Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. Long a site of peaceful resistance to the Assad regimes, Daraya fell under siege in 2012. For four years no one entered or left, and aid was blocked. Every single day, bombs fell on this place . And then a group searching for survivors stumbled upon a cache of books in the rubble. In a week they had six thousand volumes; in a month fifteen thousand. A sanctuary was born: a library where people could escape the blockade, a peper fortress to protect their humanity. The library offered a mervelous range of books -- from Arabic poetry, Shakespearean plays to American self-help, and more. The visitors shared photos and tales of their lives before the war, planned how to build a democracy, and tended the roots of their community despite shell-shocked soil. In the midst of the siege, the journalist Delphine Minoui tracked down one of the library's founders, twenty-three--year-old Ahmad. Over text messages, Minoui came to know the young men who gathered in the library, exchanged ideas, learned English, and imagined how to shape the future, even as bombs kept falling from above.