The BBCIt belonged to his grandmother. Something solid. Something to hold in her hands, run her fingers through and trace down memory lane. A beautiful little thing inlaid with a delicate mosaic.
Rene opens the music box and begins to play tinkling music, the same song heard long ago in his living room in Damascus.
“This is all I have left of my home,” he says.
Everything about this young man suggests tenderness. Rene Chevan is short, slender and soft-spoken.
All week his emotions went back and forth. Joy of the fall of Bashar al-Assad. Heartbroken by the memories his months in Syrian prisons evoked.
“There was a woman. I still have her image here in my head. She was standing in the corner praying… clearly she had been raped.
“There was a boy. He was 15-16 years old. They were raping him and he was calling his mother. It said “Mommy…my mommy…mommy.”
He had his own rape and sexual abuse.
When I first met Rene, he had just fled Syria. That was 12 years ago. He sat down across from me, shaking and teary-eyed, terrified of showing his face on camera.
The secret police had arrested him because he had gone to a pro-democracy demonstration. They also knew he was gay.
Three of them gang-raped Rene. He begged for mercy, but they laughed.
“No one heard me. I was alone,” he recalled in 2012.
They told him that this is what he was getting because he wanted freedom. Another policeman abused him every day. For six months he endured this violence.
When images of prisoners walking free in Damascus appeared on television this week, Rene returned to his own images.
“I'm not in jail now, I'm here. But I saw myself in the pictures and images of the people in Syria. I was so happy for them, but I saw myself there… I saw the old version of me there. I saw when I was raped and when they tortured me, I saw everything in retrospect.
He cries and we stop the interview. A few minutes, he says.
I look at his living room wall.
There is a photo of his destroyed home in Syria, one of René running a marathon in Utrecht. Then an image of the Jesuit priest, Father Frans Van Der Lugt, 75, a psychotherapist and ecumenical activist in Syria until he was killed in 2014.
It was Father Van der Lugt who told Rene – struggling in a deeply conservative environment – that he was a normal human being, that Jesus loved him regardless of his sexual orientation.
Rene takes a glass of water, then asks to continue our conversation.
Why had he agreed to show his face on camera now, I wondered?
“Because the republic of fear is gone. Because I am, I'm not afraid of them anymore. Because Assad is a refugee in Moscow. Because all the criminals in Syria fled. Because Syria has returned to all Syrian people,” he answers.
“I hope that we will be able to live as a people in freedom, in equality. I'm so proud of myself as Syrian, Dutch, LGBT.'
That doesn't mean he still feels confident living in Syria as a gay man.
Under the Assad regime, homosexual acts were criminalized.
The country's new rulers have fundamentalist religious roots and are involved in violence and persecution of gays.
“There are many Syrian LGBT people who have fought,” says Rene.
“They were part of the revolution and they lost their lives. (The Syrian regime) killed them just because they were LGBT and because they were part of the revolution.”
Rene told me he was “realistic” about the prospect of change. He is also concerned that all religious and ethnic groups – including the Kurds – receive protection.
Getty ImagesRene is among some six million Syrians who have fled the country and found safety either in neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey – the majority – or further afield in Europe.
Several European countries have already suspended asylum applications from Syrians since the ouster of the Assad regime. International rights groups criticized the move as premature.
There are about one million Syrians in Germany. Among them a remarkable Kurdish girl with a disability who I first met in August 2015 when she joined a huge column of people who had landed on the Greek island of Lesbos.
She traveled through Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Austria on her way north.
To reach Europe from northern Syria, Nujeen has crossed mountains, rivers and the sea – her sister Nisreen pushing the wheelchair.
“I want to be an astronaut and maybe meet an alien. And I want to meet the Queen,” she said.
I crouched beside her on a dusty road where thousands of asylum seekers lay exhausted in the midday heat. Her good humor and hope were contagious.
This was a girl who learned to speak English fluently by watching American TV programs. Nujeen grew up in Aleppo and then, as the war escalated, she went to her family's hometown of Kobane, a Kurdish stronghold that was subsequently attacked by the Islamic State (IS) group.
I meet her now in Cologne's bustling Neumarkt square, surrounded by Christmas market stalls, where locals eat sausages and drink mulled wine and the dramas of Syria seem far away.
But not for Nudgeen.
She stays up all week watching TV long after the rest of her family has gone to bed. Never mind that he has an exam for his business administration course. She'll make it.
Nujeen understands that there will never again be a moment like the fall of Assad, a moment of such singular hope.
“Nothing lasts forever. Darkness is followed by dawn,” she says.
“I knew I would never go back to a Syria that has Assad as president, and that we would never have the chance to be a better nation with that man at the helm.” We knew we would never find peace unless he was gone. And now that this chapter is over, I think the real challenge begins.”
Like Renee, she wants a country that is tolerant of diversity and cares for people with disabilities.
“I don't want to go back to a place with no elevator and only stairs to a fourth-floor apartment.”
As a Kurd, she is well aware of the suffering of her people in the region.
Now that Kurdish forces have been forced to withdraw from the cities of the oil-producing north, Nujin sees the danger posed by a new Turkish-backed regime.
“We know these people who came to power now. We know the countries and the forces that support them, and they are not exactly fans of the Kurds. They don't exactly love us. That's our biggest concern right now.”
There is also the fear of a potential IS regrouping if Syria's new leaders cannot achieve stability in the country.
There are constant calls to families still living in the Kurdish areas.
“They're anxious and worried about the future, just like we all are,” says Nujean.
“We never stop calling and we're always worried if they don't pick up after the first ring. There's a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen after that.”
The uncertainty is heightened by the change in asylum policy in Europe.
And yet, this is a young woman whose life experiences – the experience of being severely disabled from birth, witnessing the horrors of war, traveling across the Middle East and Europe to safety – have created a capacity for hope.
In the near decade I've known her, she hasn't dimmed. The fall of Assad only deepened her faith in Syria and its people.
“There are a lot of people who are waiting to see Syria fall into some kind of abyss,” she says.
“We are not people who hate each other or envy each other or want to eliminate each other. We are people who are raised to fear each other. But our default setting is that we love and accept what we are.”
“We can and will be a better nation – a nation of love, acceptance and peace, not chaos, fear and destruction.”
There are many hearts in Syria and beyond that will hope she is right.