It belonged to his grandmother. Something solid. Something to hold in your hand, run your fingers over, and trace down memory lane. A beautiful little thing with a delicate mosaic.

Rene opens the music box and tinkling music begins to play, the same song he heard long ago in his Damascus living room.

“This is all that’s left of my family,” he said.

Everything about this young man reveals tenderness. Rene Chevain is short, slender and soft-spoken.

His moods had been swinging back and forth all week. joy is The fall of Bashar Assad. He is heartbroken as he recalls the months he spent in a Syrian prison.

“There was a woman. I still have an image of her in my mind. She was standing in the corner and she was pleading…it was obvious they raped her.

“There was a boy. He was 15 or 16 years old. They raped him and he called his mother. He said, ‘Mom…my mom…mom.'”

He himself was raped and sexually abused.

When I first met Rene, he had just fled Syria. That was 12 years ago. He sat across from me, shaking, with tears streaming down his face, afraid of showing his face in front of the camera.

The secret police arrested him for attending a pro-democracy demonstration. They also knew he was gay.

Three of them gang-raped Rene. He begged for mercy, but they laughed.

“No one heard me. I was alone,” he recalled in 2012.

They told him that this was what he would get for asking for freedom. Another officer abused him on a daily basis. For six months he suffered this abuse.

This week, when images of prisoners walking freely in Damascus appeared on television, Rene was reminded of herself.

“I’m not in prison now, I’m here. But I see myself in the photos and images of the Syrian people. I’m happy for them, but I see myself there… I see the old version when they I saw what happened to me when they raped me, I saw everything when they tortured me.”

He was crying and we stopped the interview. A few minutes, he said.

I looked at his living room wall.

There is a photo of his destroyed home in Syria and one of Rene running a marathon in Utrecht. Then there is the picture of Jesuit Father Frans Van Der Lugt, 75, a psychotherapist and ecumenical activist in Syria until his assassination in 2014.

Father van der Rougt told Rene – struggling in a deeply conservative environment – that he was a normal man and that Jesus loved him regardless of his sexual orientation.

Rene drank a glass of water and then asked to continue our conversation.

I wonder why he agreed to be on camera now?

“Because the republic of fear is gone. Because I am who I am, I am no longer afraid of them. Because Assad is a refugee from Moscow. Because all the criminals in Syria have escaped. Because Syria has returned to all the Syrian people,” he replied.

“I want us to be able to live freely and equally as a people. I’m proud to be Syrian, Dutch, LGBT.”

That doesn’t mean he feels confident about living as a gay man in Syria.

Homosexuality is criminalized under Assad’s regime.

The country’s new rulers have fundamentalist religious roots and have participated in violence and persecution against gays and lesbians.

“There are many LGBT people in Syria who have taken part in the fighting,” Rene said.

“They were part of the revolution, but they lost their lives. (The Syrian regime) killed them just because they were LGBT, because they were part of the revolution.”

Rene told me he was “realistic” about the prospect of change. He also worries about the protection of all religious and ethnic groups – including the Kurds.

Reneh is one of about six million Syrians who have fled the country, finding safety either in neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey (most of them) or further afield in Europe.

Some European countries have suspended asylum applications from Syrians since the overthrow of Assad’s regime. International human rights groups criticized the move as premature.

There are an estimated one million Syrians in Germany. Among them, I first met a remarkable disabled Kurdish girl in August 2015, when she joined a large group that landed on the Greek island of Lesbos.

She continued her voyage north, passing through Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria.

To get from northern Syria to Europe, Nougien crossed mountains, rivers and seas – with her sister Nisreen pushing her in a wheelchair.

“I want to be an astronaut and maybe meet aliens. I want to meet the Queen,” she said.

I squatted beside her on a dusty road where thousands of asylum seekers lay exhausted in the midday heat. Her humor and hope were infectious.

This is a girl who taught herself fluent English by watching American TV shows. Noojian grew up in Aleppo, and as the war escalated, she traveled to her family’s hometown of Kobani, a Kurdish stronghold that was later attacked by the Islamic State (IS) group.

I meet her now in Cologne’s bustling Neumarkt Square, surrounded by Christmas market stalls where locals eat sausages and drink mulled wine, and the drama in Syria seems far away.

But not so for Nukin.

She had been watching TV all week while the rest of the family had gone to bed. Regardless of the fact that she has to take exams for business administration courses. She’ll handle it.

Nukin knew there would never be another moment like Assad’s fall, a moment filled with such strange hope.

“Nothing lasts forever. After darkness comes dawn,” she said.

“I know I will never return to Syria with Assad as president, and we will never have the chance to be a better country with that man in power. We know that unless he leaves, we never will Find peace. And now that this chapter is over, I think the real challenge begins.”

Like Rene, she wants the country to embrace diversity and care for people with disabilities.

“I don’t want to go back to a place where there’s no elevator and you have to take the stairs to your fourth-floor apartment.”

As a Kurd, she understands the suffering of the local people very well.

Now, as Kurdish forces are forced to withdraw from cities in the oil-producing north, Nugin sees the dangers posed by the new Turkish-backed regime.

“We know these people who are in power now. We know the countries and the forces that support them, they are not entirely fans of the Kurds. They are not entirely fans of us. That is our biggest concern right now.”

There are also fears that Islamic State could regroup if Syria’s new leadership fails to stabilize the country.

Family members still living in the Kurdish region have been receiving calls.

“They share our anxiety and concerns about the future,” Nukin said.

“We never stop calling and we’re always worried if they don’t answer after the first ring. There’s a lot of uncertainty about what will happen next”.

Changes in European asylum policy add to uncertainty.

Nonetheless, this young woman’s life experiences – being severely disabled from birth, witnessing the horrors of war, traveling through the Middle East and Europe to safety – create the capacity for hope.

This feeling has not diminished in the nearly ten years I have known her. Assad’s fall will only deepen her faith in Syria and its people.

“There are a lot of people who are waiting to see Syria fall into some kind of abyss,” she said.

“We are not people who hate or are jealous or want to destroy each other. We are people who grew up fearing each other. But our default setting is that we love and accept who we are.”

“We can and will become a better country – a country of love, acceptance and peace rather than a country of chaos, fear and destruction.”

Many people inside and outside Syria hope she is right.