For many children, the end of summer marks a familiar return to classrooms, friends, and routines. For some girls, however, the school year never begins again. Instead, a family holiday becomes a one-way journey abroad, where childhood gives way to forced marriage, isolation, and lives beyond the reach of the authorities who once protected them. One such story is that of Roya, whose experience was documented in an investigation by Die Zeit and supported by records from a German support organisation that documented both her disappearance and her eventual escape.
Roya was 12 years old when she believed she was leaving Germany for a holiday in Turkey with her family during the summer of 2009. According to her account, her parents assured her that the children’s home where she had been living knew about the trip and had approved it. Instead, after travelling by train to Paris and flying through Dubai, she arrived in Kabul, Afghanistan. There, she says, her parents took away her passport and mobile phone, ending any expectation that she would return home when the holidays ended.
Before that journey, Roya’s childhood had already been shaped by family tensions and intervention by German authorities. Born in Afghanistan in 1998, she arrived in Germany as an infant with her family. As a young girl, she enjoyed school and dreamed of becoming a lawyer. When she was about nine years old, youth welfare authorities removed her from her parents’ care after concerns emerged that her father intended to take her to Afghanistan. She was placed in a children’s home under the legal guardianship of an appointed lawyer. According to both Roya and her former guardian, she adapted well to her new surroundings, made friends, and resisted efforts to reconnect with her parents for some time.
That distance gradually narrowed after an older cousin re-entered her life. Weekend and holiday visits with relatives eventually brought her back into contact with her parents, despite warnings from her guardian that travelling abroad with them carried significant risks. Roya recalls believing the promised holiday was genuine. Her guardian later maintained that she had repeatedly warned the girl about the possibility of being taken to Afghanistan, where recovering her would be extremely difficult.
Her disappearance triggered concern in Germany. Staff at the children’s home reported that she had left with her uncle at the beginning of the school holidays and soon became unreachable. Four weeks later, the home reported her missing. Police opened an investigation into child abduction after her guardian filed a complaint, but Afghanistan was not a party to the Hague Convention governing international child abduction, leaving few legal avenues for her return. Her guardian later recalled concluding that the case offered virtually no realistic prospect of bringing the child back.
What followed was documented only through Roya’s own recollections until her escape years later. She says she was taken to a family compound surrounded by high walls, where strict rules governed every aspect of her life. She was no longer allowed to attend school and spent her days performing household work. Initially believing the stay would be temporary, she gradually realised that the months were becoming years. Without calendars, television, or radio, she lost track of time.
At around the age of 16, her family informed her that a marriage had been arranged without her involvement. Two years later, when she was 18, she married a man she says she met for the first time on the day of the wedding. According to Roya, her husband attempted to force sexual relations upon her, and after he returned abroad, she remained with his family, where she says she experienced repeated physical abuse while carrying out domestic work from early morning each day. She described beatings by her in-laws and said her movements remained tightly restricted.
After years of living under those conditions, Roya concluded that no one else would be able to secure her freedom. In 2019, while accompanying her husband to a government office in Kabul, she met a man who later agreed to help her escape. She secretly recovered her passport, planned her departure over several weeks, and left the family home during the night. To avoid suspicion while travelling alone, she concealed a pillow beneath her clothing to appear pregnant before reaching the airport and flying to Tehran. There, the man arranged temporary shelter with an Iranian organisation before the two lost contact, leaving Roya once again on her own.
From Iran, she began trying to return to Germany. Her efforts eventually led her to Papatya, a Berlin-based organisation that assists women and girls affected by forced marriage and abduction. According to Die Zeit, the organisation assembled a detailed case file running to several hundred pages, documenting communications, evidence, and efforts to establish Roya’s identity and legal status. In an online form submitted in September 2019, Roya explained that she had been abducted at the age of 12, prevented from attending school, and forced into marriage. She also pleaded that her parents should not be informed she had contacted the organisation.
The path back to Germany proved legally complex. Roya’s former residence permit had expired after more than a decade abroad, and additional challenges arose because she had overstayed her visa in Iran. Papatya coordinated with lawyers, German authorities, and the German embassy, helping to secure documents, accommodation, employment, and financial assistance during the process. Seven months after her first appeal for help, internal records noted that her visa application had finally progressed. By late September 2020, the organisation recorded that she had landed in Berlin. Within two weeks, she had started work at a supermarket.
Today, Roya lives independently in southern Germany without contact with her family. She has her own home, employment, bank account, health insurance, and a circle of friends. Yet she says the years spent in Afghanistan and Iran continue to affect her, with recurring nightmares reminding her of the past. To process those experiences, she has written more than sixty pages of poetry reflecting on the years she lost. According to Die Zeit, the documents collected throughout her case, together with testimony from those who knew her before and after her disappearance, provide a detailed record of a childhood interrupted by a journey that was presented as a holiday but became a decade-long separation from the life she had once expected to return to.
