At the end, which could also be a beginning, everything goes very fast. As the Tunisair plane gains altitude and the fasten-safety-belts sign goes out over the Mediterranean, TU Flight 744 pivots to a northerly heading. When breakfast comes, an island passes by below. And as the flight attendant's trolley swallows up empty trays and Ismail Ismail, whose first and last names are the same, looks out the window, he sees land between wisps of clouds and wonders whether that is already Europe. Ismail is sitting in Seat 12 F. His brother George sits next to him, his brother Joseph in the aisle seat. The three mustachioed men are all around 50 years old, wearing shirts of muted colors and plain polyester pants, as if they'd agreed to dress as inconspicuously as possible. In the row in front of them, three tourists from Stuttgart wearing T-shirts and beach tans are playing cards. Behind them, a woman in business attire is saying to her seatmate: "I fly this route countless times a year." Ismail and his brothers don't say anything. They don't read. They don't sleep. They silently stare ahead. In the midst of the routine of a scheduled flight, no one can tell that they are fleeing, just like all the Syrians and Afghans on boats at sea 36,000 feet below. Should one say the three have been lucky? A breakfast in economy class, a cup of coffee and the Mediterranean already behind them? But how much good luck does it take to make up for the bad luck of belonging to the wrong people, of practicing the wrong religion, of living in the wrong country at the wrong time? Ismail Ismail's village: overrun. His house: plundered. He himself: escaped from captivity by the "Islamic State." And now he is safe among people who fly over borders instead of merely crossing them. Among people to whom traveling is a mundane thing rather than a matter of fate. Among people who might also flee once in a while, but only from bad weather. Among people like us, in other words, the readers and reporters of DIE ZEIT.

The fate of Ismail and his brothers, his wife, his children, his friends, his neighbors -- it would have almost remained untold. On February 23, 2015, this newsflash slid through the world's awareness only very briefly in the swift stream of war reports, refugee photos and border debates: IS fighters in Syria had attacked ancient Christian communities, 35 villages along the banks of a river named Khabur, which flows into the Euphrates. The Islamists took 253 people hostage, including Ismail and his brothers.

It was still night when, months after their release, the three men boarded the airplane in Beirut. During a stopover in Tunis, we showed them a photo printed from the Internet, a satellite image from Google Maps. A puzzle out of earthy colors. Fields, paths, a winding river. At the end of a narrow road, the outlines of a village. With a bit of imagination, one could make out in this silhouette a leaf, like one that has fallen from a tree. Joseph and George rotated the photo in their hands, puzzled. They'd never seen the setting of their previous life through the eyes of a satellite. But Ismail figured it out immediately: This was Tel Goran, his village. With his index finger, he tapped on a house in the top left of the printout. He brought the image up to his lips and kissed it. His eyes filled with tears.

Related: Attacks on Assyrians in Syria
Related: Timeline of ISIS in Iraq

In a thousand small, inconspicuous scenes like the one on board TU Flight 744, an exodus of Christians is taking place -- not the first, but perhaps the final one. Among the religious groups in flight are ones almost as old as Christianity itself. Copts are abandoning the Middle East, Chaldeans, Maronites. Ismail, Joseph and George are Assyrians. Three members of another Christian people that -- as if caught up in a whirlwind of world affairs -- is being strewn across the globe. Three brothers blown away from their old home, the area between two rivers known as Mesopotamia, where there are more layers of history than anywhere else, where there are more peoples than states, where everything is a matter of dispute, including power, land, oil and proximity to God.

