its equivalent in the pilot's native language). This is rendered as "Unintelligible" when said recordings are broadcast on the news. Probably the second most common is "OH MY G*... [static noise]"^note Note: Muslim pilots saying "Allah Akbar (God is Great)" before a plane crash is not an indication that the crash was intentional; Muslims believe that these should be their last words if possible. It's no more indicative of ill intent than a Jew saying the "Sh'ma", or a Christian saying the "Our Father" or 23rd Psalm.
  • Occasionally, a pilot who knows he or she is going down and likely about to die will intentionally call out a message to a loved one, intending for it to be picked up by the CVR in hopes that the person it's directed to will eventually hear it. For instance, the pilot of a PSA plane that crashed in San Diego yelled "Ma, I love you!" just before his plane hit the ground.
  • The other black box serves as one for the aircraft itself. The flight data recorder logs pretty much everything that happens to an airplane, including instrument readings, mechanical data, and control inputs. Flight data recorders are often vital to the task of determining the cause of a crash.
• There are plans by the U.S Department of Energy to leave one of these in nuclear waste storage facilities for future civilizations to uncover. The way they outline what message they want to convey sounds more like they're warning whoever comes near not to unleash the Shambler locked inside the facility, or something. One of the lines in the message was used for the Epigraph of one issue of Immortal Hulk:
  "This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger."
• Ted Turner, upon the launching of CNN, vowed that the channel would never sign off, even to the point of becoming one of these. Luckily, it hasn't happened yet.
  "We won't be signing off until the world ends. We'll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event... and when the end of the world comes, we'll play 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' before we sign off."
• In 2004 cave diver Dave Shaw recorded his final moments when he became entangled and drowned during an attempt to recover the remains of fellow diver Deon Dreyer from Bushman Hole, where he had perished a decade earlier.
• Another unfortunate diver, Yuri Lipski, was diving at the Dahab Blue Hole when something went horribly wrong and he uncontrollably sank to his death, his camera recording the entirety of his fatal descent.
• 4chan's Bunker Map project is an attempt at tracking down and recording the locations of billionaire apocalypse bunkers like LaBeouf's flag. Leslie Fish's Digwell Carol is mentioned in terms of motivation.
• The last recorded message from the Star Dust, the Avro Lancastrian airliner involved in the 1947 BSAA Star Dust Incident, was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC" transmitted via Morse Code to the radio operator at Santiago airport; the last word, "STENDEC", was not recognized by the operator, who asked for clarification. In response, he recieved "STENDEC" again twice, before contact was lost with the plane. Rumors abound as to what exactly STENDEC means, though one prevailing theory is that it is an old World War II era term for an aircraft about to crash due to hazardous weather, translating to "Severe Turbulence Encountered, Now Descending Emergency Crash-landing", a theory backed up by the fact that all members of Star Dust's crew were WWII veterans. Critics, however, point out that the first part of the message was a routine estimated time of arrival, which would not have been transmitted if the aircraft were in distress.
• One piece of evidence that the Bronze Age Collapse was partly caused by the rampaging Sea Peoples is a letter by Ammurapi, the last king of Ugarit, describing an army laying waste to his city.
  My father behold, the enemy's ships came (here); my cities(?) were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots(?) are in the Land of Hatti, and all my ships are in the Land of Lukka?...Thus, the country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: the seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.
• The Victory Point Message of Franklin’s Lost Expedition counts as one. Consisting of two messages left a year apart, the messages detail the expedition's path through the Arctic, initially making great progress before being entrapped in the ice above King William Island. For the next two years, the ships would remain trapped in place, eventually losing 24 of their number to sickness, including the expedition’s commander. On the third year, the survivors would attempt to escape on foot to the nearest British outpost, over 800 miles away. Although the details remain foggy, it is believed to be unlikely that they survived more then a few years after the message was left, dying due to factors like starvation, exhaustion, sickness, and the cold.
  28 of May 1847 H.M.S.hips Erebus and Terror Wintered in the Ice in Lat. 70°5'N Long. 98°.23'W Having wintered in 1846-7 at Beechey Island in Lat 74°43'28"N Long 91°39'15"W After having ascended Wellington Channel to Lat 77° and returned by the West side of Cornwallis Island. Sir John Franklin commanding the Expedition. All well Party consisting of 2 Officers and 6 Men left the ships on Monday 24th May 1847.—Gm. Gore, Lieut., Chas. F. Des Voeux, Mate
  25th April 1848 HMShips Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April 5 leagues NNW of this having been beset since 12th Sept 1846. The officers and crews consisting of 105 souls under the command of Captain F. R. M. Crozier landed here—in Lat. 69°37'42" Long. 98°41' This paper was found by Lt. Irving under the cairn supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1831—4 miles to the Northward—where it had been deposited by the late Commander Gore in May 1847. Sir James Ross' pillar has not however been found and the paper has been transferred to this position which is that in which Sir J. Ross' pillar was erected—Sir John Franklin died on the 11th of June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.—James Fitzjames Captain HMS Erebus F. R. M. Crozier Captain & Senior Offr And start on tomorrow 26th for Backs Fish River.
• Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl: One of the most known real life examples. The diary was written during WW2 in Amsterdam, Netherlands occupied by Nazi Germany where many Jews were persecuted. Because Anne's family were Jewish, they were forced into hiding into a small room in a house to avoid the Nazis. In order to pass the time living in a small room everyday, Anne was given a diary which she used to document her everyday life in hiding
• The Pianist from Syria - A Memoir is about the Syrian Civil War and Bashar Al-Assad's war crimes told from the point of view of a little Syrian boy. He himself is displaced because of the conflict and targeted by ISIS for playing music (which, to radicals like them, is a no no).

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