Wesaam Al-Badry’s first and fondest memory of his father, Sattar, was visiting him in an Iraqi prison. Sattar had been imprisoned and tortured for being a pacifist who refused to fight in the Iran-Iraq war. There were at least 20 other prisoners in the same cell, Wesaam recalled where his father hugged him and held him in his lap.

It was an unlikely setting for a tender encounter, but Wesaam and his family had learned to find comfort where they could. His mother raised five children in crushing poverty in Nasriyah, which they fled when the gulf war’s fighting approached in 1991. After years in refugee camps where food was scarce the family was granted refugee status in the United States and settled in a rundown apartment building next to railroad tracks and a plastics factory in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The family was deeply grateful.