TU Flight 744 lands at Frankfurt Airport. Buzzing, pinging, ringing, cellphones awaken from their comas. It remains silent in seats 12 D to 12 F. Shortly thereafter, Ismail and his brothers are pulled forward through a long corridor by the torrent of other travelers. The stream of people halts once. George and Joseph hesitate before stepping onto an escalator for the first time in their lives. The vacationers surrounding them might think: What kind of hicks are these guys? No one suspects that these men come from the center of global affairs. Their hometown lies on the fronts of the Syrian war, where Kurds armed with German weapons are battling IS, where American, French and soon also German fighter jets are making their rounds, where Sunnis are shooting at Shiites and Syrian rebels are shooting at soldiers of the Syrian regime. Entire stretches of land have been depopulated. Chinese researchers have calculated that the night sky over Syria is 83 percent darker today than it once was. In the Christian village of Tel Goran, not a single light is burning anymore. What happens when an entire village just picks up and leaves? In the summer, we had started writing to Assyrian associations around the world, compiling lists of the identities of the hostages and looking for scattered individuals like Ismail. From satellite views online, we zoomed closer and closer in on the Khabur River -- and then Tel Goran was there. The aerial image of this village was the beginning. We learned that 160 people reportedly lived there in better days. Today, the village is empty. The two churches, the school, the houses, the barns. Hulls of an earlier life, like empty seashells on a beach. Where are the 160 now? What happens when an entire village, representing a people and a religion, just picks up and leaves? Is a new Tel Goran coming into being somewhere else? Ismail's name was the first one we wrote on our photo next to a tiny rooftop. This is how the search began. It would lead us to four continents. House for house, name for name. According to everything we know, none of the village's inhabitants has died. But every single one of them has lost their life. Germany: The Potato Peeler While TU Flight 744 is being awaited in Frankfurt, a man is on his way to work 200 kilometers away in the southwestern German state of Saarland. He doesn't have far to go, just three minutes through the pedestrian zone of Saarlouis. There, where Sonnenstrasse intersects with Bierstrasse, he heads for an old townhouse. Gray stone and paned-glass windows, like in an old movie. In gold letters next to the door, there is the word "KARTOFFELHAUS" ("potato house"). The man enters the restaurant more casually than a guest ever would, opens a door marked "private" and descends into a bare cellar. Standing there is something like a metal barrel with tubes attached. It's a peeling machine. This is Basem Adam's first task six days a week: He peels potatoes for Germans.

