Being Black in Germany has never been easy
It was a balmy summer night in 2020, shortly after the lifting of Germany’s first COVID-19 lockdown, and Omar Diallo and two friends from his home country of Guinea wanted to celebrate Eid al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice.
It was a balmy summer night in 2020, shortly after the lifting of Germany’s first COVID-19 lockdown, and Omar Diallo and two friends from his home country of Guinea wanted to celebrate Eid al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice.
“We were enjoying life, playing music, walking through the city at night — we just wanted to be together again and have a good time,” Diallo, 22, told The Associated Press in Erfurt, in the eastern state of Thuringia.
Omar Diallo, a 22-year-old migrant from Guinea in West Africa, poses for a portrait prior to an interview with The Associated Press near a dilapidated storage building were he and two friends being hunted and beaten up in 2020, in Erfurt, Germany, Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
He was not prepared for how the day would end. Suddenly Diallo and his friends were confronted by three black-clad white men.
“They were shouting: ‘What do you want here, f-——- foreigners, get out’!” Diallo remembered.
“First there were three, then five, seven — they were surrounding us from all sides. We couldn’t run away, and then they started chasing us,” he said.
At some point Diallo managed to call the police, and when the officers finally arrived, the attackers ran away. One of his friends was beaten up so badly that he had to be hospitalized.
“I simply tried to survive,” Diallo said. “I hadn’t done anything wrong. It all happened only because of my skin color.”
