Mehmet Aslan titled the frame Hardship of Life. A Syrian father on one crutch holds his son above his head as if the boy could fly. Munzir al-Nazzal had lost his right leg in 2014 when a bomb fell on a market in the Idlib countryside. Mustafa was born without arms or legs. His mother, Zeynep, had been pregnant during the April 2017 sarin attack on Khan Shaykhun; family and much of the reporting that followed treated that exposure—and the medicines that followed—as the reason for tetra-amelia. Genetics can produce the same absence of limbs without war. War supplied the story the world wanted to believe. The picture won the Siena International Photo Awards in 2021. The festival, the Diocese of Siena and Caritas raised money and visas. On 21 January 2022 the family landed in Rome: Munzir, Zeynep, Mustafa and his sisters. They went first to Tuscany, then toward the INAIL prosthetic centre at Vigorso di Budrio, near Bologna, a workshop known for athletes and for children who need more than a cosmetic limb.

Doctors in Siena operated on Mustafa before the long fitting began. The plan at Budrio was sequential: the father first, so the son would see a man stand and try to copy him. Custom sockets, training, school enrolment, Italian lessons. Later Italian papers said the family left Emilia-Romagna for Germany in early 2023 after months of rehabilitation—hope relocated once more. Prosthetics for a child with no residual limbs are not a pair of shoes. They are years of sockets that no longer fit, of motors and myoelectric signals if any muscle remains, of a body that grows faster than any workshop. Munzir could be given a walking limb. Mustafa could be given the idea of reaching. Neither gift is finished on the day a photograph wins a prize.

What moved the world was not a clinic. It was a man who had one leg left and still lifted a child who had none. Italy answered with housing, a famous laboratory and a residence permit. Science, here, is polymer and alignment and physiotherapy. Life is a boy who likes to be thrown into the air because, for a second, gravity forgets what the war remembered.

Sources: The Guardian, 5 February 2022; Corriere di Bologna reporting on arrival, Budrio and the later move; Siena International Photo Awards / Mehmet Aslan, Hardship of Life; contemporaneous Italian coverage of the family’s humanitarian visa.