Basem dumps them in by the bucketful and adds water. Then the machine rumbles and roars away as if it were about to take off. Later in the day, the restaurant's patrons will flip through the menu, with three pages of "Potatoes and More": potato fritters, potato pizza, grilled potatoes, roasted potatoes, potato lasagna. Young people speaking in the soft Saarland dialect will write down orders and balance huge plates through the restaurant. Basem Adam, 32 years old, grew up in Tel Goran and doesn't speak the local dialect. He can't even speak proper German. His vocabulary could come from a dictionary for kitchen assistants: salad dressing, schnitzel plate, side dish, sink. Basem left Tel Goran in peaceful times. Young people were drawn to big cities in Syria, too. Basem, the son of the seamstress from Tel Goran, went to Damascus to work as a fashion designer in the capital city. On his computer, he designed T-shirts, dresses and women's tops revealing a lot of midriff. For a while, he hoped to be able to live one day like the digital bohemians in Berlin, London and New York. But things turned out differently. The war arrived. Six of his friends died in bomb attacks. Basem Adam is a round-faced man who laughs a lot when he tells his story -- out of politeness, helplessness and shyness. But usually out of fatalism. After fleeing Syria over land and sea, he got stranded in Saarlouis because there were already some other Assyrians here. He started a language course but stopped going because of his work schedule. A young man who had been a fashion designer had adapted his life to the shift rhythm of a restaurant. When asked how he feels about that, Basem shrugs his shoulders. That's just how it is, he adds. On our satellite image, Basem had marked a house diagonally across from Ismail Ismail's property on a narrow road right on the river. Basem, the child, and Ismail, the adult, saw each other every day. When those who have fled Tel Goran think back on the years when the village wasn't empty yet, instead of picturing a sand-colored satellite image, they see a small cosmos full of life, where their house doors were never locked, where teenagers tried their hands on their fathers' tractors, where Basem learned to swim in the shallow tributaries of the river, where they fished for carp and grilled them in the evening with his mother, Suheila, an early widow. Some fathers commuted to the cities, as tile layers, bus drivers, engineers. On weekends, everyone worked in their fields. Each family raised chickens, goats and sometimes a cow; they farmed the land on which they grew wheat, cotton, tomatoes and grapevines. Today, frozen in smartphone photos, an idyllic village can be seen: houses made of light stone, gardens defiantly defended against the heat, shaded by cedars and cypresses. A modest life in a close-knit community that usually played out in the open air. There was Ismail, at whose house everyone would sit together in the evening in a vine-covered gazebo. There was Samer, who always wanted to be a superstar in the soccer matches. There was Isho's Shop, "Jesus' Store," where one could buy rice, detergent and sweets. There was the festival area in front of the church, where they celebrated weddings and baptisms and sometimes danced through the night. And there, on the southern edge of the village, were four brothers, Muslims, who worked as day laborers in the fields of the Christians. The Adams and the Ismails in this tiny village: Their ancestors once established a global empire, and later they were converted to Christianity by Saint Thomas, one of the Twelve Apostles. Martyrs and missionaries bore their faith along the Silk Road all the way to Beijing. Whoever attends the religious services of the Assyrian Church of the East today travels 2,000 years back in time. Holy Masses are held in Old Aramaic, which is very close to the language Jesus spoke. They call God "Alaha," a word older than Islam. In the spring, the residents of Tel Goran used to celebrate eda gora, "the big festival," or what we call Easter. In the winter, they celebrated eda sora, "the small festival," or Christmas. At these times, one could buy Christmas trees in the nearest town. Back at the turn of the millennium, the men in the village had started building a new church next to their old one, with three cupolas and three crosses visible from afar. The community was too small to have its own priest, so they had to wait for Father Moshe, or Moses, who went downriver from village to village on Christmas and arrived in Tel Goran shortly before midnight. After the Mass, Father Moshe led them in a boat across the river to its northern bank, where he lived. Back then, major political affairs seemed like they were happening on another planet. The only hint of external realities were two portraits hanging in the celebration hall of the new church: one of the old Assad, and one of the young one. "Everyone was equal in the village. That's over." When the civil war began in 2011, Tel Goran initially lay far from the major fighting. But idylls are deceptive in wartime. Soon there were police officers running through the streets carrying draft notices in their hands. Assad's army took Toni, Ismail's oldest son, and sent him into the battle around Damascus. Toni's friend Bassil stood guard at a checkpoint on the highway between Homs and Hama, in constant fear of cars full of explosives. Zaia, the mayor's son, had to join the house-to-house fighting in Aleppo. Basem has already been in Saarlouis for two years when, in February 2015, the Assyrians there start formulating appeals and drafting petitions. Basem hears that acquaintances are telling others about the storming of Tel Goran and that they are asking German politicians for help. They do this until the government of Saarland announces that it will grant sanctuary to some of the village's residents -- but only to those who stayed the longest, stood up to the Islamic State, were taken hostage and got away. Among them are Ismail and his brothers. In Saarland, politicians speak about a "humanitarian gesture." It is a gesture that makes distinctions. The fact that Ismail suffered more undergoes a miraculous transformation and turns into a privilege: a flight in a plane instead of a long march on foot, a pledge of acceptance instead of an asylum process. For the time being, the former hostages had to leave their wives and children behind, whether in Syria, Beirut or remote refugee camps. When Ismail and his brothers land in Frankfurt, many of those who had spent weeks writing petitions are waiting for them. Basem Adam, Ismail's former neighbor, stays in Saarlouis. "Everyone was equal in the village," he says. "That's over." On a gray fall day, Basem goes home during his lunch break. He is still wearing his T-shirt with "KARTOFFELHAUS" written on it when he sits in an armchair and puts his iPad on the table. With practiced fingers, he swipes the display and selects a program named Viber, which can be used to make video calls to anywhere in the world. Basem presses the telephone key. He takes a deep breath. And he knows that, at that very instant, in the Swedish city of S

Translated by Josh Ward. This article is also available in German.