"They Want Us Out"

The pellet was fired from a neighboring building and hit Nilguen Eksi, 18, as she was sitting by an open window in her parents' flat in West Berlin. "I felt a stab of pain in my right arm and screamed," she says. "They had to take me to the hospital to have the pellet removed." The police caught the culprit, a young German, who admitted responsibility. "He fired the gun at me because I was Turkish," said Nilguen. That incident occurred a year ago. More recently, Nilguen's mother Melahab, 39, was accosted in the street by a German youth waving a wooden club and shouting obscenities about foreigners. "He suddenly jumped out from behind a lamppost and threatened me with the stick," she recalls. "He was swearing and saying, 'Get out of Berlin, dirty foreigner. Go back to where you came from!' I was very frightened, but a German factory colleague stood up to him and told him to clear out or she would call the police."

The Eksi family lives in a tenement on Beusselstrasse, a bustling street in the working-class Moabit district. Melahab and her husband Mustafa, 45, share a three-room flat with their three youngest sons. Their daughters Nilguen and Aynur, 21, have a small apartment on the top floor of the same building. Mustafa is a forklift operator at the Siemens factory, where he has worked for 15 years. He is a cheerful, gregarious man. The wave of anti-Turkish sentiment has left him puzzled and saddened, and he sees little help from the national government. "I am not political," he says. "I don't know what they think. They accept us as workers, but not as Menschen. They asked us to come and work here, but now that things don't go well, they want us out. That's bad."

Bad enough to make his homeland seem doubly attractive. "I am homesick," he says. "It's the same thing each year. I save my money, then I spend it all taking my family to Turkey on holiday. I've been back 13 times in 15 years. I dream sometimes of having a business of my own one day."

Because of the attacks on his wife and daughter--and the fact that the government has refused permission for his mother to immigrate--he is concentrating these days on another dream: a house he is building in his home town of Trabzon, on the Black Sea. "It's large, very large, 3,300 square feet in size," he says, gesturing expansively. "It will be a home big enough for us all."