Sobhan Ahmadi was nine years old. His sister, Hanan, whom the family also called Hanieh, was seven. Their father says they were two years apart, but they were like inseparable twins. They would not go anywhere without each other. If one did not come, the other would not eat. Sobhan was calm and loyal. Hanan was lively and playful, always making the family laugh. Their room was always full of their voices, their laughter, and their little arguments.
Sobhan had always carried a heart larger than his age. In previous years, when he studied at another school, he would take his food to school every day but never open it. He would bring it back home untouched. One day, his teacher asked him why he did not eat. Sobhan answered that some children were poor and did not have proper food. He said he could not bear to eat in front of them because he knew they would want it too. Because of that simple act of compassion, his teacher and his mother created a charity fund to help provide food for poor children.
On another day, Sobhan saw one of his classmates crying because his pencil had run out. Without a moment of hesitation, he broke his own pencil in half and gave one piece to his classmate. These children were not only students. Sometimes, they were teachers of the grown-ups.
On the morning of the attack, Hanan woke up with unusual excitement. She washed her face, her mother combed and tied her hair, and she asked more than once whether she looked neat and beautiful. The night before, she had asked her mother to wash her school bag. Sobhan, too, had put his room in order the night before. He had folded his clothes and gathered his colored pencils. That morning, he first wanted to wear sports socks, but his mother told him to wear the socks she had brought for him from Karbala.
Later, those socks became the sign by which his family recognized him.
During the bombardment, Sobhan showed his final courage. One mother later said she had told him to come with them. He started to leave, then suddenly remembered: his sister was still there. He turned back to look for Hanan. Then the second missile struck.
Sobhan was found in the girls’ school.
Their father received a call from the school around 11 o’clock, telling him to come and take the children because the school was closing. On the way, before he reached the school, he heard the explosions. When he arrived, the school had been destroyed. At first, he still imagined his children were alive. Then he realized that the destroyed part of the building was exactly where his daughter’s class had been upstairs and his son’s class downstairs.
Hanan was found at 11 at night. Her teacher had taken several children into her arms, and Hanan was one of them. Her head had been injured, but her face and body were still intact.
Sobhan was harder to identify. His father recognized him by his sock. He went to him twice, unable to accept that the body before him was his son. Half of Sobhan’s face was gone. Even after recognition, his father could not bear to believe it.
The boy who once refused to eat so poor children would not suffer, the boy who broke his pencil in half for a classmate, went back into danger for his sister. Sobhan and Hanan left behind two empty places in a six-person home that became four. But they also left behind a truth no missile can destroy: childhood, at its purest, can carry more courage and compassion than the armies that kill it.